Wednesday 8 September 2010

isms in our vegan

glass like dreams?

Vegans of Colour summarised the Morrissey thing really well, but in case you missed it, Morrissey declared Chinese people to be a subspecies, on account of the way they* treat animals, which I guess he thinks is much better than the way, say, the UK or the USA treats their animals? I don't know, I'm just guessing. He could be thinking anything. And I'm Chinese, so I probably beat my penguins. Or something.

I always enjoy reading about hypocritical people! It totally makes my day!

Here is my pull quote from the VOC article:
Probably my two biggest gripes about these near-sighted race politic expressions of animal rights are that:

1) they really perpetuate, particularly amongst people of color, the misnomer that veganism can only be narrowly defined as a white, middle-class subculture and that;

2) vegans of color are further marginalized within the discourse of animal rights whether or not we cry foul at the egregious white-supremacist twists on these representations of animal rights politics.

As with Morrissey as well as the rest of the white animal rights crowd, here’s a itsy-bitsy tip when attempting to articulate a discourse about animal rights: a little nuance goes a long way in figuring out where the root of the problem lies and where the solution can begin. The intersection of race and ethnicity between veganism is much more complex than you might make it out to be.
The comments to the VOC post include a charmer about how China should be wiped from the earth is...well, that's lovely, but until you wipe every other country from the earth I'm just going to sit here and try to dull my hatred of hypocrisy, you know?

I'm working on a post about classism in the veganism and ethical food movements (I know you can't wait, you're just lucky I've been sick), but in the meantime, here are some tumblr and other links that you might be interested in reading:GOOD TIMES!

Leave exciting linkies in the comments.




*WE HELLO

4 comments:

Penny said...

Gah. So so so frustrating. And then you know, in a couple of weeks, he'll issue some sort of retraction, or donate some money to something, and pretend like it never happened.

And clearly he's never watched Oprah, because she is all over those puppy mills!

Precious Pig said...

Hey I know I've been bugging you about finding us a blogger for the activists forum, but we also happen to want someone to present on intersectionality! I'm just sayin'...

steph said...

@penny yeah, it's really frustrating

@precious pig WELL NOW I'M THINKING ABOUT IT, AREN'T I?

Kate said...

Some eye-opening reading, and a lot more depth than I usually come up with in my posts! The Vegans of Color one was great. Thanks for sharing!