By: NewNaturalista

What does it mean to be a black women who doesn’t eat meat?

Is it necessary to point out race when talking about this life choice? PhD candidate and author A. Breeze Harper says absolutely. Harper delves deep into this topic in her recently released anthology “Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, And Society.”

In the book, Harper looks at whether the choice of becoming a vegan is directly influenced by race, class, sexual orientation and social injustices. It’s a topic that cuts right to the core of food consumption and our relationship with health, human and animal rights.

NewNaturalista was fortunate enough to catch up with Harper before her book tour to shed some light on this powerful anthology.

NewNaturalista: You initially received some resistance when coming up with the idea of Sistah Vegan. Some felt that race should not be distinguished when talking about veganism. What has been the response since the book release?

A. Breeze Harper: I have received nothing but positive responses from people. I am getting quite a few emails from women who have told me that they were not able to make the link of non-human animal oppression, diet, human social justice, and environmental sustainability UNTIL they picked up the book. Quite a few have told me that they were only eating a plant-based diet for health reasons, but hadn’t quite made the conceptual leap to linking it to certain issues such as animal rights, environmental racism, or decolonial politics. I’ve been told that Sistah Vegan helped them make these links.

NewNaturalista: What are some discoveries you made while compiling stories of black vegan women for the book?

Harper: Well, I was pleased, but not surprised, that the contributors are not a monolith and that even though we do identify as black women, we are very unique and have come to veganism through different life experiences. Some came to it because of fibroid tumors, some came to it because they were sickened by how non-human animals were treated as “food” for human beings, others came to it as an extension of their spiritual practices. I think what is most impressive is that so many of the contributors, including myself, were greatly affected by the love and wisdom of raw foodist (and woman of the African Diaspora) Queen Afua. So many of us first learned about connections to our womb health and food through Queen Afua.

Visitors of the Washington, DC Sistah Vegan Book Signing

NewNaturalista: From your view, why is nutritional liberation an integral part of understanding the methodology of the oppressed?

Harper: Dr. Chela Sandoval, in her book Methodology of the Oppressed, as well as writer Adama Maweja (www.adamaspeaks), inspired me to understand what oppositional consciousness can potentially look like through the tools or methods of Ahimsa (harmlessness) and plant-based consumption. Though Sandoval does not write about food politics in her book, the theories she uses to engage in “rhetoric of resistance” was a key building block for my own entry into food and health activist writing. Adama Maweja contributed a piece to Sistah Vegan and speaks of how death promoting foods are part of the Methodology of Oppression (that being those who oppress). She writes:

“We have come to a place where people are no longer receiving the food that was ideally suited by virtue of the Intelligence of the vegetation and plant life complementing the genetic inheritance of the people. Instead of receiving foods and herbs found abundantly in the places of our origins, people have been generically educated, sublimated, and commercialized to feed profusely off the flesh of dead animals, the aborted fetuses of chickens, the pus and milk of cows, artificially colored, artificially flavored, artificially sweetened, carbonated beverages, alcoholic beverages, coffee and other caffeinated drinks, tobacco products, cigarettes, chocolate, white sugar, white breads, and other nutrient deficient snack foods, and all manners of other cellularly bastardizing things erroneously called “food” or even more oxymoronic, “junk” foods. As long as those who were birthed as “human” beings continue to poison themselves and their children with those things listed and categorized above, there is very little chance that they will ever walk in the fullness of themselves as truly thinking, caring, living, Intelligences of existence.”

Hence methodology of those who are oppressed, should be rooted in nutritional liberation and life-giving consumption. If the collectivity of black women of the USA have historically to the present been oppressed (racism, sexism, classism), what methodology can we use to fight back? There are many answers to this question, but as someone passionately engaged in the praxis of social justice through consumption, an integration of nutritional liberation in this methodology looks like this to me: what we put on and in our bodies either puts our whole beings (mind, body, soul) on a path of liberation or a path of stagnation/enslavement.

Let’s extend beyond the scale of the body and ask, “How can I contribute to the liberation of my own community if my consumption practices maintain suffering and pain? What does it mean that I’m fighting against racism in my community, but I buy products that are made from brown and black people who are, for example, enslaved in the global South, to harvest cocoa and cane sugar? After all, my black people were forced into slavery so white free people could have access to sugar, tea, chocolate, coffee, etc products several hundreds year ago. What do anti-racist and decolonial praxis look like if I start critically analyzing what role my consumption of Coca-Cola and Nestle have in the spread of globalized racial hierarchies of power and production?

What role does it have in creating heavy bleeding in my uterus or fibroid? ” Many people in the USA may not know it, but Coca-Cola has created (an continues to)horrible human rights violations; in addition, overconsumption of products such as soda and sugary chocolate create disease in our wombs. It gets very complex, but I think if we start integrating nutritional liberation into methodology of oppressed, scale it from mind-body-community-state-nation-globe, we can see how our minds and bodies become interconnected sites of potentially resisting oppression from the micro (body-mind) to the macro (global).

NewNaturalista: In one of your videos you talk about the push back regarding veganism being more about the animals and less about race – how does race come into play for you?

Harper: Major legacies of European colonialism are racialization, racism, and whiteness. It’s not an anomaly; it’s the norm and it manifests in every fabric of society, not just nutrition, food studies, and the environment. I can give several examples. First, the USA’s mainstream perception of life is based on the bodily experiences of straight able-bodied white middle-class people of European descent.

Hence, bestselling books such as Omnivore’s Dilemma and Skinny Bitch actually come from that perspective. I’m not bashing these books, as I know they’ve been very helpful for many people. However, there is an absence of critical reflection of what it means to be white and class privileged and to easily adjust one’s diet to local and sustainable (Pollan) or whole food veganism (Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin). Not that this is Pollan or Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin’s task (to reflect on race and class privilege), but there is a general lack of dialogue around such privilege (or lack there of) and how this impacts one’s access to “healthful” foods- or even how the discourse of “healthful” foods has been constructed.

NewNaturalista: Define “colonized palate.”

Harper: What I mean by this is that when I mention that I am interested in how whiteness, racism, and racialization manifest within vegan praxis, a significant number of white identified people express that these legacies of colonialism have nothing to do with vegan praxis. However, whether people like it or not, we live in a society that is not “post-racial,” just because we have a black president. Many white people who practice veganism talk about how “race doesn’t matter,” in regards to vegan praxis. However, one’s perception of veganism, within the USA, will be deeply connected to each individual’s geopolitical status , racialized consciousness, and racialized socio-spatial epistemic grid.

My focus on white identified vegans/vegetarians and animal rights activists manifested from noticing the overwhelming racially homogenous demographic of the USA based movement. Interestingly, it can be argued that white identified people in the USA are collectively unaware of racism and white domination as an ongoing covert, institutional, and systemic process. Most are simply not given the tools to even understand how racism can manifest; “racism” for most is defined as having a membership with the KKK. Few are literate in the covert manner of which racism and whiteness continue to function int the USA. Furthermore, this ignorance commonly manifests as a “raceless” approach to dealing with the world.

The consequences of an individual’s “lack of color consciousness” approach, in vegansim and animal rights, is the ignoring of the socio-historical context of skin color and the accouterments of white privilege that affect access to, and production of, local and global resources; this includes the resources for vegan products purchased by vegan and animal rights activist in the USA, such as cotton (forced child labor in Uzbekistan), sugar (indentured cane harvesters in Dominican Republic and Haiti), and chocolate (child slavery in Ivory Coast); all which are vegan but are actually harvested by a non-white racialized global workforce who are working in cruel and exploitative ’slave-like’ conditions. Unfortunately, write-offs such as “race doesn’t matter,” all while vegan products are being produced, often by exploiting non-white racialized human beings, is frustrating, challenging, and difficult for many non-white racialized vegan activists who must deal with battling both racism, white privilege, and animal exploitation in their lives.

A. Breeze Harper

I also hope that I can help African American/black women in the USA to integrate a type of nutritional liberation into their lives that works for them. Though practicing veganism works for me, I do not preach or FORCE anyone to do this. I am hoping to compassionately teach women of color about my own experiences without making anyone feel guilty or ashamed for not being some “perfect pure vegan.” I teach love and critical reflection, not self-flagellation or guilt. I hope to continue on this path as both a professor, turning the Sistah Vegan Project into a formalized non-profit, and a writing more books.

A. Breeze Harper holds a Master Degree in Educational Technologies from Harvard University. She’s currently working on her PhD on Intersections of Critical Food Geographies and Critical Race Theory from the University of California. Her book “Sistah Vegan: Food, Identity, Health And Society” is available through amazon.com.

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