During one evening in the summer of 2005, I strolled through the latest discussion boards on BlackPlanet.com and found a discussion forum that centered on a controversial ad, “The Animal Liberation Project,” which PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) had created. As I read the content of the forum, I learned that the NAACP had been pushing to censor a PETA ad because of the “offensive” content the organization felt it contained. Within seconds, I found the PETA site and began to watch the campaign video advertisement. In my opinion, it appeared that PETA was trying to capture viewers and induce “critical consciousness” in them to question their own normative practices with respect to human-to-nonhuman animal relationships.
My eyes stayed glued to the images of human suffering juxtaposed with nonhuman animal suffering: a painting of Native Americans on the Trail of Tears positioned next to a photo of herds of nonhuman animals being led to their demise; the atrocity of a Black man's lynched and torched body next to a picture of an animal that had been burned; a black-and-white Jewish Holocaust photo next to animals in confined, crammed structures on a meat-production farm. As I watched, I realized that most images were of Black Americans drawn from America's cruel past of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
I navigated my web browser back to the BlackPlanet.com forum and read all the contributions from the PETA forum discussion. Twenty-eight Black-identified people had voiced their opinion about the ad; only one participant agreed with the anti-speciesism message that PETA was trying to promote with the ad.1 Everyone else agreed that PETA was an organization filled with “white racists” who think that Black-identified people are “on the same level as animals.”
As I attempted to understand the PETA campaign and the BlackPlanet.com participants' anger, I drew upon the books I had recently read by Marjorie Spiegel and Charles Patterson.2 With those titles as a foundation, I could assume that PETA's campaign was implying that the exploitation and torture of nonhuman animals come from the same master/oppressor ideology that created atrocities such as African slavery, Native American genocide, and the Jewish Holocaust. In The Dreaded Comparison, Spiegel notes:
Comparing the suffering of animals to that of Blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notions of what animals are like. Those who are offended by comparison to a fellow sufferer have unquestioningly accepted the biased worldview presented by the masters. To deny our similarities to animals is to deny and undermine our own power. It is to continue actively struggling to prove to our masters, past or present, that we are similar to those who have abused us, rather than to our fellow victims, those whom our masters have also victimized.
This is not intended to oversimplify matters and to imply that the oppressions experienced by Blacks and animals have taken identical forms—but, as divergent as the cruelties and the supporting systems of oppression may be, there are commonalities between them. They share the same basic relationship—that between oppressor and oppressed.3
Even though I am an animal-rights supporter, I feel that PETA's campaign strategies often fail to give a historical context for why they use certain images that are connected to a painful history of racially motivated violence against particular nonwhite, racialized humans. In the years prior to PETA's debacle, Spiegel and Patterson provided sensitive, scholarly explorations of these topics, whereas the PETA exhibit, and the ensuing controversy, were handled insensitively. The lack of sociohistorical context by PETA is perhaps what is upsetting to many racial minorities, for whom such images and textual references trigger trauma and deep emotional pain.
Now, this doesn't mean that all those in the United States who were offended by PETA absolutely don't care about the suffering of animals; it's much more complex than a simple binary of “we care” versus “we don't care” about animal suffering. But I do believe it means that the wounds and scars of United States's sordid history of violent racism, in which Black Americans were derogatorily categorized as animals within a racist colonial context (I understand that outside of this context being called an “animal” isn't derogatory), need to be addressed and reconciled at a national level that I have yet to see. In addition, PETA campaign strategists could be more cognizant of the consequences of not offering a sociohistorical context to many of their outreach campaigns that contain emotionally sensitive materials.
It has been over four years since I first viewed “The Animal Liberation Project.” I have been thinking more in depth, and I have begun to reexamine veganism as an alternative, food ways movement, as well as a personal health choice from a Black feminist, antiracist, and decolonizing perspective. I hope that the Sistah Vegan anthology can help start formulating answers to the following questions:
Alka Chandna, a woman of color from Canada and a research associate with PETA, wrote a commentary about the NAACP reaction to the advertisement. In her recollection, she writes about how acts of racism were directed toward her family's house. One of her memories is of eggs being thrown because her brown family was not welcomed in the community. However, she is perplexed by the NAACP attacks on the PETA campaign:
Although the photos of poor immigrants, children used in forced labor, Native Americans, and African slaves are extremely upsetting, why is it so shocking to suggest that the mindset that condoned exploitation of people in the past is the same as the mindset that permits today's abuse of animals in laboratories, in factory farms, and on fur farms? And why is it assumed that this display—and indeed the entire animal-rights movement—was generated by insensitive white people? As a person of color, I am hurt and perplexed that my two decades of work in the animal-rights movement, as well as the efforts of my many colleagues who are people of color, are discounted. . . .
Here in the United States, the NAACP and others are now painting animal-rights activists as white racists in order to marginalize and dismiss us. I can't help but think that this sort of “analysis” that persists in painting our movement with a broad brush is the same disparagement that people engage in when the truth makes them uncomfortable. Racists dismissed Martin Luther King as a womanizer. Colonists dismissed Gandhi as a short brown man in a loincloth. Sexists dismiss feminists as ugly, angry women.
Yet many people of color work every day to change attitudes toward animals. My own beliefs, and those of many of my colleagues, sprang from an understanding of right versus wrong. It is not racism that inspires us, but justice. I ask other people of color who have had eggs thrown at their windows or experienced other forms of racism to stop condemning for a moment and to consider that what they are now saying about animals—that animals are lesser beings whose suffering can be dismissed—was once said about them and was used as an excuse to keep them in bondage.5
It is Dr. Chandna's last sentence that intrigued and motivated me to find Black-identified females who practice veganism, as well as support anti-speciesism and/or see the connections speciesism has to all the “isms.” Furthermore, the goal of Sistah Vegan is to function as an effective literary model for teaching about alternative health and decolonizing strategies that benefit personal health and the environment, while simultaneously resisting institutionalized racism, environmental pollution, and other legacies of Western colonialism.
I can honestly say that my transition into veganism was not a sudden overnight decision. It initially evolved from my childhood experiences with institutionalized racism, heterosexism, and sexism. Many people who have transitioned into veganism reference animal rights as the most important reason for their initial transition. Experiencing life as a working-class, Black-identified female led me eventually to practice ahimsa-based veganism from a different point of entry that didn't initially involve animal rights as the catalyst to my “awakening.”
When I was twelve years old, I entered the halls of Lyman Memorial Junior High School for my first day of seventh grade. The first greeting I heard was, “Look at that skinny little nigger. Run, skinny little nigger, run.” From this point on in my consciousness, I became very aware of my historically and socially constructed position in the United States through the unique fusion of Black/girl. Racially socialized and gendered through Eurocentric heteropatriarchal and capitalism-based society, my experiences differed drastically in comparison with my peers in our over-97-percent-white, rural town. Although whiteness was the “invisible” and comforting norm for this majority, it was the neverending and constantly visible, “in-your-face” foreign, and suffocating “norm” for me. It was expected that being teased for being “the Black girl” was what I'd have to accept, simply because none of my peers ever seemed to be reprimanded or chastised for being racist. Similarly, speciesism was the acceptable norm in my town; folk engaged in the sport of deer hunting, turkey derbies, and using animals in the annual Lebanon Town Fair every August. Racism and speciesism simply were the norm, and the suffering and misery they caused were largely invisible to most.
Several years later, I began reading books that uncovered the roots of the types of oppressive acts I encountered in high school and college. I read Black feminist writers like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins and then expanded into ahimsa-based philosophy by authors such as Jiddu Krishnamurti.
What truly moved me into practicing veganism was reading about Dick Gregory and seeing the connections he made to institutionalized racism/classism/sexism, Black liberation, the Black community's “health crisis,” and dietary beliefs/practices. Dick Gregory, cited in Doris Witt's Black Hunger, notes:
I have experienced personally over the past few years how a purity of diet and thought are interrelated. And when Americans become truly concerned with the purity of the food that enters their own personal systems, when they learn to eat properly, we can expect to see profound changes effected in the social and political system of this nation. The two systems are inseparable.6
While being introduced to Dick Gregory's philosophies, I also began reading Queen Afua's Sacred Woman. She is a raw foodist who advocates womb health and harmony through veganism. It was with the help of these two critical thinkers that I finally saw the interconnectedness to my own “out of harmony” reproductive health (I had been diagnosed with a uterine fibroid and was seeking an alternative to allopathic medicine to address it) as a symptom of systematic racism, sexism, nonhuman animal exploitation (which I would later learn is called “speciesism”). Immediately, I made the transition to ahimsa-based veganism. Ahimsa means a life of practicing noninjury or harmlessness to all living beings.7
After my introduction to Queen Afua and Dick Gregory, Spiegel's The Dreaded Comparison and Patterson's Eternal Treblinka further expanded my understanding of the interconnectedness of institutionalized racism, nationalism, and sexism; the mistreatment of nonhuman animals; and the abuse of the planet's natural resources. Eventually, years after I started down my path on that first day of seventh grade, I made the connections between institutionalized oppression and unmindful consumption and what it means to be socialized as a Black female in a society in which I must navigate through racist legacies of slavery, while simultaneously being part of an economically “privileged” global northern nation in which overconsumption is the “norm.” It is this type of unique experience—the social implications and historical context of being both Black and female in a neocolonial global society—that has led me to request voices from females of the African diaspora living in the U.S.
When I conducted research about Black health on my university's online library, I was inundated with articles that depicted how horrible the state of health is among the Black female population: that we continue to eat too much junk food and not enough fruits and vegetables; that we are addicted to junk food and postindustrialized Soul Food practices to the point of killing ourselves. Articles and essays painted a grim picture: Black females do not know how to combat these health disparities.
However, after receiving a plethora of imaginative and thought-provoking contributions, I saw that there are many of us who know how to fight back. This book holds a collection of narratives, poetry, critical essays, and reflections from a diverse North American community of Black-identified females/females of the African Diaspora. Collectively, these ladies are actively decolonizing their bodies and minds via whole-foods veganism and/or raw foodism, resisting becoming a “health disparities” statistic by kicking the junk food habit, questioning the soulfulness of postindustrial Soul Food, raising children who have never tasted a McDonald's (not so) Happy Meal, and making the connections that compassionate consumption has to creating a compassionate and eco-sustainable society.
Sistah Vegan is not about preaching veganism or vegan fundamentalism. It is about looking at how a specific group of Black-identified female vegans perceive nutrition, food, ecological sustainability, health and healing, animal rights, parenting, social justice, spirituality, hair care, race, sexuality, womanism, freedom, and identity that goes against the (refined and bleached) grain. Not all contributors necessarily agree with each other, and that is the beauty of this edited volume: even though we do identify as Black and female, we are not a monolithic group. I hope that Sistah Vegan will be an inspirational and thought-provoking read for all who are interested in how dietary habits and food production connect to either the dismantling or maintenance of environmental racism, speciesism, ecological devastation, health disparities, institutional racism, overconsumption, and other social injustices.
I welcome your readership of the first book ever written by and about Black female vegans in North America. It's nice to finally be at the table with some food for thought.