Like an overzealous student cramming for an exam, I think I highlighted more lines than I left unmarked. Except with Aphro-ism, I did so with captivated fervor rather than fear of failure.
I ate that sh*t up. And I was hungry for more.
In my eighth year as a vegan, my perception of what was possible for our movement was becoming more expansive than ever, thanks in great part to the people behind APEX Advocacy. I was sliding through a wormhole, from a space that could be described as disconnected, inauthentic, and bureaucratic toward one inspired by pre-colonial existence and our relationship to the earth and each other.
Syl and Aph Ko are two sisters who have been tending to this alternate vegan space.
Aphro-ism is their joint collection of essays on race, advocacy for nonhuman animals, and feminism, compiled in chronological order (originally published between August 2015 and December 2016) to help demonstrate their personal political and intellectual development over time. Aph notes, “I’m sure as we read and discuss more, we’ll extend these conversations and even continue to change our minds, because activism is all about growth and learning, never staying in the same conceptual space for too long.”
There are 19 reality-bending essays in total. To give you a glimpse into the necessary future of veganism, and the Ko sisters’ style of theoretical inquiry, I’ve selected a passage from each.
Enjoy the trip! ✨
“We are in love with the finished piece, and feel that it is representative of the radical, futurist work that lies within.” —Wai Roka Studios on their cover design
1: BLACK LIVES, BLACK LIFE
In short, diversity (or rather “diversity”) is the idea that black (and brown) people should function as vessels for white perspectives and white theory as opposed to contributing their own viewpoints and theories. The assumption here is that the considerations of black people are either inferior or negligible and so the value of black people in any space will be in their ability to reproduce whiteness. In simpler words, “diversity” is the presence of black bodies, as opposed to the presence of black ideas born from black perspectives, in predominantly white spaces.
2: BRINGING OUR DIGITAL MOPS HOME
A Call to Black Folks to Stop Cleaning up White Folks’ Intellectual Messes Online
Liberatory social change will require us, as minorities, to change our thinking as well. If we know that racism and sexism are systemic issues that impact everyone, why would we think that white people are the only ones who need to reevaluate their behaviors and conceptual frameworks? The system has infected us all. It is illogical to talk about “structures” in one breath, and then have our advocacy structured around disciplining individual white people. Liberation will require all of us to act differently and to reevaluate how we’ve been trained to understand what the actual problems are, and their solutions. Change won’t just be an external event, but will happen internally as well.
3: #ALLVEGANSROCK
The All Lives Matter Hashtag of Veganism
Exclaiming “We are all vegans” is a way to employ post-racial rhetoric to violently silence activists of color who are trying to organize around their own experiences.
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Conceptual violence creates the conditions for physical violence. The conceptual chains that oppress animals have been forged by race and gender constructs, which is why it’s important to create theoretical tools to help break these chains. Setting animals free physically requires us to conceptually reevaluate all systems that have sustained and normalized their oppression.
4: BY “HUMAN” EVERYBODY JUST MEANS “WHITE”
When we make use of the human-animal binary to justify our attitudes toward other species, we are in fact using the very same racial logic that posits the “human” as whiteness. There is already a movement underway in which people from our community call upon members to “decolonize” our bodies, our diets, and areas of activism. But we also need to decolonize the frameworks that govern our concepts. For those of us in the West who can afford to live otherwise, our comfort with using animals, especially as meat and dairy, only reveals our comfort with white-centric modes of thinking. Dismantling racism might require dismantling our patterns of consumption, including our food practices.
5: WHY CONFUSION IS NECESSARY FOR OUR ACTIVISM TO EVOLVE
Part of activism is finding yourself in a new space of confusion, allowing yourself to step into new conceptual terrain. When you abandon commonly held oppressive beliefs, you might not exactly know what to do afterward, and that’s where more activists need to be. Confusion is usually a symptom of decolonizing yourself from the mainstream system. Answers aren’t easily laid out in front of you since you’re now forced to think critically. You have to create new blueprints and imagine new ways of interacting with people and doing things. Often, people who are colonized by the contemporary system ask questions in a patronizing way because they don’t want change to happen, because most people thrive on comfort. Change is a threat.
6: WOMEN, BEAUTY, AND NATURE
The very same thing that affords [women] this status of perpetual beauty, however, makes us exploitable. Because we are distanced from subjecthood, because we are alien and different, mystical creatures, passive beautiful things to be apprehended from afar, we are also forced into perpetual object status.
I think something similar is going on with the nature-as-beautiful rhetoric. If we were to regard “nature” in such a way that we were so deeply related to it that the concept wouldn’t even make sense to us, perhaps it would be strange to think of it primarily in terms of aesthetics. … If there is no such distance, then certainly “nature” would not be seen as exploitable. After all, the deep relations to it would prevent us from being able even to conceive of it as something “out there,” something deeply different, an object and a resource. Rather, we would operate in conjunction, as co-subjects, as continuous.
7: EMPHASIZING SIMILARITIES DOES NOTHING FOR THE OPPRESSED
What I take issue with is the assumption that phenomena like racism or speciesism (not to mention other pernicious “isms”) are caused by or can be explained by appealing to data (real or imagined) about differences in capacities, intelligence, behaviors, features, and so on. Certainly, given the amount of effort spent creating or stressing differences among groups, this type of information (again, real or fabricated) plays a role in helping to maintain and especially to make normal specific oppressions and exploitation.
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The “difference” is, in the case of humans and animals, created by us as a functional device. As a result, many terms that are animal-specific carry within them the parameters for how to treat that being. Appealing to anything external, such as their capacity to suffer, misses the force of concepts and how they function.
For example, just calling someone an “animal” or “nonhuman” is more than enough to justify extreme violence toward that person.
8: ADDRESSING RACISM REQUIRES ADDRESSING THE SITUATION OF ANIMALS
By settling for temporary improvements without addressing the “violence producing category” of the animal/subhuman/nonhuman, we invite guaranteed future harms, which—given technological advancements—will be more destructive than ever before.
9: WHY BLACK VEGANISM IS MORE THAN JUST BEING BLACK AND VEGAN
Black veganism, then, encourages activists to think about and articulate the animal situation as they see fit through their lived situation. Sometimes, this might even mean never addressing the exploitation and oppression of animals directly. It’s a way of being vegan, which suggests that there are lots of equally legitimate ways to understand, articulate, and resist how it is that animals are negatively impacted by our systems of power. As the name black veganism suggests, we believe our identification as black affects what our veganism will look like.
10: SEVEN REASONS WHY LABELS AREN’T NECESSARILY THE ROOT OF OPPRESSION
The problem isn’t labeling: it’s who’s doing the labeling and for what purpose.
11: WE’VE RECLAIMED BLACKNESS NOW IT’S TIME TO RECLAIM “THE ANIMAL”
(Part II of “Addressing Racism Requires Addressing the Situation of Animals)
[T]his process has real implications for those who suffer the most from the category of “the animal”—nonhuman animals. If we reclaim “the animal” in the same way that we’ve reclaimed blackness, we acknowledge that nonhuman animals, too, are among the many beings who are condemned by the current system. Their inferiority is also materially located, in their bodies, which are generally marked as consumption items, objects to be used as we see fit, and so forth.
12: NOTES FROM THE BORDER OF THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE
Thinking and Talking about Animal Oppression When You’re Not Quite Human Yourself
Let’s use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. Let’s use our erasure from this rotten-to-the-core Western notion of humanity to build up a different “new world,” one that is not defined in terms of dichotomies or hierarchies or emotional death—but centered on love: one in which we accept ambiguity and difference, grounded in an expansive, limitless “we.”
13: VEGANS OF COLOR AND RESPECTABILITY POLITICS
When Eurocentric Veganism Is Used to Rehabilitate Minorities
Since veganism is culturally associated with whiteness, there’s an unfortunate narrative of racial transcendence for minority folks who embrace the vegan lifestyle. So, when we still insert our racial experiences even after we embrace veganism, the self-proclaimed leaders are confused: What does race have to do with veganism? We let you in this space where you won’t have the baggage of racial stereotypes!
14: WE CAN AVOID THE DEBATE ABOUT COMPARING HUMAN AND ANIMAL OPPRESSIONS, IF WE SIMPLY MAKE THE RIGHT CONNECTIONS
[W]e tend to be blind to the fact that in both the narrative of speciesism and the narrative of racism the members of the losing side both fall short of real human status and, as a result, their suffering and their deaths are mundane, normal, and expected.
In my view of things, the “humanity” trumped up in one narrative is the same “humanity” trumped up in the other. If we want to make a connection, this is the connection we should be making. We’re really not “comparing” anything in this type of thinking. We’re noting a common source. The connection we make is not found in the oppressions themselves or the oppressed bodies. It’s about realizing that we’re wrong to focus on human bodies or animal bodies or what those bodies and souls face in being oppressed when we want to make “connections.” All we need to do is focus on and make salient “the human” in both cases.
15: WHY ANIMAL LIBERATION REQUIRES AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
There’s almost something tragic and comical about activists failing to realize the blatant missing piece to the activist puzzle: that your own oppression is anchored to your citizenship as a “subhuman” or “animal” in contemporary society. This is what makes racism, sexism, and all other “isms” possible. These “isms” are expressions of being labeled less-than-human.
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If we’re not organizing around this human-animal divide, then we aren’t properly getting to the root of our oppression.
16: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA SERVES AS A DIGITAL DEFIBRILLATOR FOR “THE AMERICAN DREAM”
Just as black folks were beginning to bury the American dream, rightfully pointing to its racist, neoliberal foundation designed to perpetuate the disenfranchisement of minorities, innovators came in with their social media platforms, using them as digital defibrillators to revive it. They repackaged it and called it Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. It’s not a coincidence that almost every single inventor of these platforms is a white man.
If you use YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, you too can make it to the top, which means visibility in a white mainstream marketplace. Fame and wealth are promised to young minorities who show a commitment to obsessively using and engaging with white social media platforms. In our hyper-engagement and distraction in the online world, it’s easy to forget that once again white men are the gatekeepers of our success.
17: REVALUING THE HUMAN AS A WAY TO REVALUE THE ANIMAL
Coloniality is dangerous beyond its power to objectify, harm, and destroy living beings. Its poison lies in its monopoly over human consciousness. It tricks us into believing that wherever is the opposite of what currently exists is the “radical” or “revolutionary” place to land. But, again, these spaces are given to us by coloniality. We remain within the narrative it constructed.
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[T]he way to animal liberation partially requires us to free our notion of “the animal” from the binary (anything else is to repeat binary thinking). It’s a stepping stone to animals existing as beings for themselves.
18: BLACK VEGANISM REVISITED
Part of coloniality’s task is to ensure that certain futures remain unimagined, that certain ideas remain unthinkable so that it seems that whatever we have now is all we have to work with. Simply put, black veganism is a methodological tool to reactivate our imaginations. It is designed to relocate the animal question to a new and fresh space to find new and fresh answers as well as to benefit any oppressed being.
19: CREATING NEW CONCEPTUAL ARCHITECTURE
On Afrofuturism, Animality, and Unlearning/Rewriting Ourselves
[E]ach moment we turn away from learning more about oppression or being exposed to new ideas that could change the direction of our movements, we are no longer activists. In that setup, we are just clinging even tighter to the architecture of white supremacy.
We need to radically reevaluate everything we’ve ever known about our own bodies, the bodies of the dominant class, and the bodies of nonhuman animals.
😮💨
While I feel that every excerpt can stand alone, serving as a spark for critical thinking around each topic, there is so much more within the complete body of work to carefully consider from the vantage point of your unique life experience.
Check out Lantern Publishing & Media to source your copy of Aphro-ism and explore their library of books on veganism, animal rights, humane education, recovery, therapy, and spirituality, including Aph Ko’s second book, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft.