UC Berkeley Talk Part II: Queen Afua and Race-Gender Conscious Veganism

Part II: This the first part of a talk I gave at UC Berkeley, Nov 16, 2011. I read content from my dissertation in progress. I focus on what an Afrocentric vegan practice looks like, through the eyes of Afua, who feels that black female's womb health can only be decolonized through a khemetic vegan diet.


Last night I spoke at UC Berkeley, and explained the Afrocentric approach to veganism that is race-gender conscious, decolonial, and revolutionary black feminist. I did this because I wanted to explain that there are more than just Eurocentric philosophical 'ethics' behind why some people choose veganism. By Eurocentrism, I mean the philosophical canon of 'ethics and animals' that dominate the mainstream academic literature in the USA. While Eurocentric philosophy focuses on the 'ethics' of non-human animal consumption and non-human animal exploitation, Afrocentric veganism (through Queen Afua) focuses on how veganism becomes a decolonial tool against the unethical abduction and enslavement of Africans and the institutional of chattel slavery; an unethical institution that took away their original plant-centered dietary philosophy and "forcing" them to eat a carnicentric diet. This is what a vegan methodology of the racially oppressed can look like! Video of talk and Q&A :

If you comment in a way that is obvious you didn't watch the video, but are "annoyed" that I am looking at race, whiteness, and decolonial theories as a way to understand vegan consciousness, I will not post your comments. For me, it simply doesn't make sense to receive passive aggressive comments from people who don't know anything about my work, haven't watched the video, but then feel like they are "experts" on the subject matter and then wish to "educate" me about my "incorrect" 4+ years of dissertation research and 35 years of racialized-gendered bodily experience as a black female in the USA. If it's not enough that I have been "educated" at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and now University of California, learned how to engage in qualitative research, and document ongoing themes in vegan cultural practices (themes that are influenced by race, class, gender, whiteness, neoliberalism), then what more can I offer? (I'm being funny with educated in quotations, because of the mainstream assumption that if you just "educate" non-white folk through the "proper" Western university educational system, they will "assimilate" and agree with the perceptions of the white middle class status quo. But if they don't, they must simply be 'irrational' and 'angry', and must be "educated more")

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Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• Queen Afua
• veganism
• breeze harper
• sistah vegan
• decolonial
• decolonizing the womb

[sistahvegan]

Thanks! Thank you for watching this. I can't wait until I file and am done with this dissertation! Been working on it for 4 years now.

I want to focus more on fatphobia, sizeism, and social constructions of 'health' in my next project... not sure when that will be, but hopefully I can pursue that as a professor next year.

Best,

Breeze

[kushiteprince]

@TalmedgeTheHypnotist Hater?? Wrong again. I'm just a man who stands on my principles. And wont be swayed. I assume if I were to say homosexuality was a beautiful expression of love--you would say I'm kind and open minded,right? I'll pass. I'll stay true to my own convictions and what I believe is normal behavior. I wont let the media dictate to me what is "normal". If you see that has "hating",so be it.

[kushiteprince]

@TalmadgeTheHypnotist What white/Jewish controlled media does is suppress opinion that don't agree with them. I'm doing no such thing. People can post and disagree with me all they want. It's an open forum. So you're the one that's way off base.

[TalmadgeTheHypnotist]

@kushiteprince A common trait of the white imperialistic paradigm you are so against, is the need to dominate a conversation and the need to be right. Your comments are nothing more than you forcing your opinions and frame of references on others without even the slightest consideration that you may be off base. Congratulations, it looks like you've adoptedthe white, patriarchal imperialistic paradigm of forcing a belief and reality on other. You've become that which you hate.

[kushiteprince]

Homosexuality then becomes

innocent, without a peculiar, conscious intent. In fact, the

problem comes to be with those who critique sexual deviance or do

not participate in it because they are obviously socially retarded,

sexually repressed or both.

[kushiteprince]

With this discovery,

fault for the homosexual sexstyle, whether blamed on individual

insanity or cultural peculiarity, cannot be leveled at its

practitioners because they are only doing what man naturally does.

There is then nothing to critique or correct or dismiss because it

is what humans have always done.

[kushiteprince]

This reasoning is obviously much less complicated thanit has

been made to seem. If you can make homosexuality Afrikan, you make

it human. Then it becomes a biological tendency, not a socially or

environmentally learned behavior. Then, and only then, the cultural

genes of Europeans lose their peculiarity.

[kushiteprince]

And this is the key to understanding why Europeans are driven to

homosexualize traditional Afrikan society. It is the political

force driving European male homosexuals, effeminates, their

sympathizers and Afrikan clones to surreptitiously plant

homosexuality in the soil of traditional Afrikan culture.

[kushiteprince]

@virtualgotogirl For the record,I don't hate anyone. Spending your life hating someone doesn't allow you to enjoy life. I'm a Pan-Afrikanist,therefore my beliefs are based on the survival of my people. Solidarity is great. But with who? Are black people supposed to embrace all Europeans? The very same people who are landgrabbing Africa as we speak. The Europeans who are spreading homosexuality all throughout South Africa.

[kushiteprince]

@virtualgotogirl Most of the articles I find about "homosexual Africa" is usually written by whites or homosexuals. Sometimes by phony black authors who have been paid off by the establishment. Why do white authors want Africa to be seen just as homosexual crazed as Europe? So they can claim that homosexuality was "normal" in all cultures. Sounds like an agenda to me. Sorry,I'm not buying it. To embrace homosexuality is to embrace genocide. You can't convince me otherwise.

[kushiteprince]

Homosexuality and pedophilia spread along with

European imperialism, as a natural expression of the unbound aggression of

missionaries, traders, diplomats, and military personnel who already embraced

that sexual persuasion. It was not limited to a particular group of the invaded

countries or kept away from certain continents being overrun by the European

hordes. During our enslavement in this society, homosexuals were as much

present with the "liberal" North as the "conservative" South.