African American Doctor Depicted as Gorilla at UCLA Event

akagoldfish:

These are actually pretty good questions. Thanks for sending them.

I can’t recall if I’ve ever known a vegan person of color to take the position of veganism as a universal moral imperative position. I’d like to talk to one. Maybe they have a novel argument for that position that avoids the racism implicit in the typical militant vegan argument.

There’s a couple different ways that militant vegans are (unintentionally) racist. I don’t want to overlook those, but you asked specifically about white supremacist logic in veganism so let’s deal with that.

The militant vegan argument defines veganism as a categorical imperative (don’t worry if you haven’t read Kant before, this is the one part of Kant that’s pretty easy to get a handle on). If veganism is morally required no matter how difficult this requirement might be to fulfill, than a person who fails to fulfill this requirement has fallen into moral turpitude. Since the militant vegan considers eating animal products to be literally equivalent to murdering, raping and enslaving humans, this makes anyone who fails to follow a vegan diet morally responsible for heinous atrocities.

Because the ability to follow a vegan diet is closely tied to economic status, and economic status in our society is closely tied to race, and race to structural white supremacy, there is a disproportionate chance that those who are unable to meet the moral requirements of veganism will be people of color (poor white people also get screwed but white-on-white structural violence is a separate issue with its own history to consider).

The militant moralistic vegan argument, like so many other examples of white supremacist rhetoric in western culture, creates a standard that implicitly favors whites via their unearned ambition and social privilege and punishes people of color for their failure to live up to this unfair standard. It assumes equality in an unequal society and ignores the existence of original social difference.

To your second question, Capitalism might be free of some of the “isms” it’s infected with now if you started fresh, but it would always have “isms”. If it didn’t it would invent them. It’s a system for winners to continue being winners. Racism, sexism etc. etc. are convenient ways to maintain that unearned ambition.

Earlier I posted a brief passage about how Europeans didn’t feel justified in enslaving Africans because they believed Africans to be inferior a priori. Rather, the belief in white superiority was invented by early capitalists to justify the exploitation of Africans for cheap labor.

So if capitalism wasn’t racist or sexist or whatever to start with, it would become so as soon as it was profitable.

(Source: ghost-of-algren, via lavenderlabia)