The importance of the body in this equation cannot be overlooked. The body shows me decay (or growth) where I most fear it. Ultimately, my body is simply a map of where I’ve come from. Quite literally, it is the trail of my electrons coursing, racing, and whirling through space - what my eyes see is the trace of where they’ve been. I ran ten miles; I ate wheat; I skinned my knees, and experienced pleasure, pain, love, and birth. My body remembers all of these things, even when I am not reflecting on them.  The body remembers experiences once endured and actions once taken, things I am capable of because I have once done them.

This is why recognizing ourselves as beautiful is in some ways more powerful than recognizing that we can be “good”. To love my body is to reconcile with where I have been and thus what I am capable of. By appreciating myself, and what I capable of, and hence knowing the roads I don’t take in spite of that capability, only then does my current action became a choice. Only then may it be called good or bad. Without choice, judgement has no value. It is meaningless to call something “good” or “bad” that simply is. Only that which is chosen can be said to be chosen out of compassion or cruelty.

Thus,recognizing that our bodies are beautiful becomes a powerfully political act, a celebration of compassion directed toward the self. And this is what is behind the Black woman’s love of her body, which is so present in the ethos of contemporary Black culture. It is imperative that we love our own bodies *and* that we love other’s bodies in their diversity. Ultimately, loving people for who they are should never be about disregarding the body - but about embracing it.

Journey Toward Compassionate Choice: Intergrating Vegan and Sistah Experience.
By Tara Sophia Bahna-James in the Sistah Vegan anthology by Breeze Harper. 

In the spring of 2005, after attending and volunteering at my first animal-rights conference, I found myself or the first time with vegan friends and an awareness of a larger, multi-dimensional vegan community. Yet, as my enthusiasm for this new lifestyle, philosophy, and community grew, I could not help but realize that the most vocal skepticism I encountered came from my other female, Black-identified friends.

One friend made the connection that often veganism meant having the luxury of enough time and money to go out of one’s way and engage in specific, harder-to-find consumer choices; a prerequsite that makes assumptions about class and privilige that are largely at odds with the more mainstream Black experience. Another,more financially succesful Black friend has been put of by hearing vegans making ethical arguments that analogized animal agriculture to slavery. Still another friend, whom I watched go from childhood in the projects to a law school by the sweat of her own brow, couldn’t help but interpret what I said as though someone was asking her to sacrifice after all she’d been through. And though I’m committed to veganism, I don’t necessarily disagree with their arguments. I still feel I can see where these friends are coming from, simply because I know where they’ve been.

Outside the Vegan Box.
 
As I talked to these women I realized that my feelings for them didn’t amount to having forgiveness while I waited patiently for them to change their minds; rather it amounted to having respect for the fact that they were in the middle of a process of intergrating their own experience, just as I was in the process of intergrating mine. I am not uncommitted to my cause, but I didn’t need for them in particular to change their minds. Nor did I fear that the difficult, honest conclusions they had come to (about what was right for them) would alter mine or sway me from my own.

Diversity, the different needs and opinions of an infinite number of individuals, was for me, a fact of life. If there were an underlying truth, it would have to be big enough to encompass *all* of our experiences, natures, and inalienable rights:mine, theirs, *and* the animals. And my faith that such truth does exist is what kept me from desperately wanting to impose my particular piece of the puzzle on those honest quests to discern their own.

It wasn’t until I started to deconstruct my lifelong releationships with these women and to understand that my acceptance of their nonvegan choices was born out of appreciation for their divinity, and their journey towards embracing that divinity, that I came to understand my strangeness in the context of what I felt had been outlined for me as the larger vegan movement.

This strangeness wouldn’t come up oftenm but it would always rear its head when, in an attempt to explain how one tolerates living in a nonvegan world, someone would say something likem “If I could just force all the people in the world to stop eating meat right now I would, but I can’t.” This has always stopped me in my tracks to pose the question mentally to myself: “If I could *force* everyone to stop eating meat, would I?” And the answer came back invariably, “No”.

I’ve never been fond of hypothetical questions. I think they are a big distraction created by debate-minded folk to take the heat off of what people can actually do in the world. We think we know how we feel of what we would do in seemingly cut-and-dried situations, but we really have no way of knowing. Still, this is one question haunts me because of its far reaching implications. If the question came to me as “If you could *encourage* or *influence* everyone in the world to stop eating meat, would you?” I beleive you’d be able to say, “Yes”. But in the more common phrasing of the question lurks a condition I cannot abide. Forcing sentient beings to behave in a particular way - especially with regard to their own bodies - is always wrong; and although as a vegan I can see the connection between my nonvegan friend’s purchase andthe financial support of an unspeakably cruel institution, I do not have the right to usurp her decision-making in this regard *nor would I want to*. Any prayer or dream for mind control and world domination, even a benevolent, hypothetical one, only perpetuates the cycle of domination and oppression the vegan lifestyle seeks to end.

To my mind, the cause ought not to be to end slaughter, but to end the cycle that causes people to choose it. Fight ignorance, fight deception, fight self-loathing, fight fear of the other, be a witness to the truth as you have experienced it- reject the inevitability of that unspoken social contract - and in doing such, empower people to make compassionate choices for themselves.

Journey Toward Compassionate Choice: Intergrating Vegan and Sistah Experience. Tara Sophia Bahna-James in the Sistah Vegan anthology.

I grew up in the working class in a blue-collar town. Since my teenage years, I have been a fervent literary activist when it comes to antiracism, anticlassism, and antisexism. However, I was never able to understand how eco-sustainability, animal rights, and plant-based diets could be integral to my work. I honestly thought that these issues were the domain of the privileged white middle and upper class people of America. Sure, it was easy for them, I had thought with ignorance and prejudice. Race and class struggle is not a reality for them, so they can “waste” their time on saving dolphins, whining about recycling cans, and preserving Redwood trees while my Black and brown brothas continue to be denied “human rights” because of the color of our skin. It has been only in the past several years that I realized that eco-sustainability, nonhuman animal rights, plant-based diets, and human rights are inextricably linked to each other. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it has been the tone and delivery of the message—via the white class-privileged perspective—that has been offensive to a majority of people of color and working-class people in America.

Excerpt of Sistah Vegan, by Breeze Harper of Vegans of Color Blog, in the Scavenger

I’m loving this.

It may be true, hell it is true, that ‘green’ eating advice can be inaccessible to so many people that it sounds elitist. That said, people whose only comment on food ethics is obvious criticisms of food security activists as elitist are, imo, even worse than those they criticize if they have enough wealth to eat well themselves. It’s the obvious criticism of those who - in the abscence of a perfect, easy, ‘one size fits all’ solution - resort to avoidance, cynicism and cheap shots over engagement.

Please note: I’m saying this about people who have some wealth and choice around food ethics, not those criticizing genuine exclusion in veganism and nutrition generally due to poverty and prejudice.

I bet that most people currently excluded from healthy, satisfying eating by their budgets, dominant food markets, allergies and the emotional muckheap of food moralism, would love to be well nourished.

It’s because I come from poverty, that I prioritize food ethics. To starve and be called “dumb” for the hunger fatigue that makes you fall asleep in class, then see your peers spend a days food budget on Cosmo magazines telling them how to eat less, was a formative “yes” moment for me about class, race, food and whose nourishment is stigmatized in what ways and why. [I’m white, but my hunger was at least kept private at home, Aboriginal girls were made to take ‘charity food’ publicly at my high school while white girls from middle classed homes…well, you know, bulimia and fashion mags and mum teaching them to diet]

I’m excited by people like Breeze who take intiatives to make good eating relevant to people beyond elites, rather than sit back and pretend it’s some grand class and race levelling liberal enlightenment to write those people out of food ethics entirely.