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

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Che parla alle persone nere, alla loro comunità ma che andrebbe letto soprattutto dalle persone bianche per iniziare ad essere alleat* attiv* e in ascolto dei nostri fratelli e delle nostre sorelle nere e per abbracciare una volta e per sempre l'antispecismo. She is currently working on a book exploring Wittgensteinian "forms of life" defenses of animal use, taking into account the racialization of the animal.

But maybe racial thinking actually means to judge beings differently based on their race, rather than simply to acknowledge race? Aph and Syl’s brilliant work is laying the groundwork for an exciting new millennial generation of deeply critical and compassionate thinkers, feminists, and activists. As Syl states, "The human-animal divide is the ideological bedrock underlying the framework of white supremacy. In this provocative collection of essays, the two sisters Aph and Syl Ko tackle issues ranging from animal rights and the problems with contemporary vegan movements to the kinds of obstacles facing activists in feminist and anti-racist spheres, demonstrating the interconnectedness and intersectional nature of all of these issues. There’s no better metaphor for the failures of white supremacist capitalism than mortar, since it is the white slime that holds stone together.Aphro-ism introduced an entirely new-to-me philosophy that goes beyond intersectionality and asks us to examine how we view the entire structure that's been firmly in place by the dominant class (ie straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender men) for centuries.

In 2010, I published SISTAH VEGAN, which was a collection of articles, poems, and essays by a number of black-identified female vegans. The former can thus help challenge the latter by inspiring new insights for a Critical Theory that might be utilized to help transform the way we treat those that are deemed inferior by the status quo which might help emancipatory efforts forward. Until people reconsider their relationship with all animals, humans will continue to leave the door open to doing horrific harm to one another. Le autrici, attraverso un dialogo costante suddiviso nel libro in capitoli, riescono addirittura a trasformare il loro pensiero man mano che si va avanti, mettendo in pratica anche ciò che suggeriscono rispetto all'attivismo contemporaneo e gli spazi di militanza.

The same arguments we use to disregard hurting nonhuman animals today were used then - they don’t feel pain, don’t have culture, don’t have attachments to each other, don’t understand what is happening to them. Their feminist sensibilities encourage a deconstruction of Eurocentric understandings of race and species that changes the terms of debates about both. The book is an extensive adaptation of blogs that the sisters wrote between 2015 and 2016 and we kept the vernacular, slightly demotic tone.