Privilege: The U.S. Vegan Movement, Whiteness, and Race Relations (part 3)

Introduction
In the last post, I described some of the reasons how and why the animal and veg*n movement(s) are alienating to people of color. In summary, U.S. vegans present themselves as middle-class, single-issue activists who think they have the one truth which all others should accept, yet, dismiss other humans’ struggle against their own oppression as marginal. Not only do they avoid race by promoting “color-blind” politics (which only makes race issues invisible), some may be explicitly racist and colonialist by targeting an entire country and/or culture for “cruel” practices with little effort or care to assist those within those cultures who are working on similar campaigns. I recommended that middle-class white American vegans need to engage in empathetic dialogue with people of color, the working class, and “foreign” countries/cultures as the first step for establishing better inter-racial relations, respect, and furthering veganism.

In part three and four of this series, I will discuss how, beyond alienating and offending people of color who are not (yet) vegans, “a lack of race-consciousness has [also] made invisible those people of color who are already vegans.” VOC, despite being indispensable fellow members in the AR and veg*n movement(s), are nonetheless persistently marginalized and deeply hurt by how they are identified by fellow vegans as exotic Others whose own everyday oppression must come second for the sake of liberating animals. If there were only one reason—and don’t get me wrong, there are a sh*t ton—many white vegans ought to become more conscious of their race privilege, it is to end the hurt and alienation their ignorance causes their partners and allies to experience.Read more »

The Racial and Colonial Politics of Meat-Eating (part 2)

Colonialism: Cattle, Class, and Hunger
Tragically, the genocidal imperialist policies of the United States did not cease at the end of the 19th century. David Nibert, who in Animal Rights/Human Rights (2002) argues that human and animal rights cannot be fully achieved within consumer capitalism, notes that 20th century American agricultural interest in Guatemala and other Central American countries resulted in the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands of people.[17] The United States supported and helped install dictators in order to secure land from which to extract agricultural resources, mostly fruit and beef. Communities of people were uprooted and displaced from their land as U.S. corporations and regional elite bought or leased it until only 3 per cent of Guatemalans owned 70 per cent of the arable land.[18] In the Amazon, competition over land has resulted in the cattle ranchers appropriating forest from the indigenous and forcing them into slavery.[19]Read more »