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“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”, Audre Lorde once said.
Veganism has become a movement that constantly grows. More and more people embrace its values, make different food choices and change their habits. There are also many people who take part in street activism or through social media try to inform others on the lives of non-human animals.
Veganism is about animals. However, as a movement that exists for the animals but is created by humans, it also affects human lives. The human world is quite complicated functions on interlinked systems of oppression. Speciesism is one of them.
Veganism in an Oppressive World is about all those connections that exist around us. The book’s editor, Julia Feliz Brueck, and all its other contributors support the idea that we cannot effectively dismantle speciesism if we do not understand the relations between veganism and the rest of society.
The book explains why the vegan movement needs to be intersectional and inclusive and also why this should also happen with other social justice movements. In a way, it is an introduction to Consistent Anti-Oppression.
A very important aspect of the book is that it is the collective work of people who are very often silenced inside our community. People with afroamerican, hispanic, pakistani, indian descent all contribute with essays, interviews and their personal experiences. Voices that are usually absent from the vegan discourse, offer a different perspective on issues we (thought we) knew all about.
Through their experiences, one can learn about issues that are often omitted or actually distorted by the mainstream white veganism. Many of these are the reasons that people who do not belong to the dominant Western culture tend to distance themselves from mainstream veganism as they feel unsafe and unwelcome.
Through the intersectional lens, the book examines the different overlaps of identity in vegan community and the role they play in our vegan and non-vegan relationships.
The book’s goal (as well as this blog’s goal) is to connect the dots between different systems of oppression in order to be able to recognize them and build a world without them. Veganism in an Oppressive World offers the first tools for a vegan intersectional analysis. Maybe it is time to start working with them?
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