If you’ve not been checking Vegans of Color, you’re missing some great, often brief, posts on topics of interest to all people of color, vegan or not. The most recent post, expanding on previous comments on white, vegan centering of themselves to struggles, is sharp. The propensity of whites to assume alliances because of shared eating/lifestyle is acknowledged, as is the pressure on people of color to identify as vegans over every other aspect of our lives. Anarchist people of color will realize this sounds like a shared experience. The piece concludes:

The very idea that one should ignore the impact of markers such as class, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc. is completely repugnant. Clearly this viewpoint is steeped in deep, unthinking privilege. It is no secret that a lot of people of color, for instance, are put off animal rights issues because of racism & colonialism in the movement. Women are put off when they see veganism used to encourage women to hate their bodies.

None of these critical issues are going to go away. They are all interconnected. To claim to be able to pull one strand, one lone form of oppression, away from the whole tangle, & to hold it up as the One Thing Worth Fighting For? Naive at best, & damned offensive & dangerous at worst.

Reading this, one considers the fury often directed by whites at anarchists of color — those people of color who hold revolutionary, anti-authoritarian values, but won’t divorce themselves from the realities of other oppressed people and take scorn almighty for it. There are always a few such “comrades” who “get it,” but largely people of color who can’t stop being people of color face the kind of verbal, psychological, emotional clubbing from “good” whites that we are all too used to seeing and experiencing. And they wonder why we feel tired of them and their racist attitudes…

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