Claudia Serrato (Left) and Dr. A. Breeze Harper (Right) at CAER, May 18 2013 discussing Women of Color, Food Justice, and Self-Care
This photo (and video of the lecture below) is from the women of color food justice and self-care panel. This took place at the Conference Against Environmental Racism at the University of Oregon-Eugene, on May 18 2013. The featured critical thinkers are Dr. A. Breeze Harper of the Sistah Vegan Project (on the right) and on the left is Decolonial Food For Thought blogger and PhD Student Claudia Serrato. Claudia’s work is amazing. She is developing indigenous decolonial veganism as well as focusing on something called ‘womb ecology’, which you’ll hear more about during this talk. Also, at the beginning of the panel, Claudia explained that she brings her daughter with her everywhere and asks that everyone be open to sharing this space with her toddler. I find this really profound, as it is rare that women can do this and/or are allowed to do this in the USA. I also shared with the audience that I nurse on demand when my kids were really really young, so I would bring them to many of my conferences; I would even nurse on stage because that is a form of food justice that simply isn’t taken seriously. So, mad props to Claudia.
Below is the video of our recorded panel talk. Get ready to hear about the psychic and nutritional consequences of subscribing to the “Strong Black Woman” syndrome, decolonizing our taste buds, and indigenous decolonial veganism that is not rooted in Eurocentric animal rights canon. I debut my new singing mantra about 7 minutes into the video. It is called “Strong Black Woman”.
From Left to Right: Marima Gray, Giovanna Montenegro, and A. Breeze Harper at the 1st Annual Women of Color Research Conference at UC Davis.
On May 11, 2013, at 12:15 pm, I gave a short talk at University of California-Davis for the Annual Women of Color Conference, which was from 9am-5pm. The video is below. I also included the transcript. I didn’t read exactly from it, but you will get the basic idea.This blog post and video are the continuation of my April 2013 blog reflection‘Racist Cunt’ and Cyberbullying: Ruminations on the Troll Life.
Thank you to those of you who helped to cover my travel costs! I’m truly appreciative!
Title: On [cyber]bullying and racist [micro] aggressions: turning your experiences of discursive violence into opportunities for research and activism
Abstract: I will be discussing the research and activism I did as a PhD student, which investigated whiteness and neoliberalism within vegan spaces. I will draw special attention to how I had to navigate the tremendous amount of direct hate as well as covert racist micro-aggressions that I experienced largely from white identified people. Most importantly, I will speak of how I turned these situations into research and activist opportunities. I will try to answer what I think it means to do this type of work as a critical race feminist and Black woman in a ‘post-racial’ USA.
Full Transcript In March 2013, I finally completed my dissertation and all my PhD requirements. Finally, I was PhD certified as a social scientist to investigate the phenomenon of structural racism and normative whiteness within ethical food movements such as veganism and vegetarianism in the USA.
I know that doctoral studies, and especially the dissertation portion of a doctoral program, can be very difficult for so many graduate students of color. However, I wanted to share with you my personal experiences of specifically doing the work of critical race feminism and critical whiteness studies in spaces that are quite hostile towards those of us- particularly women of color- who debunk the myth that we in a post-racial USA. I also wanted to share with you how repetitive experiences with what I’d call racist micro-aggressions, can be often times inspiring as well a physically, emotionally, and mentally debilitating. The most important question that I have had, since beginning my graduate work until now is: What does it mean for me, as a Black woman, to not play the expected “mammy” role, but to actually investigate the meaning behind this hostility and turn it into a scholarship?
Back in 2007, when I matriculated into Davis’s Geography Graduate Group program, I was dead set on researching 4 or 5 key black female vegans in the USA. I had posted on cyberspace, on as many blogs and other social media apps as possible, that I was releasing my Sistah Vegan Anthology and that I was searching for influential Black women vegans for my doctoral studies. However, I kept on running into what I would consider, hostile responses from white self-identified vegans who seemed rather angry that I was interested in how race and gender influenced not just Black women, but any vergan person’s consciousness in the USA. I tried not to be distracted by these responses, however, I have to admit that it nagged at my consciousness for a very long time. In the fall of 2007, I was invited to give a talk at Pitt, to discuss the concept of using veganism to decolonize the diet. I presented a case study about adjudicated black and brown youths who were introduced to a vegan diet [at an alternative rehabilitation program in Florida]. I solely concentrated on a bell hooks critical race feminist inspired analysis of this case study to my audience. Not once did I mention anything about animal rights, which is the mainstream reason why vegans in the USA feel strongly that people should become vegan. Within a week of giving that talk, an audience member emailed me. She was under the impression that I was quite “rude” to only talk about how at risk youths were utilizing a ‘decolonizing’ vegan diet to fight against white supremacist structures that make it so ‘easy’ for black and brown boys to enter the Prison Industrial Complex. She had let me know that it was “misleading” to give a talk about veganim and never talk about the TRUE purpose of veganism: which is really only about saving the lives of non-human animals. At the end of her email she also let me know that I needed to dress more professionally to be take seriously.
I forwarded her email to the person who had invited me to give the paid talk. Coincidentally, he actually knew who she was; she was a student of his and he had let me know that unfortunately, she reflected the ‘post-racial’ white entitled attitude that so many from her white Pittsburgh suburban neighborhood represented. Even though this happened 6 years ago, it highlights many of the similar emails, posts, and real world interactions I have had with white vegans who have heard about my Sistah Vegan Anthology, have viewed my recorded lectures, or attended my keynote addresses.
In 2010, I passed my qualifying exams and presented to my committee, that I still would be looking at the history of Black female vegans in the USA. They approved my proposal. However, about a month later, I found myself going through my collected emails and posts of ‘post-racial’ racist microagressions from white people, mostly vegan or vegetarian. Something was definitely there, but I didn’t know what I should do about it. I couldn’t lie to myself and say that it didn’t “hurt” to be constantly blasted with such vitriol, despite me always being ‘professional’, backing up my analysis with the strong canon of critical race, black feminism, and critical whiteness literature, and being ‘mindful’ towards mostly white audience participants. So, I was at a serious crossroads. I knew my dilemma was not an isolated event within the alternative food and food justice movement. I had privately shared my hurt and pain with a plethora of other food activists of color who were trying to understand how to deal with such hostility towards them, when they would try to explain to white foodies how white supremacy, as a structure, is embedded in the food system.
About a month after having my proposal passed, I told my advisor that I just couldn’t become as excited about researching solely Black female vegans, and that if possible, I would like to understand the hate, anger, and denial from the collectivity of white, mostly vegan people that had contacted me. I felt like a needed to create a type of critical race literacy model for a post-racial era of whites in the USA who sincerely though they were ‘good’ people for eating ‘ethically’, ‘vegan’, and or ‘vegetarian’, but were simply unable to grasp how race, whiteness, and globalized capitalism organized the food system, organized their consciousness around ethical consumption, and influenced them to be unaware of racial power dynamics.
Yes, I finished my dissertation, but I won’t lie to you: it was very very difficult. I spent days wondering if I had chosen the right path. Despite trying to create this much needed critical race literacy model for the hip and rising vegan movement, my soul and mental health seemed to suffer greatly. I began to have trouble with balancing the comments, emails, and even real world audience’s covertly angry questions about the scholarly-activist work I had chosen to do. I also began to wonder if it was worth it. The anxiety attacks I would get every time I would be asked to lecture at a university was difficult. I’d often show up and see how often, most of the audience was white, and then I would think to myself, How would they respond to what I had to say and was I putting my safety in jeopardy?
In November of 2011, I was asked to give a talk about veganism and critical studies of race at UC Berkeley. I decided to talk about how Queen Afua’s veganiusm is an Afrocentric response to colonial whiteness and response to the legacies of slavery that have manifested as black health disparities and inequities in food and health access. I was never allowed to complete my lecture, as I was constantly interrupted by white audience members who were irritated that Afua asked black women to practice veganism for decolonizing their food practices and did not mention anything about animal rights. Despite me trying to explain that the kitchen is not oppressive for all women, and that historically, second wave white middle-class feminists have a collectively different relationship to the kitchen space than black women, I was also interrupted by white women who were irritated that Afua’s sense of Black female empowerment meant Black women should reclaim the kitchen space as the central site of resistance and Black nation building. Yes, one can agree with me; it’s okay. But the lack of respect and sense of entitlement to not even let me finish my talk and not wait to bring these these issues up during q and a was quite telling. I was the ‘formal’, ‘articulate’, and professional ‘accommodating’ negro, while they were allowed to be the opposite…. and without repercussions. If this was indicative of my ‘professional future’, then I wasn’t sure if I should just get the hell out now.
But no, I didn’t. After calming down my enraged and broken heart, my dissertation chapter on Afua continued, and I was inspired to provide more evidence the next few months, why Afrocentric veganism came about. But I also beat myself up privately for having bitten my tongue and being ‘nice’ to the audience members who had disrespected me. Did they not know or care? Was I being an ‘emotional mammy’ by trying to be nice and to not hurt their feelings? What exactly was my role as a black feminist scholar and activist? When do you just stop being ‘nice’ because it is at the expense of your own health?
On May 11, 2013, I will be giving a short talk at University of California-Davis for the Annual Women of Color Conference, which is from 9am-5pm.
Location: Student Community Center; Session #4 – SCC Room E
Time: 12:00-12:50pm
Title: On [cyber]bullying and racist [micro] aggressions: turning your experiences of discursive violence into opportunities for research and activism
Abstract: I will be discussing the research and activism I did as a PhD student, which investigated whiteness and neoliberalism within vegan spaces. I will draw special attention to how I had to navigate the tremendous amount of direct hate as well as covert racist micro-aggressions that I experienced largely from white identified people. Most importantly, I will speak of how I turned these situations into research and activist opportunities. I will try to answer what I think it means to do this type of work as a critical race feminist and Black woman in a ‘post-racial’ USA.
If you are unable to attend this free conference, do not worry; I will be video recording it like I always do and then uploading it to my blog.
OK, so, what would you say, my ‘foodie’ friends, if you found out that your favorite ‘slow food’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘local’ touting restaurant exploits and abuses its servers and busers….most who are ‘conveniently’ non-white racialized people? Weird that the further you go back into the kitchen the ‘darker’ and more ‘abused’ a worker is. Seems like many ‘foodies’ and ‘slow food’ restaurants are only concerned about the ‘purity’ of their meal ingredients, but don’t care much about the lack of ‘purity’ behind racialized and gendered abuse and exploitation.
On May 6, 2013, Oakland HUB hosted an amazing dialogue about human abuse and exploitation in the restaurant business of the USA. Saru Jayaraman presented the research from her latest book Behind the Kitchen Door, which explores the numerous human rights injustices that restaurant workers endure.
Jayaraman talks about the heightened abuse of racialized minorities and immigrants as restaurant workers. What I found particularly amazing was Saru’s focus on “sustainable” and “slow food” restaurants that tout how ‘ethically’ sourced their foods are, yet many treat their workers unethically. Basically, a significant number of the ‘higher up’ employees and the mostly white and middle to upper class patrons only care about the ‘purity’ of ingredients of their foods; they do not care about how ‘sustainable’ or ‘ethical’ it is to make someone work without sick days, work while they have H1N1 (because taking time off means they lose their jobs), or that over 40 states have made the minimum wage for servers about $2.13/hr. Saru speaks of the plethora of servers and cooks who were infected with Hepatitis, H1N1, and other illnesses, and how they ended up exposing thousands of other people to these diseases. She talked about a bartender in DC who was unable to take time off, although he knew he was sick. However, one day he simply could not get out of bed and had never gone to the doctor because he didn’t have health insurance. After being immobile and in bed for a long time, he basically crawled to Korea town and hoped that someone would take mercy on him to diagnose what he had. He was told he had H1N1. It took him weeks to recover, and when he finally returned to work, they said his job had been given to someone else. Furthermore, the bartender had incurred over 10k dollars of credit card debt, while sick and trying to recover.
After Saru spoke, there was a panel of food justice workers, moderated by Ashara Ekundayo, to talk about what it means to be a “foodie of color,” decolonizing the diet, and trying to get the ‘privileged’ to care about the 10 million restaurant workers who make their ‘special’ cuisine possible. This video below is about the food justice panel discussion after Saru spoke.
On the panel are Jayaraman, Saqib Keval, Ashara Ekundayo, and Nikki Fortunato Bass. Also, pay special attention to how brilliant and acutely aware Ashara is about her own geo-political status as a woman of African descent with the ‘privilege’ of formal education, a USA national citizenship, and English as her first language. She, and the other panelists, complicate the notion of ‘food’ by asking what it means to be a foodie of color– both in the USA, and traveling outside of it. People’s Kitchen founder Saqib Keval and Ashara talk about how, while they were in France, their brown and black racial identity wouldn’t allow them entry into certain restaurants… but then Ashara notes when she opened her mouth and her USA English accent came through, that would often give her a ‘pass’ to enter.
Similarly to my dissertation work about how much so many USA vegans don’t really care or understand that their ‘cruelty-free’ vegan commodities are made possible through racialized and gendered exploitation(this link connects people to the PDF of my dissertation), Jayaraman and the panelists engage in deep dialogue about the implications of such a ‘privileged’ and a ‘narrow’ mindset on how one engages in what they think is ‘ethical’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘good food.’ Even though I know Saru published the book to educate people about the abuses occurring in the restaurant business, I felt quite frustrated at the end of the discussion; not because of Saru’s work, as I think she is awesome and a great mentor. What I found frustrating is the notion that if you ‘educate’ people who are causing abuse and exploitation, that that ‘new’ education will mean they will stop committing these injustices against people. I feel like education does not necessarily mean people will care. This is probably from my own work and observing a significant number of vegans of the USA, not care to change their consumer behavior, after learning that a vegan commodity they purchase was made possible through human slavery, structural racism, and coloniality. For them, they are ‘ethical’ enough, simply because a non-human animal was not exploited or killed for their vegan goodie. All the education in the world about the human abuses that make their vegan stuff available, doesn’t seem to work.
But, Jayaraman stated that what makes ‘the privileged’ owners and shareholders of restaurants ‘care’, is when one presents to them that if they treat their employees unethically, they will end up losing money in the long run. She cites the example of how Olive Garden was sued because an employee with Hepatitis A (who didn’t know she had it because she couldn’t get insurance or go to a doctor) exposed thousands of people to her disease. It was a financial disaster for Olive Garden to be sued; hence, if you present to them that they will lose “their” money for not “caring” about their employees, then they get interested. It is sad and disgusting that that is what it takes for SOME owners and stakeholders to care. Disgusting, and disappointing… but not surprising.
Beyond “Cruelty-Free”: Critical Race and Decolonial Approaches to USA Ethical Consumption
Dr. Amie Breeze Harper
Instructor: Amie Breeze Harper, PhD
The above refers to a Webinar available that I video-recorded. I also provide a Powerpoint presentation and notes for your refer to. It is approximately 2 hours long (1 hour lecture, 1 hour Q&A) and now available for purchase for $9.99. PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A PRE-RECORDED LECTURE.
How to Purchase and View: Please pay with the PayPal link here. Once I receive the payment, you will receive an email with a link to the Webinar that you can view as many times as you would like. Please email me at breezeharper (at) gmail (dot) com if you have any questions. If the PayPal link above does not work, you can pay by clicking on the Click here to make a donation by PayPal link on the right of the page.
Webinar Description:
It seems like everyone is talking about ethical consumption in some way, shape, or form. And it also seems like there isn’t a universal agreement on what is ‘ethical’. Some folk think eating animals is ‘ethical’, as long as the animal didn’t suffer living in confined quarters and was ‘free range.’ Some folk think veganism is the way to go, but don’t think about the humans who may labor in cruel conditions to provide them their vegan foods, or the humans and non-human animals who are displaced to source ‘cruelty-free’ palm oil for vegan butter for example.
This webinar will help you think more critically about how you consume, why you consume, and how to alleviate suffering through mindful consumption that is pro-vegan. This webinar will acknowledge that all people are different and that due to racial, class, and geographical privileges (or lack there of), access to ‘ethical consumption’ varies.
In this pro-vegan oriented critical thinking course, I will teach you how and why you should consider how structural racism, classism, neoliberal capitalism, normative whiteness, and ableism affect what you think is ‘ethical consumption’, ‘healthy,’ and ‘perfect body.’ Upon finishing this webinar, you will have a better understanding of how to think critically about being a vegan consumer that is both mindful of non-human animal suffering and the suffering and pain that structural ‘isms’ (such as racism, sexism, etc) cause to human beings who labor throughout the food chain. You will be able to bring this information to your organizations, friends, and family in a way that is compassionate and loving, not shaming or judgmental. Though there are many human injustices that the global food economy relies on, this webinar will pay close attention to the under-represented topics of how structural racism/whiteness operate within a neoliberal capitalist driven consumer economy in the USA. This webinar is not about finding one sole solution to ‘ethical consumption’. Instead, this webinar will help plant the seed for more critical thinking in your consciousness and allow you to then self-train yourself on how to determine what pro-vegan ethical consumption lifestyle, principles, or philosophies best suit your own social, geographical, and financial statuses. This self-training will always be a process that is neverending. You will become better at it each day; this webinar will plant the seed to get you started. For example, once you learn about the human slavery used to produced certain cocoa products, this will engender you to think about the source of your vegan cotton and then research if people are exploited to produce a supposedly ‘cruelty-free’ product.
Over the past few years, I have blogged about whiteness, racism, and veganism in a way that is mindful, holistic, and critical. Despite my attempts to present such ‘sensitive’ issues in scholarly and mindful ways, I have experienced comments that are downright violent and full of hateful rage from white-identified people. Most recently, someone posted a response to my 2012 blog article about the racial politics of dread lock wearing and cultural appropriation. The exploration of the topic earned me the label of ‘racist cunt’ from commenter “geoff” on April 8, 2013 at 844am. Thank goodness for cyberspace; what normally would not be said directly to my face, in a real physical space (like in my former university or my professional place of employment), can be now be spewed towards my avatar in the comfort of one’s home, library, or even a smartphone/tablet from the commuter train.
The other summer, I spoke of my experience at a Buddhism retreat for women of African descent. The retreat mindfully acknowledged how the repetitive trauma of structural, institutional, and individual acts of racism-sexism have uniquely shaped our Black female collective consciousnesses. My open-hearted blog post about my spiritually healing experience at this retreat was met with easy dismissal and calling me ‘racist’, by white male Buddhist practitioners. It would seem that they sincerely did not fully understand what ‘racism’ actually means; or how they as beneficiaries of whiteness in the USA (or in other white settler nations), have probably never had to find a healing retreat that mind fully acknowledges their experiences of surviving through a society that simply covets whiteness (phenotypes as well as ‘whiteness’ as performance and ‘ways of thinking’); a society that is usually repulsed by those bodies and systems of thought that deviate from “whiteness.”
Instead of engaging with the lived realities of ‘the other’ in a mindfully engaging way, it would seem that a significant number of these folk who don’t agree with me resort to what I would consider ‘the troll life’: cyber-bullying, the usage of discursive violence, etc., versus more open-hearted ways of explaining how or why they disagree with my interpretations/analyses of my own experiences with race, whiteness, and power in the USA. I have actually never responded to those engaging in the “troll life” in the same violent ways that they have done to me. Sure, go ahead agree with or disagree with someone…. But why not do it in a way that is not violent? What purpose does it serve to resort to the “troll life?” I don’t believe that anyone deserves to receive hate filled rage and discursive violence; after all, when has anger and hate created love and understanding amongst people? If I were to go that ‘hate-rage’ route, once I jump into their world of trolling logic, it is a lost battle. Instead, I have chosen to use my energy in other ways. However, recently, I have began to revisit the overall meaning of such hateful and violent language that is so easily used against me by these folk who end up on my blog-space.
Over the past 8 months, I applied to a lot of full-time academic, non-profit, and industry positions. I have easily applied to over 100 full time positions at this point. Even though I know that the job market is intensely fierce right now, I have been quite perplexed that I have not even been called for one initial ‘phone screening’ interview. I have begun to wonder what the likelihood is that these ‘honest’ but hateful feelings towards my online articles about race, whiteness, and power may potentially represent how I am actually viewed by those that look over my resume and cover letter. Do they eventually conduct an Internet search of my name, only to find my Sistah Vegan blog and its ‘confrontational’ topics are not ‘suited’ for a ‘post-racial’ USA?
However, I also want to give most people the benefit of the doubt and suggest that ‘discomfort’ and ‘defensiveness’ around my work may not even be a ‘conscious’ act; it could very well be dysconscious. Negative and uncomfortable reactions to my ‘online presence’ could be at the deeply somatic level. Perhaps most of the mainstream do not even know how to begin to interpret or come to terms with their reactions to what my work means or represents within their lives and the overall scheme of power, race, gender, and ['white'] nation-building. Even though it was back in 2005, I will never forget the plethora of hateful comments made about my initial call for papers for the Sistah Vegan anthology. White vegans and vegetarians were angered by the idea that racialization and gender in the USA could influence one’s practice and rationale of veganism. I even ended up analyzing a vegan site’s 40+ pages of ‘annoyed’ white vegans’ responses to my CFP. I turned it into a Masters Thesis and published an article from it the other year in a peer-reviewed volume.
For my own highly degreed self, what does it mean that despite getting a PhD with critical race studies oriented emphasis in a social science (critical food geographies), it wasn’t/isn’t enough to earn the ‘respect’ of not being a recipient of such hateful rage? After all, I’m using ‘social science’ training from a PWI to ‘show’ that racism, whiteness, and power are very ‘real’ in a ‘post-racial’ USA. Graduating summa cum-laude from Harvard Master’s program, as well as from my University of California-Davis PhD program, having received the Dean’s Award at Harvard for my “critical race feminist” thesis, or having received the two-year GSRM UCDavis Fellowship to academically theorize about race and food does not ‘yield’ a pass to exempt me from such trolling hate.
Whether it is direct, unconscious, or dysconscious, if this how I am seen (i.e. ‘racist cunt’) by a significant number of [white] people , then what does it mean, or should it mean, for my future scholarship, activism, and my search for post-PhD full time employment? What does it mean for so many of us non-white women in white-settler nations who are doing similar work with love mindfulness, only to experience similar hateful reactions? And even the job market is really ‘tough’ right now, is it ‘equally’ as tough across the board, or does it become significantly tougher and more fierce when one does the type of work that I do while doing it in a body that is not ‘markedly white’?
In this video, I answer Dianna’s question about nutritional healing and necessary support to combat the stress of being seen as the ‘token negro’ or ‘affirmative action’ case in a largely white environment. This video is part of my new series, “Ask Dr. Breeze”, which I will showcase on the Sistah Vegan blog, but also its own website askdrbreeze.com . Dianna also refers to an earlier video I recorded last fall, that was about recipes for racial tension headaches.
Today it became official: I am Dr. Amie “Breeze” Harper. Thank you to everyone who helped to make this possible.
The photo above is of me holding my baby daughter this morning with the document stating I have been awarded my PhD.
Dissertation Title: Vegan Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal, Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of ‘Cruelty-Free.’
Dissertation Abstract
In this dissertation, I analyze how neoliberal whiteness, race consciousness, decolonization, and anti-racism operate within three different vegan food guides: PETA’s Vegan Shopping Guide, Queen Afua’s Sacred Woman, and Food Empowerment Project’s Ethical Food Choices. PETA, Queen Afua, and Food Empowerment Project are all located within the landscape of vegan politics to produce “ethical” spaces across multiple scales (i.e. consciousness, the body and the home). However, these three sites represent different engagements with food commodities for achieving ethical consumption. Such differences are not so much about food, as much as they are about the social, political, and economic relationships underlying the food commodity chain. This manuscript will reveal that these ‘differing’ vegan guides, actually effect and are affected by whiteness; both in its historical (i.e. colonial whiteness and Jim Crow segregation) and contemporary forms (i.e. neoliberal whiteness). These connections will be revealed and articulated through the primary framework of critical race materialism and the lens of critical food studies.
Chapter two is titled “’Never Be Silent’: On Trayvon Martin, PETA and the Packaging of Neoliberal Whiteness”. Vegan tomato products and So Delicious® are advocated as “cruelty-free” in PETA’s online Vegan Shopping Guide. I will engage critical race materialist and decolonial analysis of the meanings PETA has applied to these two commodities. Such analysis will reveal how PETA’s marketing of vegan products, as “cruelty-free,” conceals human exploitation that makes these foods possible. I also show how PETA’s ‘anti-racist’ use of Trayvon Martin’s 2012 murder for their new campaign, signify how both post-humanism and post-racialism work to conceal the violence of neoliberalism and racism.
Chapter three is titled, “Feed a Wom[b]man, Feed the Black Nation: Afrocentric Vegan Politics and Queen Afua’s Kitchen.” Queen Afua is one of the most popular and widely read health activists amongst Black women in the USA. In this chapter, I analyze the food that Sacred Woman recommends or abhors to ‘purify’, ‘decolonize,’ and ‘liberate’ Black Americans from legacies of colonialism and racism. First, through an Afrocentric framework, I show how Afua’s vegan philosophy resists anti-black conceptualizations of Black women as “unfeminine” and “breeders.” After this analysis, I use Black feminist theorizing to explore how the meanings Afua places on particular vegan commodities simultaneously reproduces heterosexist, ableist, and black middle-class ‘reformist’ conceptualizations of a ‘healthy’ Black nation.
Lastly chapter four is named “Food Empowerment Project and the Underside of Veganized Modernity.” Food Empowerment Project (FEP) is a pro-vegan food justice organization in South Bay California. They place great emphasis on farmworker rights and alleviating environmental racism. I show that their Ethical Food Choices guide exposes how neoliberalism, corporate-capitalist profits, and hyper-consumerism dictate “ethical” vegan marketing schemes and labels such as “sustainable,” “ethically sourced,” and “Fair Trade.” They achieve this by re-signifying the neoliberal meaning of ‘sustainable’ palm oil products and cocoa, to reflect the cruel and unethical conditions they create. Analysis of FEP’s boycott of popular ‘eco-conscious’ and ‘sustainable’ labeled vegan brands Earth Balance® and CLIF Bar® will be undertaken.
Ultimately, this dissertation articulates how something as `mundane’ as vegan food guides can be used to create new critical literacies around ethical consumption and racial dynamics, as well as reveal how neoliberal whiteness operates within the food commodity chain.
In this video I talk about a Winter 2012 issue of the Intelligence Report, a magazine dedicated to the surveillance of ‘extreme hate groups and individuals.’ A magazine that seems to significantly focus on white supremacist and anti-Muslim people, I was surprised to see that Paul Watson was included in this issue as an ‘eco-terrorist.’ I felt Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where Intelligence Report is published, could have done a better job of providing more information about animal liberation activism, instead of lumping Watson together with ‘other’ violent and extreme hate groups/individuals like white supremacists Wade Page who shot and killed Sikhs in the USA last year.
Breeze Harper
melissa danielle
