Minority vegans

[TopoGigio]

If being Vegan is not hard enough for the average person; imagine being a Vegan while being of a certain ethnic minority living in a Western country.

Are there are Vegans in here who are ethnically in the minority? I personally don't think there are such thing as ''races'' but that doesn't change the fact that in this day and age we are still going to get treated differently..... something of a catch-22.

If you identify yourself as a minority, how do you feel you fit in the larger vegan community? Do vegans in your area treat you any better than carnists?

 

[Forest Nymph]

I am not a minority in any appreciable way ( there are traces of Ashkenazi Jews, and the Shawnee native American tribe in my blood line not qualifying as "at least one half parent" that is required to be considered anything but Caucasian in the US which seems strangely racist in it's erasure of ancestry) ...But I know a Latina woman who has been vegan for sixteen years and there seem to be a lot of African American vegans recently. Jewish people who survived the Holocaust or whose parents/grandparents died there are actually more likely to be vegetarian than "whites." Three of Peter Singers grandparents died in a concentration camp.

I do think it would add a level of alienation to racial struggles, yet I don't think veganism is remotely common in the American South where I was born. It's likely whites in California, Oregon or New York, or upper middle class whites that are stereotyped as vegan.

 

[TopoGigio]

Yes, in the US. Even though the concept of "veganism" is a Western one, a large % of people (in the world) who adhere to a plant-based are not white; e.g. rastafarians, a significant % of buddhists in throughout East-Asia, Jainists, etc... the most common vegan dishes out there come from "exotic" places...where would Vegans be without the cuisine from the rest of the world? lol

But when you are in a Western country and you do not have a "white" skin tone people seem to make a big deal of the fact that we are not what they expected.... that's something Vegan communities need to work on, to want to look more inclusive... just saying.