By Chief Yuri
White vegans focus too heavily on their performative activism, with no plan for real change.
“Anonymous for the Voiceless” and “Cube of Truth” events are some of the most liberal protests I have ever witnessed.
Events like these force poor and working-class people to watch traumatizing videos of animal slaughter and animal abuse. This is meant to shame everyone that walks by these public protests, as if the ongoing violence is the individual’s fault.
Veganism is the active effort to remove all animal products and byproducts from your personal lifestyle. However, performative activism makes the vegan activist feel like they have accomplished something more than only spreading videos of animal abuse.
Some white vegans might argue that they are changing minds and starting a conversation, but guilt shaming people does nothing for the animals suffering in slaughterhouses!
For example, even if vegans increase from 1% to 5% of the population, mass-scale animal abuse will not be stopped.
Factory Farming is a Colonial Concept
Animal abuse, mass slaughtering and the intentional breeding and killing of animals is tied to the capitalist-imperialist economy of the united snakes of amerikkka. These bodies of animals, conscious beings, have been turned into a item to be sold for profit.
This process of exploiting innocent beings is not new to the white colonizer and the white power capitalist economy.
For centuries, europeans have practiced destructive profit-making and exploitation. Everywhere the colonizer goes, every land they “discover”, is immediately rid of all its natural resources and infested with foreign contaminants.
The land and its people are looted to make the colonizers wealthy.
Colonialism invades our lands, destroys our ecosystem, and destroys entire civilizations. These crimes are done for the benefit of the white ruling class and the comfort of the white working class.
Colonialism is much worse than the mass factory farming and slaughtering of animals.
Factory farming is a european invention and therefore a colonial concept. No civilized human would think to raise an animal in complete darkness surrounded by their own feces and the rotting corpses of their family members.
Materialist Veganism vs White Veganism
Materialist veganism is the synthesis of veganism and decolonization. It means understanding the difference between:
- The colonizer’s culture of eating meat harvested from an abused body raised to be killed, and
- the first nations communities, which depend on hunting for survival.
A variety of indigenous people are hunters. To this day, many native people hunt for their food as a form of survival and a continuation of traditional ways of life.
Materialist veganism is against imperialism, colonialism, amerikkkan/european hegemony and also against the violence inflicted on billions of animals by these same violent forces.
In contrast, white veganism believes that everyone must remove all meat from their diet, and that it’s good to shame Indigenous people or poor Black and colonized working people for eating meat to survive.
The white vegan is ignorant of the history of colonialism which removes people from their ancestral land and blocks their path to self-determination.
Veganism should never mirror the actions of the colonizer, and vegans should never feel comfortable criticizing colonized people.
White veganism is convincing yourself that your lifestyle choices are the correct ones, and everyone else should follow suit.
Vegans need to understand that their efforts are useless if they are not actively fighting the capitalists who own the factory farms and who benefit from the slaughter of animals.
Vegans must unite with the Black and colonized working class to destroy the empire which slaughters us and the animals we wish to liberate.
They must become materialist vegans.
A Revolutionary Path to Decolonize Veganism
The colonizer vegan is familiar with mass scale cruelty and murder because it mirrors the history of european colonization.
Poor and working-class colonized people don’t have the time to budget monthly for a vegan lifestyle. Colonized people are not worried about the factory farms that are purposefully hidden from public view.
We are worried about our lives and communities.
Do not shame us for eating meat, eggs and milk — we do not have the access you have to faux animal products, let alone jobs to sustain us.
Fighting for animal liberation is an essential part of my own revolutionary path, but removing the colonial aspects from my vegan activism is essential.
I refuse to allow liberalism to infest such a vital part of my life. I know animals are capable of feeling pain, sorrow and fear. Still, this does not give me the right to impose my lifestyle on communities and people fighting for their life and survival.
Fighting for animal liberation must be organized and thought-out.
You cannot be vegan for the animals while being a colonizer toward the people.
The continual violence of factory farming and animal abuse are symptoms of colonialism and imperialism.
Defeating imperialism is the most effective way of ending animal cruelty. We must return land to its rightful stewards and remove the white colonizer from power.
That is how I fight for animal liberation.
Land back!
Black Power!
Thank you.
Such a concise understanding of what are prerogatives should be!!
Discussing factory farming and animal abuse without talking about colonialism/imperialism is futile!