White veganism: The vegan movement’s very real race problem
With the mainstream finally looking to veganism as more than just a fad diet or the extreme ethics of a handful of cranks on the outer fringes of society, is the plant-based community's attitude to race set to severely limit its potential?
The arguments are compelling: consuming animals is bad news for our health, with The World Health Organisation recently classifying red meat as carcinogenic. Animal agriculture is catastrophic for our planet, threatening biodiversity, the rainforests and our oceans, as well as contributing substantially to global warming. Then there’s the fact that perhaps the torture and murder of 56 billion farm animals annually (that’s 3000 per second!) becomes hard to justify in anything approaching ethical terms.
The human cost of our flesh fetish also comes with a huge moral question mark dangling over it. We live on a planet where people starve to death every day. Even in the US, the richest country on earth, 16 million children live below the poverty line. That same nation could feed 800 million people worldwide with the grain it wastes instead on cattle.
It’s not difficult to see why vegan ideas are gaining serious traction, yet there’s a disturbing trend within elements of the vegan community that dehumanises people of colour, excludes members of marginalised groups and hijacks minority suffering in a misguided attempt to forge facile links between human and animal exploitation.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that I became aware of it, but there was one instance in particular when it really struck me that nothing was sacrosanct, nothing off limits and that certain activists would use any body (literally) to advance the animal rights agenda.
The picture of the Syrian-toddler Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body lying face down on a beach sent shockwaves around the globe. Even the UK’s rabidly anti-refugee right-wing tabloid press had its granite heart melted for just long enough to hypocritically cease whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria and call on the Prime Minister to intervene.
That morning Aylan was on every front page, garnering more attention in a few hours than his plight had ever warranted when he was still alive. Though it was a very different picture bearing his image that was busy circulating on social media.
One half featured the now infamous photo of Aylan, only in the lower segment there was an eviscerated marine animal. Its message was obvious – why does the world collectively mourn one victim of man’s iniquity, yet ignore others?
Of course animals matter, but if you need a dead child to illustrate that, something is very wrong. It not only displays a shocking insensitivity but is devoid of the compassion that is so crucial to veganism. Such measures are unquestionably counterproductive to the animal liberation cause.
It becomes almost psychotic when we consider that as the world mourned, and we all experienced a powerful sense of collective guilt and shame for a situation that our Western governments were the grand architects of, there was one person out there who didn’t see an innocent little victim prostrate in the sand, but an opportunity to exploit a young boy’s death to further an unrelated cause – to use his miniature corpse as a propaganda tool.
Propaganda involving the barely-cold bodies of deceased children should run contrary to anyone’s sense of better judgement, taste and decency, but this wasn’t an isolated incident. The root of such dehumanising tactics lie in the cornerstone of animal rights ideology: speciesism.
Originating in the 70s with Darwinian roots, speciesism is the term given to interspecies discrimination. Anti-speciesist activists seek an end to human-animal prejudice by eradicating any notion of difference between the two groups.
While our relationship to animals is problematic and exploitative, unlike racism, which was predicated on socially-constructed pseudo-scientific distinctions artificially designed to enforce the spurious notion of white supremacy, there are undeniable differences between humans and other creatures.
Challenging speciesism should never involve resorting to the ludicrous idea that no differences exist between animals and humans, but rather that to use differences as a pretext to exploit, torture and murder animals is morally wrong.
Some quarters of the vegan community have long sought to advance the cause by drawing comparisons between the Jewish or African holocausts and animal exploitation. Alex Hershaft, himself a survivor of the Nazi atrocities perpetrated against the Jews, has commented extensively on his experience and explored the parallels, but with the proviso that such associations should not be made lightly – and, dare I say it, not by those without a direct connection to the subject.
And therein lies the problem. A white vegan minority is visibly and aggressively appropriating, manipulating and seeking dominion over black bodies. This is not the first time in history whites have compared black people to monkeys. To ensure its continued domination, the white supremacist power structure has always sought to class as bestial or less-than-human those that it deems ‘other’. Mirroring this strategy, no matter what your intention, can only ever be interpreted in one way. It should be common sense that whites do not exploit the black holocaust, one of the most shameful chapters of history, to not pick at that open sore – but it isn’t.
Ironically, the same mentality that animal rights activists fight against in their struggle to free animals – the idea that another group can be used, dominated or exploited for gain without their consent – is exactly the same attitude that they themselves display towards marginalised people.
The historic dehumanisation, enslavement and rape of PoC still reverberates today with very real social, psychological and economic consequences. That does not cease to be a reality merely because certain people are so deluded as to believe we live in a post-racial society. Shamefully, elements of the vegan community seem to have picked up exactly where their forefathers left off.
While such images are undoubtedly inherently racist, the idea behind their use also proves problematic, as it defines veganism as the domain of an over-privileged racially-exclusive white boys club.
Those who create these superficial, racist comparisons are sufficiently detached and insulated from both sides of the trauma they exploit. The comparison itself is engineered to provoke reactions only from other whites, who are the primary target being similarly positioned at enough of a distance that they are able to ‘get it.’ Black sensibilities are not considered nor is a black audience sought. They are removed from the equation entirely, reduced to providing a functional contrast. Their suffering is deemed unworthy of individual contemplation, as murdered or enslaved black bodies are inserted purely to provide context to the animal rights agenda.
Neither creator nor audience require any real understanding beyond the image or any actual affinity to those represented. These are privileged white middle-class people who are oblivious to the full implications of the parallels they evoke, removed from the everyday reality and without any connection to the subject upon whose historic misery they are trading.
When people juxtapose a monkey or pig with a lynching they are inviting comparison, and tacitly, whether they realise it or not, upholding hundreds of years of systemic racism. You cannot simultaneously exploit one group while to attempting to free others, to put your foot on the head of someone who’s drowning, in order to offer your hand to another. It doesn’t work that way.
Though some vegans seem content to exploit one form of suffering to highlight another, they would presumably baulk at the idea of physical confrontation with those whose form they appropriate. Would they stand in Brixton market on a Saturday, or Kingston, Harlem or Harare wearing a sandwich board (like Bruce Willis’ character wore through Harlem in Die Hard 3) emblazoned with one of their very own racist creations? What is certain is that they sleep safely in the knowledge that they can keep spewing discriminatory bile as the likelihood of any real-world confrontation is slim. All the while their sole success is in creating a fragmented, single-issue movement that only benefits people exactly like them and is of little wider strategic use in the fight for animal liberation.
Instead of confronting our often deplorable attitudes to race within veganism, we laud activists like Gary Yourfsky and those he influences, who play with racism and sexism to suit their purpose. Yourofsky, who has been routinely exposed by the Vegan Feminist Network for his racist and sexist views, seeks to distance himself from accusations of discrimination by hiding behind misanthropy.
Yourofsky has previously suggested that Palestinians were ‘psychos’ who were lucky to not suffer the same existence as chickens. As someone who’s effectively an Israeli apologist, assisting the regime in green washing their way neatly past accusations of human rights violations, it’s hardly surprising.
In fact, Yourofsky takes it one stage further than the activists who contrast black people and animals, by implying that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is perfectly acceptable due to the fact they are not farmed animals and that they ‘live like kings and queens’ compared to animals. This moves the focus away from the conditions the Palestinians endure, de-legitimises their suffering and removes their claim to a voice. How dare they complain, when chickens have it so much worse! Yourofsky isn’t using one group’s suffering to highlight or alleviate another’s, but the reverse, using the suffering of animals to derail, obfuscate and entirely circumvent the debate on human rights.
Rather than striving to fight all forms of injustice like most vegans, Gary is content to remain complicit in oppressing Palestinians (as well as uttering repulsive nonsense about black people and women) while he basks in the messianic glow of a state that he helped to partially veganise. It is a type of veganism in his own image, though, naturally. One that can overlook human atrocities as long as the animals are ok. The type where activists break into a chicken hatchery and heroically attempt to save baby chicks from a grinder, but no one bats an eyelid over 500 children murdered in Gaza by their government.
Sadly, Yourofsky isn’t alone. His poisonous rhetoric, egotism and racially-repugnant discourse have spawned a generation of clicktivists who remain confined to their keyboards rather than engaging in any useful direct action, which leads to a tendency to overcompensate by accentuating their particular brand of passive resistance with a by any means necessary gung-ho mentality.
These slacktivists make animal rights more about feeding their own lowly, distorted sense of self-worth than actually creating a cohesive, effective movement. Prominent amongst them, with 50k followers on twitter, is @veganrevolution. Found regularly spouting racist, sexist and ableist epithets, he may as well actively work for the meat industry with all the good his award-winning method of converting people to his evangelical cause does.
@veganrevolution claims to have turned over 4k people vegan, yet this, like everything else he says, doesn’t really hold up to close scrutiny. That would equate to one person every day for ten years. Hardly likely, given he acts like he’s about 12. That, and the fact that most right-minded individuals would consider him vile.
At this moment we should be capitalising on the momentum and buzz surrounding veganism to make it open for all and to position it as the key to solving so many of the problems facing us in the 21st century – but instead, as Ruby Hamad pointed out recently, certain elements within the community insist on ensuring veganism is white, exclusive and elitist, admitting only the privileged and remaining unavailable and hostile in its discourse towards other groups.
It is discouraging when people are so myopic, self-indulgent, ignorant or downright hateful as to use their platform to discourage anyone but other white, middle-class men from going vegan, instead of actively fighting to embrace all people. For without them, our efforts to save animals will always be woefully limited.
Hey Liam,
This is a very informed article and is incredibly interesting and well written.
I have worried about this before, that veganism seems to be a white middle-class magnet. That is, it isn’t so great at attracting non-white people, and also isn’t great at attracting the ‘lower’ classes. Coming from a mining working class background myself, veganism certainly would never have had its name mentioned in my house had I not gone to university.
I absolutely agree that the speciesism issue is awfully addressed by the likes of people like Vegan Revolution. I am just wondering, are you arguing that the whole idea of ‘speciesism being akin to racism and sexism’ is misguided and itself racist and sexist, or are you saying that the way that the speciesism argument has been handled by extreme segments of the vegan movement is racist and sexist?
Again, great article.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for your positive feedback.
I am arguing a bit of both but certainly the misuse angle. My problem with speciesism is not conceptual but a matter of interpretation/application. As you know, people think that screaming speiciesism at everyone gives them carte blanche to do and say whatever they want, which often happens to be uttering the most deplorable things. I think many vegans suffer from a kind of superiority complex, whereby they view humans as, in Gary Yourofsky’s words, a ‘scum virus.’
You wrote a strong piece recently, and the main thrust of it was the relationship between vegans and meat eaters. I tend to view meat eating as a case of ignorance and social conditioning rather than innate evil, and see veganism as a gradual awakening. Of course, everyone must play their part to raise awareness, but if you compare it to civil rights or the feminist struggles, they have progressed slowly over decades (and if you consulted Derick Bell or many PoC Womanists, they would argue that the progress has been virtually non-existent, concessionary or Eurocentric.)
From birth we are given books with happy chickens and cows and then fed roast chicken and hamburgers. We don’t ‘make the connection’ because we are programmed not to.
Speciesism is a real form of prejudice in that it, like all prejudices, it is predicated on the premise that those whom we dominate are worth less. Your last article that touched on human anti-essentialism was well argued and I broadly agree. For instance, going back to your ideas on what makes us human, Chomsky suggests that humans can eat animals as animals have no responsibilities. Paraphrasing your point, people who are brain damaged, in a coma or a children also have no responsibilities, but most sane people would not seek to eat them. I don’t believe that claiming membership of homo sapiens is enough to justify the illing and torture of other creatures. I do, however, without lapsing into essentialism, consider humans to have certain enhanced faculties that are more acute versions of the animal sentience, communication and cognition that you previously mentioned. This slight evolutionary edge should never be a pretext for animal abuse. Do our brains make us superior? Undoubtedly, but that should never mean that animals are worth less, as confused as that sounds.
However, I think there is a ‘natural’ (hate that word in such contexts) hierarchy of sorts. Again this should never be an excuse to murder animals. As far as man goes, morally, we are the worst of animals. Yet, if your house was burning, inside you had a pet puppy and a pet snail but could only save one, I imagine Fido would be safely wrapped in a blanket being cuddled by a neighbour while Eric the snail was left to the flames. I think the same goes for baby and a puppy, only this time working in the baby’s favour. Many vegan activists would say both are of equal importance and maybe even that they would save the puppy. Perhaps they would, but I think most people would save the human. Is this speciesism, favouritism or pragmatism, or because, rightly or wrongly, humans perceive themselves to be more valuable? It is a dangerous sense of superiority that we are imbued with, one that translates to untold abuses in the natural world, but I think there is a modicum of truth to it.
I agree with Alex Hershaft when he says that animals are on the very bottom of the pyramid. Animal abuse is universally condoned and most people believe that animals are there to be exploited. My main point is that to compare it to other types of abuse is wrong and certainly should never involve whites using the suffering of other groups. This is, in itself, a form of abuse. I don’t think making facile analogies between human and animal exploitation is helpful. What happens to animals is shocking enough to stand by itself. It should not need such contextualisation.
Veganism also seems one of the only justice movements that actively attempts to stall, dismiss or be openly hostile to other struggles. Not all vegans, but an element. The barrier always seems to be ‘but these people eat meat.’ Eating meat is unethical but the way to educate people is through dialogue not trying to undermine their struggle.
One of my favourite tactics comes from a direct action group of the best kind, London Vegan Actions, who have spawned Earthlings Projects country-wide, where groups of people hit the streets with laptops and masks and encourage the public to watch Earthlings. Letting a film speak for itself and giving people the opportunity to watch it is a brilliant idea. Better than calling someone a ‘meat-tard.’
Hey Liam,
Thank you for getting back in such an in-depth and exquisite manner.
You’re ringing to bells of truth. It’s something I haven’t thought about as carefully as yourself - the misapplication/misunderstanding of the speciesism argument. I think I have been locked in academia too tightly to see the negative and harmful effects you have highlighted. Almost every time I have seen it used in articles and books it has often been very quickly explained, and romped through. As if it is obvious what the parallels are between it and other forms of prejudice which have been universally condoned until relatively recently (and still are in more pervasive and implicit ways).
When you say: ‘what happens to animals is shocking enough to stand by itself. It should not need such contextualization’, I wholeheartedly agree. My worry (and I am sure you and many other vegans have released this too) is that the illuminating of the blatant exploitation and abuse of animals does not seem to be enough by itself to convince everyone that things need to drastically change. Given that, the speciesism argument, I suppose, is a tactic used to ‘align’ this abuse with other abuses we do recognize as such. But, as you say this tactic can easily go awry when leaned on too much and spread out into social media and other slippery platforms.
I personally found the speciesism argument helpful when I first started thinking about these things. Now, I no longer need it; it is superfluous in way. But as I say, it was helpful in kick-starting my understanding. Maybe the problem is that many people will tend to put too much weight on it, and take it too far, as you so effectively pointed out in your above article. The argument shouldn’t demean or lower other humans to an ‘animal’ level, it should rather raise animals to the human level that we use when making ethical decisions about concerning other humans. However, in a world where demeaning other humans is still rife and therefore an ever-present hazard, perhaps as an argument is should be used with much more care than it previously has so as not to be warped into something that it is not.
I find so many problems with my own points above, though. Social conditioning is so powerful and meat eating practices so ingrained and widespread that my worst fear is that no argument (especially not one that needs to be used very carefully) is going to convince 100% of people who already don’t have some other, perhaps, non-intellectual, empathy with nonhuman animals. Socialization is too powerful and diverse for one argument to topple.
Many people do have that empathetic/emotive link of course with their pets and the more ‘human’ animals like the other great apes, but somehow fail to extend this emotional strand to other animals. Hopefully this is where more emotive tactics, such as films and images come in. They certainly are powerful and moving, and anyone with a beating heart should not fail to understand what the messages are which those images are trying to convey. Another worry though is that emotive responses are short lived, and fade quickly.
What I think might be the best approach would involve a combined front of careful valid arguments and emotive direct methods through film and images, as well as a larger integration of veganism within the broader Equality movement itself. It’s a tough task, and something that I don’t see many popular organizations carrying out. For instance, PETA are great at the emotive side of this but keep the intellectual stuff at a minimum, as I see it anyway.
Possibly things would improve if veganism as a movement was more cohesive, but as I am sure you know even vegans disagree with each other about why people should go vegan, and have different stances on the moral status of animals, as well as humans, etc. All this slows down everything. With that, I have come full circle in thinking that this is why a simple tactic, like the speciesism one is helpful when used carefully- but again shouldn’t be leaned on too much. From speaking to you, I have learnt not to consciously rely on it too much, so thank you.
I should have said also that it’s great that someone is writing and blogging about these things outside of academia. You especially are much more in touch than myself with the sociological/social movement side of things. So I have much respect and appreciation for that fact. I’ll eagerly be learning from and reading the good word you put out, and good luck with your writing in the future.
Hi Richard,
Not sure about exquisite manner! I was trying to bang that out between jobs and there are a few obvious mistakes, but you get the gist.
When I went vegan, I had vegans around me, watched a few videos and already had some lingering compunction over the treatment of animals. I had a good support network, too - something I regard as crucial. Vegans create vegans. They are like the effing Jehovah’s! (only with a sounder ideological base.) It’s the domino/ripple effect. It is great that these videos exist, the theories underpinning it all and ideas on how best we should relate to animals, but without people to apply them they are redundant.
Speciesism for me is more theory than tactic but even on a tactical level no one should impinge on the well-being of other groups or be offensive. Of course, offensive is purely subjective and something banded about perhaps too easily these days. Does that mean you cannot make meat eaters feel guilty? No, of course not. I think everyone who wants to eat meat should be aware of its provenance. However, when you add in a racial dimension it is beset by two overlapping concerns: firstly, it is more likely to reinforce the idea many people already have that veganism is a white middle-class movement/fad, and secondly because it exploits and alienates PoC.
I have no problem with speciesism as a concept based on prejudice, but as tempting as it is to make these simplistic connections between slavery and animal exploitation it can never be effective as it hurts PoC and stunts the animal movement. I do, however, think that there is a difference between comparing attitudes and comparing people/animals. Highlighting the fact that our grandchildren will most likely look back on us eating animals/destroying the planet in a similarly horrified fashion to the way that we view our forefathers who enslaved Africans or refused women suffrage is a not unreasonable statement to make. You are not risking supporting structural racism, you are not weighing human suffering against animal but rather comparing social mores.
I have a very personal problem with speciesism as I cannot quite work out my relationship to it. Typically for him, Gary Yourofsky doesn’t speak to all but one of his entire family as they consume animal flesh. If my family or friends were racist, I would be similarly inclined to distance myself from them and be wholly intolerant of their racism. Yet, despite being ethically opposed to their dietary choices and vocal in my opposition, I still sit at the table (when unavoidable) while they consume carrion and I am not the only vegan to do that. This tells me that either racism and speciesism as I understand them are different or that perhaps I should be more militant, because if this was a matter of race, I wouldn’t condone such behaviour. I could argue socialisation in my defence but most people were inured to slavery (although I believe one reason slavery was never permitted on UK soil was due to the fact that those in power felt the common man wouldn’t accept it). Of course, meat-eating is universally engrained and is part of our social fabric and has been for thousands of years, but it still rankles me. Perhaps I am speciecist in that regard and it is the Yourofskys who have it right?
The vegan movement is a fragmented one. Yourofsky is part of the ‘can do no wrong as he does it for the animals’ side. Francione has a far more intersectional approach but his absolutism is not without problems. For instance, failing to see that ideas like Meat-free Mondays or meat reduction are stepping stones, and his views on feminism. I happen to agree that welfarist measures are half-hearted and designed to appease the consciences of consumers and that welfare is disingenuous double-talk when we are really talking about murder. There are too many problems with PETA for me to begin to list. However, as disparate as these activists, institutions and ideologies are, the vegan movement is still growing exponentially. I attribute this to individuals and changing attitudes more than I do to the work of the big guns. Who may help in making veganism more visible, but none of them come without serious complications.
You are right, of course, in that progress is slow and getting people to make the connection is an often seemingly impossible task, which is why I don’t underestimate the power of Meat-free Monday or Veganuary. For many people, these represent huge undertakings and a sizeable philosophical shift in their understanding. Even if they only create a fraction of vegans, those that go the distance will produce others.
The same way I know many people who won’t eat at omni restaurants or buy products by non-vegan companies, not realising that although the motives of said companies are incompatible with veganism, these cross-over concessions raise the profile of the movement, provide reassurance to those considering veganism that it’s perfectly normal and encourage people who may have never heard of it to give it a try.
I don’t think any one tactic works, but as long as our approach is intersectional and open to all (again, I do not advocate watering down the vegan message to make it more palatable to those who sponsor animal abuse – I feel if you eat it, the least you can do is watch it die) but when we are talking about images that hurt other communities and the response is ‘well they eat meat!’ or ‘the animals have it worse!’ then we are really missing the point.
By the way, if you are living in London, have you been to Vx and Fed By Water? You should.
Hi
I don’t think it’s a facile link at all. Have you read Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust? This is what completely changed my view on veganism and understand where all the comparisons stem from. And that a lot of the injusticies in the world stem from speciesism. You can buy the book on Amazon.
http://www.powerfulbook.com/overview.html
http://www.drstevebest.org/EternalTriblenka.pdf
I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you read it.
Also, have you read Benjamin Zephaniah’s articles for the Guardian about comparing animal exploitation to slavery? He’s not a ‘white vegan’. He’s British Jamaican. His articles were the first time I ever saw that comparison made.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/30/animals-circuses-slave-trade-anne-elephant
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/aug/01/thenewfaceofslavery
He worked with PETA on an exhibition about animal exploitation and slavery.
http://www.peta.org/blog/benjamin-zephaniah-opens-liberation-exhibit/
Hey Lily,
Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.
I will have a look at Eternal Treblinka. Have been meaning to read it for years, so thank you for the link.
The Zephaniah links were similarly appreciated. I am not saying black people should not draw these inferences between human and animal slavery, but rather that it is for them to decide. I don’t think it is ever appropriate for white people to use such imagery because it more often than not alienates people of colour. The reason I wrote this article and how I became aware of the use of such imagery in the first place was through black friends of mine who sent me the images. All were angry at the way in which black people were portrayed.
Do you know if Benjamin Zephaniah was behind any of the Peta posters that used images of lynchings?