As I said before this is an unsafe site for Indigenous people. I’m out. Don’t bother DMing me. I’m scrambling my password and locking myself out of my own account. I’ve grown to care for and trust a lot of you so it’s hard to leave but it is clear that this site isn’t for me. I understand that the world and internet at large is really shitty to vegans so I understand and support the need for a safe space to process your experiences and to practice your dunks. All the best, signing off.
Reposted here since it is invisible where I first posted it. https://hexbear.net/post/94432
As a member of a marginalized community, I don’t think our beliefs or traditions or viewpoint should be held as sacrosanct. We’re humans, with flaws and fucked up-beliefs like anyone else, and nobody is asking for some Disney-style fetishization of POC or indigenous practices or customs.
What I do expect is, an acknowledgement that we may not be fully aware of other groups conditions, that we’ve often been silenced when we speak out and the fact that even attempts to regulate or promote behavior deemed to be more positive has often be applied in ways to suppress. Some tact, and common consideration is all I’m asking for.
Constantly using ham-fisted comparisons and equivocations to the worst atrocities in human history and blithely doubling, tripling, quadrupling (and so on) down after people apart of those groups affected have repeatedly spoken out against it is not consideration and tact.
Presenting a less harmful choice in consumption habits under capitalism as a pillar of leftism and excluding marginalized comrades and dismissing their explanations on why some presuppositions might be inaccurate or reductionist is not consideration and tact.
Depicting your less harmful choice in consumption habits and the pushback you receive as being apart of an ‘oppressed minority’ is not consideration and tact. Vegans have never been systemically hunted down, whipped and hanged from trees for being vegan, have never been forced into conversion camps to surrender their commitment to veganism, have never had their places of gathering torched and looted in pogroms, deported or murdered in droves.
I’m sure there are POC and indigenous among the vegans here with different views. That’s fine, our experiences are far from universal, what matters is that there is a consistent pattern of negative behavior that a very significant amount of the POC and indigenous community here have found very harmful and not without reason, as I’m sure you’ve seen by some examples now.
Veganism is good. It should be promoted.
Just don’t be racist about it and don’t confuse it for being leftist in itself.
I really appreciate this explanation, and I apologize for not seeing this earlier. I grew up as an ethnic minority being “hunted down,” as you say, and so while I originally defended the conflation of oppression of animals to the oppression of minorities, I was mostly thinking about my own marginalized community. So, that said, I apologize for not recognizing the bigger picture that every POC, indigenous, and marginalized community has a wildly different cultural identity and relationship with their past. The usage of slavery, for example, in the argument for veganism triggers a generational trauma that we as leftists should not force on our comrades.
Vegans have never been systemically hunted down, whipped and hanged from trees for being vegan, have never been forced into conversion camps to surrender their commitment to veganism,
Lots of sensible input, and I think we really ought not to compare it to the Shoa or such. As such I will not talk about anything related to that or comparable moments in history, though vegans/vegetarians were in some places and time frames systematically hunted, captured, tortured, and killed. Your argument still holds most weight, but it isn’t necessary to marginalize people who were kileld for not participating in murdering living beings or eating meat.