Renouncing vegan birthright
By Julia Tanenbaum
The new Vegan Birthright program sponsored by Jewish Veg and Mayanot Birthright exemplifies how Zionists so often exploit the struggle for animal rights in the service of colonialism. Since 1999 Birthright Israel has handed 500,000 young Jews worldwide a free trip to Israel at the hidden cost of the dispossession of millions of Palestinians. As both Vegans and Jews we have a moral duty to renounce this program that supports Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine and apartheid policies. Over 5 million Palestinian refugees are to this day ...
The Intersections of Species Politics, Colonialism, Food Justice, and Gender in Okja
By Tori Lion, CF Toronto Organizer
(Please note that this article contains spoilers.)
Recently, after completing an intensive course, I finally had the opportunity to watch Bong Joon-ho’s new film, Okja, which has been receiving a lot of attention in the vegan and nonhuman animal rights activist communities. Aside from applauding it for being a beautiful film that will hopefully inspire many viewers to consider the subjectivity of nonhuman animals reduced to commodities within the agricultural industrial complex, I would like to focus on the interesting ...
Elsie Shrigley: the Woman Behind the Word Veganism
By Sarah W. Fox, CF Vancouver organizer
Where Are the Women in the Animal Rights Movement?
"Patriarchy is a social system in which males hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property." [1] Sadly throughout history and the history of veganism there are many examples of how patriarchal the vegan and animal rights community is--and how it always has been--excluding of, or hardly mentioning, women who have made huge contributions to both veganism and the animal rights communities.
Who ...
3 Reasons Why You Should Become a Pro-Intersectional* Activist
By Lilia Trenkova, CF Co-Founder
*Intersectionality theory was created by Kimberlé Crenshaw and other black feminists in the 1960s and 70s as a form of resistance to the predominantly white (read: racist) feminist movement and the predominantly male (read: sexist) civil rights movement at the time. It introduced the idea that 1. People who experience multiple - layered - forms of oppression (e.g. racism and sexism) face more struggle than people who experience less forms (say who only experience sexism) because 2. These oppressions feed into and support one another ...
Your Organizer Voted for Trump, Now What?
By Raffi Marhaba & Lilia Trenkova, Collectively Free Founders
Whether you're part of an activist community or an organizer yourself, chances are you have had to deal with conflict in your network. Conflicts come in many shapes and sizes and can be as small as a disagreement or as large as activists/organizers no longer believing in your mission; they can range from cases of microagressions to actual infiltrators. We like to look at conflict as an opportunity to become stronger - to use a metaphor by a friend of a friend, “Whenever there's a bone fracture, the ...
Capitalism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Anthropocentrism Are Killing Us: Why We’re Joining Disrupt J20
by Tori Lion, CF Toronto Organizer
It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump rose to power at a time when open challenges to capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy have become commonplace. In 2011, during my first year of undergraduate studies, I watched in admiration as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring uprisings captivated the world. More recently, the Movement for Black Lives and the No Dakota Access Pipeline campaign have mobilized countless young people; the latter, although facing new threats under the incoming Trump administration, has been ...
Surviving the Social Justice Revolution: tips for becoming an intersectional (vegan) activist
by Kadedra Holmes, CF Hampton Roads Organizer
So, you are still wrapping your head around veganism and its overlap in social justice issues such as racism, sexism, modern-day slavery and climate change. What do you now? Social media is flooding your mind with hundreds of thousands of half-thought opinions and false propaganda, and you are finding that your IRL (“in real life”) friends aren’t as understanding as you thought. Before you know it, you are finding yourself with a bottled up frustration towards [insert here], and a lack of community of support to help ...
Animal Rights Leading Where?
Just recently Alex Felsinger published an article critiquing the use of disruptions in the animal rights movement. While there are certainly points that we can agree on, there are also points we decided to break down and discuss.
To start off, we would like thank Alex for writing this article. We appreciate the time and research that went into it. We agree with a lot of what Alex has said, for instance about the “Berkeley Bubble” and the co-opting of other movements’ stats into ours without context.
We have in the past publicly expressed issues with DxE, ...
Just Language [As In Justice]
by Raffi Marhaba
Quite often I will look at my Facebook memories from 5 years ago and be like, “what the hell did I say??” Sometimes, even posts from 2 years ago surprise me. As activists, we use language as a powerful tool to ignite social change. But sometimes the words we choose can actually end up firing back at us.
Here are a few things I learned about language and frameworks that are just.
All Lives Matter
Context is everything. Saying “All Lives Matter” directly undermines “Black Lives Matter.”Yes, I know. The Animal Rights Movement was ...
A history of Animal Use by American Police
It is a less understood dimension of animal exploitation which transforms man's best friends into deadly servants of American racism. However it is still animal exploitation.
By Timothy Hurwitz
The police are 21st century fugitive slave catchers. Just as they were when they first arose two hundred years ago from the dark shadows of America’s racial history.
The capitalist system was built off the labor of enslaved Africans. And racism was created as the one of the system’s ideological justifications. And police were created as the system's enforcers.
Ame...
