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

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If we aren’t organising around the human-animal divide we aren’t focused on the root of the problem. Aphro-ism was a digital space dedicated to critical thinking, intellectual conversations, and probing essays centering on decolonial feminism, veganism, animals, and anti-racism. Even when we “acknowledge that racial oppression exists and may even think it’s bad, in fact some might even experience racial oppression first hand, but in vegan/animal rights spaces and in vegan/animal rights organising they believe it should be all about the animals. Many of the arguments made against academia and critical theory include the reality that some people are trying to tangibly survive while academics sit writing think pieces. She is the co-editor of The Praxis of Justice in an Era of Black Lives Matter and served as the Associate Producer for the documentary film Always in Season.

Let's use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. It is at the forefront of new and needed systems of thinking, moving on from intersectionality as a technique to afrofuturism as a practice and model for the future. The Ko sisters are simply on a much higher intellectual plane than I, and as such I really struggled with some of the concepts discussed in the book.She is co-author with her sister, Syl Ko, of Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. People assume differences must be bad or divisive because we’ve always served up differences within hierarchical logic. The essays in APHRO-ISM explore critical theory in ways I find somewhat more accessible than a lot of critical theory out there.

Unfortunately, intersectionality doesn't really trouble the systems looming over us that we never created.This discussion often focuses on the sensitivities of oppressed groups - are we upsetting or offending anyone - which is a valid question. It also includes rituals that are perceived as distanced from nature, something as simple as eating at a table instead of on the floor. Often, people advocating against their own oppression are confronted with the assertion that the issues they raise are exaggerated, misunderstood, or not real, the implication being that their bias stems from the same weaknesses—the same inferiority—which they assert to be false. She also contributed a short essay about race and animal oppression in the first African American Vegan Starter Guide.

Aphro-ism introduced an entirely new-to-me philosophy that goes beyond intersectionality and asks us to examine how we view the entire structure that's been firmly in place by the dominant class (ie straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender men) for centuries. Society has recently agreed for the most part to care about black people when they die (at least we are outraged and upset for the cases that grace our newspapers) but does it care about them when they live. Accessible and timely, Aphro-ism challenged my conceptions of veganism and introduced me to new ways of decolonized, anti-racist thought. Many intersectional movements assume liberation rests in finding newer intersections of oppression and creating new terms to add to the lexicon of oppression. for how our collective liberation movements can be more inclusive and tackle the root of oppression moving forward.But maybe racial thinking actually means to judge beings differently based on their race, rather than simply to acknowledge race? You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.