Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
As a queer white woman doing social justice work, giving my money to the animal industrial complex was an expression of solidarity with my oppressor.
Sisters-in-arms, and legs: Without an animal rights pedagogy, any
anti-oppression movement that seeks “liberation for all” is fundamentally
deficient. (Photo credit: Kat Jayne/Pexels)
Growing up in rural Virginia, veganism was never on the menu. It was one
of the many things I simply didimage not know about until later in my life—much
like the idea that I could love women, or that I am complicit in systems
that oppress people of color.
The bootstraps ideology I was raised to believe in—this idea that those with
less than me simply didn’t work hard enough to earn it—instigated not only
my racism but my speciesism. I believed we were entitled to animals because
we had dominion over them by virtue of being “smarter,” more “developed,”
and able to “contribute to society” in a way that non-human animals could
not. It wasn’t exploitation; it was just the natural order of things.
Even when I struggled with eating meat and felt actively uncomfortable
consuming the flesh of animals, my socialization made it easier to push my
qualms aside than parse through my discomfort.
When I left for college and began to interrogate my place in the world as a
white, able-bodied, cisgender, queer woman, my cognitive dissonance around
speciesism was still very much intact. I viewed animal rights as a petty
movement of yuppies determined to steal the narrative from people of color;
to say “it isn’t about you; look how bad the animals have it.” Looking back,
I think my determination to believe that was less about inclusivity in the
animal rights movement and more about using my social justice ideals to
justify not engaging with the topic.
So, to my great convenience, I was able to ignore the issue of animal
exploitation. As I became more and more politicized I focused instead on
racial and queer justice, examining and unlearning how my whiteness
contributed to a racialized system of oppression. It wasn’t until my
professor Dr. Paul Gorski introduced me to Dr. A. Breeze Harper’s anthology
Sistah Vegan that I realized my determination to whitewash the vegan
movement was actually ignoring and discounting the hard work of the many
women of color who pioneered it.
As a graduate teaching assistant, I constantly pushed my students to
consider the root causes of societal problems. Issues like poverty and food
insecurity do not exist in a vacuum—they are the direct result of a system
designed to preserve the power of the ruling class. These causes are rooted
in those “-isms” and “-phobias,” and in some ways, specifically,
anti-Blackness.
When confronted with the realities of the animal agriculture industry, with
its wide range of exploitation of human and non-human animals, I realized
that without an animal rights pedagogy, my anti-oppression lens was
incomplete. And as a queer white woman doing social justice work, giving my
money to the animal industrial complex was an expression of solidarity with
my oppressor.
Beyond recognizing the systemic connection between human and animal
liberation, veganism offered me a much-needed way to care for myself. When
faced with the enormity of the world’s injustice, changing my eating habits
was a simple way to make a quantifiable impact. Not only that, but eating a
plant-based diet did wonders for my health, virtually eliminating medical
issues I had struggled with since I was a child and helping me better manage
my depression and anxiety (although I don’t want to claim that veganism can
be a cure-all for everyone). My renewed energy makes me a better asset to
all the movements and causes I fight for.
Even today, nearly three years into my veganism, I realize my consumption is
not, and can never be, completely ethical. But as I attempt to navigate the
world in the most compassionate and just way I can, veganism offers me a
tangible way to refuse to be complicit and to move toward “liberation for
all.”
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