(Posted October 12, 2016) Oddly, before I became vegan around 20 years ago, no one ever challenged me about why I wrote and recorded an anti-racist rap in 1992 titled “The Declaration of Misrepresentation”. People didn’t bombard me with questions of whether I would save a black person or a white person from drowning, or whether I thought blacks were more important than whites. No one asked me why I didn’t write raps condemning sexism, classism or heterosexism because society accepts that it’s always okay to oppose racism - or any other human rights issue - without bringing up other issues of injustice.
Yet, when one chooses to care about cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, etc. - and live a vegan lifestyle - all of a sudden there are a litany of accusations ranging from killing insects in a field to engaging in racist behavior (white privilege). Concerning the latter, since when are rice and beans white-privileged foods? Expensive, pre-processed, packaged vegan meats/milks might be privileged BUT rice, beans, lentils, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, carrots and noodles certainly are not! Poverty-stricken societies, regardless of color, are almost always vegetarian/vegan because the aforesaid items are dirt cheap. This is why the world's largest feed-the-hungry organization - Food for Life Global - feeds millions of hungry people free vegan meals on a daily basis!
Why would any human, poor or rich, black or white, gay or straight, religious or atheist, be allowed to rape, enslave, commodify and murder animals? Why would anyone be exempt from behaving ethically? If poor people aren’t allowed to have human slaves, or rape and murder children, then the animals are off limits, too! I’m also amazed when people claim that poor people are incapable of showing compassion, or that they don’t care about eradicating speciesism. Am I supposed to believe that wealth breeds compassion, and that wealthy people care about issues of injustice? Since rich people run the world, how can wealth lead to morality, compassion and equality?
To prove beyond a reasonable doubt that vegan food isn’t a white-privileged thing, when I was lecturing at the University of Texas-El Paso in 2011, I saw an article about the local chapter of ONE, an international group that fights extreme poverty and has NO links to animal liberation. They challenged 15 students to live on campus for one week on $1.50 per day. Here's the 5th paragraph from the article describing what they ate: "We ended up with a ton of Raman, loaf of bread, apples, beans and rice.” How about that? When you’re broke, hot dogs, cheese, hamburgers, steaks and chicken wings don’t seem to be on the menu!
By the way, are you familiar with the term ‘black privilege’? It’s when black people are allowed to scream racism because a white person won’t excuse their unethical behavior. I'll probably receive a slew of hate email for explaining this unchallengeable fact. Even though black people have been screwed over with impunity for centuries, victims of racism cannot mimic the unethical behavior of their oppressors! Why would victims even want to victimize someone else? Why would black people marginalize, discriminate and dismiss animals as irrelevant in the same vile way that they’ve been marginalized, discriminated against and ignored? Sadly, this proves that ALL humans are nothing but egotistical, selfish, myopic, narcissistic fools. And it’s time that black people understand that they suck just as much as white people, and all the other 2-legged monsters that destroy everything in their paths!
