Reclaiming the Animal: A Black Vegan Critique.

Scrolling through Instagram, I land on the feed of @myepiphany. She’s a stunning Black woman, a millennial mom, and vegan. Her page overflows with gorgeous pictures of travel, fashion, poise, and a very cute toddler. But then, a photo appears of her in a lavish fur coat, standing before a rack of furs. The caption says: Minding and growing my business all 2019. The backlash is instant:

This is essentially an entire forest… absolutely heartbreaking… using fur for vanity feels like trophy hunting. #Hypocrisy #RespectTheEarth

Black commentators, including ms. epiphany herself, were rushing to clarify that veganism and plant-based living aren’t the same. Without further clarification, they seem to suggest that plant-based is a health-focused lifestyle, while veganism is ethical. Then, my eyes falls on a particular comment: White people care about animals more than they care about Black people.  I have heard and read this many times before. And although I get it, I don't think it captures the problem. This contradiction says more about the ways racial bias distorts who is recognized as deserving of empathy in the white gaze, rather than about genuine concern for animals. But, above all, must white people's arbitrary sense of compassion really dictate how we care about animals and the world? The discourses at play illustrate a deeper tension, and it’s something recurring in our community. We’ve internalized a lot. Some of us might distance ourselves from other Black people, thinking that proximity to our own communities diminishes our claim to humanity in the eyes of white society. I feel like such logics of "internalized racism" can be extended into the non-human realm. In that sense, internalized racism could look like claiming "black people don't hike", or "veganism is for white people". And those of us who have embraced a vegan diet, advocate a health-only veganism while perpetuating the structural harm against animals. I have come to believe that many of us feel threatened in our emotions towards the non-human ecosystems around us. Especially animals. Some of us have come to believe, however subconsciously, that distancing ourselves from animals will affirm our human legitimacy in a white-supremacist world. As if staying away from animals, mistreating them even, will show white people that we are nothing like them. Let’s call this phenomenon anti-animality. It is the notion that proximity to animals delegitimizes our humanity as Black people. But the thing is, race is a social construct. And so is the human-animal divide. Both were created by the same colonial and white supremacist knowledge system. Animality and Racism Colonial narratives cast Black bodies as "closer to animals than humans," justifying violence and stripping dignity. In the words of Aph Ko, cruelty often targets bodies relegated to the category of animal, rendering them unworthy of moral consideration. This zoological racism lies at the heart of white supremacist logic, where exploitation extends seamlessly from Black bodies to non-human ones. The work of sisters Aph and Syl Ko's reframes the human–animal boundary, not as a given, but as a tool of domination. Their framework of Black veganism refuses the exclusionary "all about the animals" myth. It insists that racial justice and animal liberation are co-constitutive struggles, not separate spheres. That makes it possible - logical even - to be (pro-)Black and vegan. And to be vegan for human and animal liberation, not just for health purposes. This veganism-blackness binary isn't merely cultural, but has deep roots in Western thought. Philosophers from Kant to Hegel insisted (white) humans were rational, animals mere automatons. And although they have fundamentally shaped western thought, thinkers began to contest that artificial boundary, showing how similar and interwoven life across species - including across human "races" -  truly is. In the contemporary legal realm, scholar Paulina Siemieniec advocates a centering animality approach, i.e. to recognize non-human animals not just as property or a mirror of human personhood, but as carriers of their own subjecthood. This model reframes liberation and grants animals rights-bearing status, not by making them human, but by decentering the human altogether. A Decolonial Call to Black Vegans Black veganism, as envisioned by Aph and Syl Ko, is not about assimilation into white paradigms of animal advocacy, but about dismantling oppressive binaries, including racialized ones. It rejects the idea that loving and caring for animals is a "white thing," or that a Black identity requires abandoning compassion for or closeness to animals. Black veganism is a radical, decolonial act reclaiming the animal, and freeing it from white-supremacist imaginary. It means solidarity across species and systems of oppression. To dismantle the human-animal divide is to dismantle the same ideological foundations that uphold anti-Blackness.