Thread by @_CarolJAdams

This is a second thread for #white #vegans & #animalrights activists who recognize we are often the problem in the way we articulate issues having to do with the other animals. What if white privilege has influenced the way we have framed issues around veganism and animal rights?

This is a part of journal entry from the early 1980s when I was involved in a very difficult battle around integrated housing and racism. I wrote “Racists who do not see that they are being racist. If this is true as a paradigm—racists do not see racism...

...what is there about me that is racist but I fail to see it?"
I tried to learn a methodology for confronting that racism that goes unacknowledged: Assume your own ignorance & if you have received feedback that something you said or did or endorsed was racist—hear the critique.

If you can’t even think yourself to a new perspective because you have surrounded ourselves with people who think as you do? How do you know that you don’t know? You could start with "Why I am no longer talking to white people about race: bloomsbury.com/us/why-im-no-l…

Reni Eddo-Lodge writes "Those who perceive every critique of white-dominated politics to be an attack on them as a white person are probably a part of the problem." Think about it, there is a reason the documentary on #vegansofcolor is called "The Invisible Vegan" @InvisibleVegan

@InvisibleVegan Eddo-Ldoge writes, "Support looks like white advocacy for anti-racist causes in all-white spaces. White people, you need to talk to other white people about race." This includes in #vegan & #animalrights spaces. Who is absent from the vegan table and why?

@InvisibleVegan Reni-Lodge also says white people should intervene "when you are needed in bystander situations." Somewhere we should be talking about the way social media has enabled racist white vegans to attack #vegansofcolor for raising the issue of #whitesupremacy in the movement.

@InvisibleVegan Or turn to "What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question." There is alot to challenge us as we try to be anti-racist whites. routledge.com/What-White-Loo… #whitevegansdealingwithourwhiteprivilege

@InvisibleVegan This book, "What White Looks LIke," edited by George Yancy is so profound, and I have underlined so many sentences, to make sure I return to them and ponder them. In the Introduction, George Yancy writes, "One can cease to cooperate with structures of white power; cease to ...

@InvisibleVegan ... perform white racist acts; &, hence, help to dismantle structures of white power." Where in the #animalrights & #vegan movements do we find such structures? Because they're there. Yancy says we have been seduced by #whiteness--& let's be truthful, we have. It gives us power.

@InvisibleVegan Yancy also writes, "One way of challenging whiteness is to interrogate its ontology, its being, as expressed through its imperial & hegemonic gaze. Indeed, such a challenge is designed to critique the representational power of whiteness." #whitevegansdealingwithourwhiteprivilege

@InvisibleVegan "The representational power of whiteness" is so key. How is #veganism represented by #vegans? I was asked to blurb a book that was designed to help people go vegan & it was filled with photos of people serving & eating food. 98% of the photos were white. I said that was a problem

@InvisibleVegan Lord, Yancy says so much that applies to #vegan and #animalrights activism: "The black, within the social space of whiteness, does not constitute a radical Otherness, but an always already pre-interpreted thing." We who challenge the making of animals things, fail to see this.

@InvisibleVegan So, just to bring this to a close tonight, When we consider the vast majority of those who have murdered multiple individuals—white supremacists attacking African Americans, Jewish, Latinx, & Muslim citizens; antiabortionists killing medical doctors; ...

@InvisibleVegan ...homophobes &transphobes killing LGTBIA people; and husbands who exterminate their entire family—one common characteristic prevails: most are white men. The failure to label these men as terrorists reveals the resilience of the dominant conceptualization about who is a citizen—

@InvisibleVegan ...still, the white man—and who is not. It shows, as well, the danger of holding to a prevailing stereotype that favors one group of (white male) citizens. Activists are labeled terrorists, & terrorists, the everyday kind, the ones shooting up campuses and churches are not.

@InvisibleVegan So, to come full circle: listen & read. If you haven't heard @sistahvegan on "White Fragility" there is no time like the present. sistahvegan.com/2016/04/20/vid… #whitevegansdealingwithourwhiteprivilege