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

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Aphro-ism is a revolutionary tool for holistic anti-oppression work that can benefit both grassroots activists and academic scholars. Incredibly well-written, you will fly by chapter after chapter (broken down into essays) faster than you think and notice your perceptions immediately altered afterwards in the ways in which you view racial human to human and human to nonhuman relations. Humanity vs animality; these descriptions are part of a hierarchy where anything “animal” is valued less, and Aph and Syl discuss how it’s a racialised system.

In 2010, I published SISTAH VEGAN, which was a collection of articles, poems, and essays by a number of black-identified female vegans.Since racism requires this notion of animality, since racism and race-thinking would fail to make sense without animality, those of us interested in resisting or combatting racism need to take seriously why the status of “the animal” is what it is. This difference is a functional device, and only showing similarities (through philosophy, or (social) sciences) between races and humans and animals will thus never be sufficient for facilitating the liberation of the latter by the former. This book isn’t about race or veganism, per se—the book is about the perspectives of black veganism, a construct which they describe. Their feminist sensibilities encourage a deconstruction of Eurocentric understandings of race and species that changes the terms of debates about both.

Author Aph Ko, states in the opening of this book, that she and co-author, Syl Ko, intended for "Aphro-ism" to read like “an intellectual journal between two sisters” and that is exactly what it feels like. But who are the people who decided that actions that are perceived as distanced from nature are what makes us human?Aphro-ism is helping countless young, hungry critical thinkers navigate through a world of ‘isms,’ make sense of endless contradictions, and come out the other side as more well-equipped, effective, woke activists. Over the last few years the discussion has entered mainstream vegan spaces - is it okay to compare factory farming to the Holocaust? I belong to a mixed-race animal rights community in Chicago (Direct Action Everywhere) and bought several copies to share with community members who are all raving about it. The dominant thought is: If we just show more minoritized faces in the white marketplace, then progress is being made. My favorite is the concept of animality that they bring in and how it is contingent upon white supremacy, racism, and speciesism.