Aphro-Ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters

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But, what Aph and Syl do in this book is show the importance of thinking through things to liberation. Intersectionality is a wonderful and useful tool to help oppressed folks navigate current systems of oppression that we never created, but it was never designed to map out the future. The Ko sisters make the case that the opposite of white supremacy isn’t the subordination of other humans, but is the subordination of animals. I can’t find the exact wording but Aph and Syl say we have to fight not just for vapid superficial representation, but also for the right to produce knowledge, to create theory, and to rearticulate the way oppression manifests itself. The same arguments we use to disregard hurting nonhuman animals today were used then - they don’t feel pain, don’t have culture, don’t have attachments to each other, don’t understand what is happening to them.

One of the joys of reading is surely to be invited into a world you might otherwise have little knowledge of or not necessarily be privy to.A fascinating examination of how racism and animal rights are intertwined even while most people who work in both philosophical areas intentionally try to keep the two ideas separate. Now, more than ever, is the time to engage in critical thinking and an honest consideration of what is. English is my second language and I took one star off because it's a challenging read: the language is academic and hard to understand at times. Their feminist sensibilities encourage a deconstruction of Eurocentric understandings of race and species that changes the terms of debates about both. Saying “Black people experience racism and, therefore, are treated like animals” is redundant because racism is already entangled with speciesism.

Society has a very vivid idea of what a "human" is, and as such it can justify anything "below" that as an "animal". Aphro-ism was a digital space dedicated to critical thinking, intellectual conversations, and probing essays centering on decolonial feminism, veganism, animals, and anti-racism. Over the last few years the discussion has entered mainstream vegan spaces - is it okay to compare factory farming to the Holocaust? Part of activism is finding yourself in a new space of confusion, allowing yourself to step into new conceptual terrain. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.There is seemingly nothing worse for an activist than being introduced to a new perspective or theory that challenges the way you've been doing things.