Reading lately over at the always-provocative “Vegans of Color” blog, I had a bit of a mixed reaction. Reflecting on race conflicts, I can honestly say that I have been far luckier than most vegans of color, a few notable instances notwithstanding. The down-and-dirty guts of conflict in my lived experience is a little different than a lot of people of color because I grew up among other people of color, in a truly multicultural environment. Being part of a truly multicultural (omnivorous) family, any vegan/omnivore conflict has arisen almost exclusively from issues related to abledness.
The “other” that plays a major role in my political/social persona is that of disability: cerebral palsy means I have a diagnosed learning disability and I’m partially deaf as a result of a skating accident. Now, before you think “Well, cue the violins”, let me state that the sole purpose of this post is to examine interconnections of domination that plague so much of human relations; this is not, by any means, a new concept in abolitionist discourse, nor is it necessarily indicative (I hope) of philosophical pity-partying on my part. If you happen to be a differently-abled vegan who deals with the very real problem of depending on speciesists (no matter how understanding they may be) for your daily survival (dietary and otherwise), you’ve got some room to talk, even if it’s just in order to clear your head.
Speciesist paternalism towards the differently-abled may tend to be a lot more insidious than other issues of intersectionality, simply because it is far more logical on the face of it. Who can blame the harried parent that must make extra meals for the resolute vegan that is physically and/or mentally ill-equipped to do so? Ability prejudice can also play out in the even subtler forms of animal rights activism that demand a intimate familiarity with every single hot topic in the movement, or at least, the ability to show yourself well-versed any of a number of disciplines ranging from law to sociology to ethics. While each of these certainly is germane to the broader issue of animal rights, and can be used with great efficiency, might it not be conceivable that the vegan, who for whatever reason (e.g. disability), honestly and truly cannot engage these issues so deeply might read this demand as a slammed door in the face? I get really tired of my psychoeducational/ organizational issues being co-opted as the bullet in the brain of veganism’s logic. Veganism, with one patronizing pat on the back, becomes not an ethical position to be reckoned with but a gracious favor bestowed by the sensible and kindly omnivore upon the petulant and overly-sensitive “animal lover”.
The subtle assumption constantly at work here is that I need to “earn the right to be vegan” by gaining the forms of independence that would allow me to more quickly attain that happy day when my organizational skills, learning disability and memory all begin to function at some externally-imposed benchmark that bestows upon me the “right” to live as a non-speciesist. Do you see why no external criteria regarding veganism’s “permissibility” holds water? Not culture, not religious tradition, not ability, not an expensive or even extensive education. There is no deadline on an education in the abolitionist school of thought, and the cost of admission is shockingly low. All people owe it to the animals to go vegan, regardless of their ability status. Everyone’ s activism is important, and not in some patronizing “everybody’s a winner” sort of way, but, as I have stated repeatedly on this blog, because everyone is the only one who can reach everyone. I cannot do the work you do, you cannot do the work I do. Peter Singer isn’t exactly the figurehead for any sort of animal rights movement anyhow, but it’s telling that the purported “godfather” of the movement espouses views that might be called quasi-eugenicist. Are we really so eager to be a part of a movement made up only of those accorded worth by some predefined criteria, when it’s predefined criteria that we’re fighting against in the first place? We must refuse to engage in “practical utilitarianism” in our activism. We desperately need a radical reworking of what veganism means in social discourse, outside of a “trickle-down” privilege paradigm. Really, the corrective to all this is quite simple. The notion that I have a “right” (earned or otherwise) to be vegan is at its core powered by speciesism. Indeed, the opposite is true: I don’t have the right not to be vegan. Veganism is not a choice, per se. I “choose” it only in the sense in that I recognize that by living in a speciesist world, I am morally compelled to live abolition in my life.
Nor is veganism a philosophical halfpipe with which to show off your mad reasoning skillz. It is an absolute imperative that everyone, regardless of their eloquence, relative education and ability to effect personal decisions ought to embrace. It matters little to nonhuman animals that your stance can be backed up with cross-references to every piece of relevant literature, or even that you don’t cook all that well. The only ones who care about such trivialities are either speciesists or vegans with something else to prove.
Fellow vegan advocates, I humbly ask for a renewed awareness of the lived experiences of other vegans; veganism is simple; let’s let it be simple, and use that simplicity to attract everyone we can. Remember that we’re not combating stupidity, but ignorance; we advocate not secret wisdom, but common moral sense. Veganism is easy, we so often say, and so it is, as a general matter; but there are those of us who are making this journey with a little less skip in our steps and a little more grinding our heels against the dirt.
* If you are a young person living abolition while under the guardianship of an omnivore parent(s), please know you have my deepest respect. Keep up the good fight – you are not alone.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised...It’s Going Straight to Home Video
A while ago, a coworker noticed that I was reading an article about some inane publicity stunt involving a naked woman that PeTA had put on. He was surprised when I agreed with his disdainful dismissal, because “I thought you were a vegan!” And that, in an unfortunate and regrettable nutshell, is the problem of uniting under a single “figurehead” of the movement. The corporatization of the animal rights movement is, in large part, what leads to the trivialization of the movement. When people think of animal rights, they think of PETA. And that is a tragedy, both for the broader credibility of our cause and for the concrete efforts against the institution of animal slavery as a whole.
The point here is not to castigate PeTA (though I’ve done so before and will most likely do so in the future, given their resistance to change). The point is to assert, as forcefully as I can, the importance of individual effort.
This might just be the social anarchist in me coming to the fore, but I strongly suggest that the worship of a figurehead is one of the quickest ways to start making people start losing their own heads. Like it or not, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the integrity of the message and the popularity of the message. To suggest that veganism will immediately become universally understood and embraced is to sadly underestimate the bang-up job that culture has done in instilling a speciesist ethos into the very fabric of human life. Why else is it so easy to draw the ire of speciesists for being “too hardcore”? Even if they finally get off a vegan’s back for the mere fact of his or her veganism, heaven help the uppity vegan who actually does a little preaching of his or her own.
But on our own is where we so often find ourselves. And that can be discouraging, frustrating and downright painful at times. I am not going to purr some platitude about how we are not alone, because, in a sense, we often are. But this reminder goes out to everyone of my fellow vegans: never let anyone convince you that you are ineffective or isolated. Number one, it isn’t true; number two, it has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity, or even the success or demise, of animal rights.
Individuals are powerful precisely because of their lack of capital, not in spite of it. I’m not saying that people whose paychecks come from the animal rights movement or vegan businesses are innately immoral, but it seems intuitive that if your bottom line is profit, you will thrive only when the majority opinion lines up pretty squarely with yours. That is why PeTA shacks up with mainstream animal-agriculture enterprises like KFC. Can you imagine the idiocy, from an economic standpoint, of a business plan that rejects animals as capital? By joining forces with the animal industry while paying lip service to the comfort levels of the industry’s slaves, PeTA (which is, make no mistake, an industry in itself) can have its 99.9% vegan cake and eat it too: railing against the industry it helps to function.
The rejection of this compromise is the whole point of animal rights. Our interest (and I don’t deny that some people feel they do indeed have an interest) in using animals for our purposes must get out of the way of the interest of nonhumans in living a subjectively meaningful and inherently valuable life. In other words, I shouldn’t eat/wear/use animals, even if I want to; I don’t have the right. The moral structure of a right is a boundary—back up off this person, he/she belongs to him/herself.
Thus veganism is, to the dismay of many, a complete surrender of power, at least on one level. At its root lies a new evaluation of our place in this world and our relationships to those we share it with. It resists organization into a hierarchy because it is itself a protest against a form of hierarchy. For vegans to take the tack of people like Martin Balluch and concentrate solely on the struggle between larger institutions, dismissing individual effort as ultimately irrelevant to the goal of animal rights has, whatever the original intent, exactly the same effect as refusing to go vegan because someone else will pick up your slack. There is, as unbelievable as it sounds, a substantive philosophical component to veganism: it is abolition, lived out in everyday life. To say that it is a symbolic protest is in no way to belittle it, but it is more than that: it is living abolition, making yourself proof that another world is possible. If going vegan means laying down one power, surely it entails picking up another: the power of one in the life of one. The smaller we are, the easier it is to remain authentic. The corporatization of the movement backs itself into the corner of fighting hegemony with hegemony. I haven’t the time, and certainly not the desire, to check in with Peter Singer every time I want to effect change on behalf of animals.
I am not going to change the world, no. But I am doing my damnedest to change my world. And the funny thing is, I’m finding out every day (if we want to focus on the numbers) that thousands upon thousands of animals are being killed on behalf of just the people I know. If I believe (and I do, very strongly) that animals are individual beings with interests separate from our own, how am I supposed to believe that they don’t have interests separate from each other? That the 2 or 3 lives I save every day aren’t worth something to the animal who has an interest in continuing it?
Animal liberation – I mean real, substantive change that fundamentally alters the place of nonhumans in our culture – is a zero-sum game. When you tell me that I will not make a difference because I can save only X number of animals, you are forgetting something. You forget that every animal is more than a statistic. Yes, I want the concept of animals-as-property to disappear as a social construct; but in the meantime, I can’t ignore the very individuals who bear the consequences of that idea. We worry so much about missing the forest for the trees that we forget that we aren’t fighting for the rights of trees. We are fighting for the freedom of sentient beings. Sentience, by its very definition, presupposes the existence of an individual self, a unique moral entity. Of course I won’t topple animal exploitation by myself...but how exactly does it follow that I shouldn’t even try? And the point of a truly abolitionist perspective is that this “trying” isn’t merely “making the best of a hopeless game”; it is making a difference in a single life, a life that means literally the world to its holder. That isn’t a failure, of veganism, of vegans, or of abolitionism: it is an affirmation that a single life saved makes a lifetime of individual effort worthwhile.
Go vegan, today. Never forget the value of the one: the value of every new vegan, the value of a single animal's life to itself.
And then, remember not to let anyone do your fighting for you. A great many of the battles are fought not in university lecture halls or in front of fur stores, but at the dinner tables of everyday people, because it is everyday people that know how to reach people they know. The revolution will not come from the top down, but from the ground up. It will move among the people, apart from corporations and companies and trends and traditions. It will unite professors and scholars and priests and salespeople. It will make a theorist out of the commoner and a commoner out of the theorist. It will open your mind and your mouth and your arms to think, to speak and to embrace your fellow beings. The revolution will not be televised, because people are switching the channel. It’s going straight to home video, where it effects real transformation, here and now.
The point here is not to castigate PeTA (though I’ve done so before and will most likely do so in the future, given their resistance to change). The point is to assert, as forcefully as I can, the importance of individual effort.
This might just be the social anarchist in me coming to the fore, but I strongly suggest that the worship of a figurehead is one of the quickest ways to start making people start losing their own heads. Like it or not, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the integrity of the message and the popularity of the message. To suggest that veganism will immediately become universally understood and embraced is to sadly underestimate the bang-up job that culture has done in instilling a speciesist ethos into the very fabric of human life. Why else is it so easy to draw the ire of speciesists for being “too hardcore”? Even if they finally get off a vegan’s back for the mere fact of his or her veganism, heaven help the uppity vegan who actually does a little preaching of his or her own.
But on our own is where we so often find ourselves. And that can be discouraging, frustrating and downright painful at times. I am not going to purr some platitude about how we are not alone, because, in a sense, we often are. But this reminder goes out to everyone of my fellow vegans: never let anyone convince you that you are ineffective or isolated. Number one, it isn’t true; number two, it has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity, or even the success or demise, of animal rights.
Individuals are powerful precisely because of their lack of capital, not in spite of it. I’m not saying that people whose paychecks come from the animal rights movement or vegan businesses are innately immoral, but it seems intuitive that if your bottom line is profit, you will thrive only when the majority opinion lines up pretty squarely with yours. That is why PeTA shacks up with mainstream animal-agriculture enterprises like KFC. Can you imagine the idiocy, from an economic standpoint, of a business plan that rejects animals as capital? By joining forces with the animal industry while paying lip service to the comfort levels of the industry’s slaves, PeTA (which is, make no mistake, an industry in itself) can have its 99.9% vegan cake and eat it too: railing against the industry it helps to function.
The rejection of this compromise is the whole point of animal rights. Our interest (and I don’t deny that some people feel they do indeed have an interest) in using animals for our purposes must get out of the way of the interest of nonhumans in living a subjectively meaningful and inherently valuable life. In other words, I shouldn’t eat/wear/use animals, even if I want to; I don’t have the right. The moral structure of a right is a boundary—back up off this person, he/she belongs to him/herself.
Thus veganism is, to the dismay of many, a complete surrender of power, at least on one level. At its root lies a new evaluation of our place in this world and our relationships to those we share it with. It resists organization into a hierarchy because it is itself a protest against a form of hierarchy. For vegans to take the tack of people like Martin Balluch and concentrate solely on the struggle between larger institutions, dismissing individual effort as ultimately irrelevant to the goal of animal rights has, whatever the original intent, exactly the same effect as refusing to go vegan because someone else will pick up your slack. There is, as unbelievable as it sounds, a substantive philosophical component to veganism: it is abolition, lived out in everyday life. To say that it is a symbolic protest is in no way to belittle it, but it is more than that: it is living abolition, making yourself proof that another world is possible. If going vegan means laying down one power, surely it entails picking up another: the power of one in the life of one. The smaller we are, the easier it is to remain authentic. The corporatization of the movement backs itself into the corner of fighting hegemony with hegemony. I haven’t the time, and certainly not the desire, to check in with Peter Singer every time I want to effect change on behalf of animals.
I am not going to change the world, no. But I am doing my damnedest to change my world. And the funny thing is, I’m finding out every day (if we want to focus on the numbers) that thousands upon thousands of animals are being killed on behalf of just the people I know. If I believe (and I do, very strongly) that animals are individual beings with interests separate from our own, how am I supposed to believe that they don’t have interests separate from each other? That the 2 or 3 lives I save every day aren’t worth something to the animal who has an interest in continuing it?
Animal liberation – I mean real, substantive change that fundamentally alters the place of nonhumans in our culture – is a zero-sum game. When you tell me that I will not make a difference because I can save only X number of animals, you are forgetting something. You forget that every animal is more than a statistic. Yes, I want the concept of animals-as-property to disappear as a social construct; but in the meantime, I can’t ignore the very individuals who bear the consequences of that idea. We worry so much about missing the forest for the trees that we forget that we aren’t fighting for the rights of trees. We are fighting for the freedom of sentient beings. Sentience, by its very definition, presupposes the existence of an individual self, a unique moral entity. Of course I won’t topple animal exploitation by myself...but how exactly does it follow that I shouldn’t even try? And the point of a truly abolitionist perspective is that this “trying” isn’t merely “making the best of a hopeless game”; it is making a difference in a single life, a life that means literally the world to its holder. That isn’t a failure, of veganism, of vegans, or of abolitionism: it is an affirmation that a single life saved makes a lifetime of individual effort worthwhile.
Go vegan, today. Never forget the value of the one: the value of every new vegan, the value of a single animal's life to itself.
And then, remember not to let anyone do your fighting for you. A great many of the battles are fought not in university lecture halls or in front of fur stores, but at the dinner tables of everyday people, because it is everyday people that know how to reach people they know. The revolution will not come from the top down, but from the ground up. It will move among the people, apart from corporations and companies and trends and traditions. It will unite professors and scholars and priests and salespeople. It will make a theorist out of the commoner and a commoner out of the theorist. It will open your mind and your mouth and your arms to think, to speak and to embrace your fellow beings. The revolution will not be televised, because people are switching the channel. It’s going straight to home video, where it effects real transformation, here and now.
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