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There was a really incredible article in make/shift magazine’s spring 2010 issue about male domination of social justice movements and how the replication of those patriarchal power structures have both directly and indirectly helped the state to topple some of the most influential organizations working toward a just world.  I discovered this article via the INCITE! blog and would love to share it with LOVE readers and collective members and, well, every activist on the planet.

The article can be accessed here: http://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

I think the INCITE! blog and its commenters have dissected and discussed much of the same things I would choose to mention, but I just want to emphasize how incredibly relevant and important I find this analysis to be.  My time as an activist has been plagued with struggles against male domination and the oppression of female-identified activists, ostensibly from people who are billing themselves as allies: whether it’s an individual vegan activist who is abusive toward other female activists and partners or an entire organization that has allied itself with this culture’s hatred of women.

I do love this passage, though:

“Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles. I’m not talking about witch hunts; I’m talking about organizing in such a way that we nip a potential [informant] in the bud before he can hurt more people. Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.”

It seems so important to get activists and activist organizations to stop thinking of misogyny and abuse of women as something that will resolve itself once we solve the “real” problems.  And for as long as male activists are exploitative of female activists, they are just as bad as the animal abusers, racists, homophobes, and the state against which we are all struggling, together.

I have been dreading writing this post.  Each time I sit down to work on it, I get really anxious and worried: I don’t want to come across as attacking people who are otherwise doing good work, I don’t want to pretend that I am a perfect consumer (an oxymoron in itself!), and I definitely don’t want to alienate the four people on the planet who still actually listen to what I have to say.  But every time I subsequently close the browser window and don’t get the thoughts out of my head, I feel a different, worse kind of anxiety: the knowledge that well-meaning, vegan-identified people are spending their money on products that are incredibly harmful to animals and the planet — the exact reasons that we, as vegans, have stopped buying animal-based goods.

“Orangutans are literally dying for cookies.” So begins a report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, published in 2008 and chronicling the myriad ways in which palm oil is troubling.  When this and another similar report were released, Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network wrote a really concise and informative article on the Huffington Post about the problems with palm oil: deforestation, loss of habitat for rainforest animals (both human and non-human), climate change.  But even before that, as an apprentice at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute way back in 2006, I had heard about the loss of Orangutan habitat due to the production of palm oil.  If you want to help primates, my teachers there said, don’t buy palm oil.  Having been so educated and moved by the lives of the chimpanzees at the institute, I knew this was something that I’d try my best to avoid.

But once I left the safe confines of CHCI, my promise to avoid palm oil was virtually forgotten.  Truthfully, it seemed a bigger challenge to me than avoiding meat, dairy, leather, and the ilk: nearly 50 percent of consumer goods contain some sort of palm oil, no doubt many of them considered “vegan.”  Furthermore, I wasn’t prepared for the teeming masses of Earth Balance-lovin’ vegans unwittingly singing the praises of this problematic product.  It seems like nearly every magazine, recipe, and restaurant trying to sell me something vegan is celebrating palm oil.  Who am I to rain on everyone’s parade?

I decided recently to go outside of my comfort zone yet again and remove Earth Balance and palm oil from my diet to the best of my ability (possibly spurred by a re-reading of the book “Next of Kin”).  Just as I used to say that I couldn’t give up dairy because I liked the taste too much, I have to get over my unwillingness to give up a delicious but palm oil-laden vegan treat.  But now I have also had to deal with these squiggly feelings of not knowing how to address my concerns with fellow animal advocates.  I don’t want to be the vegan police, and I certainly don’t want to be prescribing a solution that is too utopian to be feasible for the average person to attain.

So what is the solution?  As usual, I’m not sure.  Most of the vegan restaurants and bakeries I’ve encountered have been huge proponents of Earth Balance and other palm oil-based margarine products because it closely replicates cow’s milk butter when used in recipes, especially baked goods.  When I made the decision to stop buying Earth Balance, it meant a serious change in the types of foods I cooked at home: no more toast with “butter” for breakfast, fewer cupcakes and pastries made from scratch, etc.  And I’m still struggling to not order these things when I go to restaurants: I’m a sucker for a cupcake, and it isn’t until after I’ve eaten that I worry about the ingredients I may have just consumed, “vegan” though they may have been.  It’s a difficult change and no doubt one that people are reluctant to make.

I acknowledge that calling out Earth Balance and palm oil for its harmful impact on humans, animals, and the planet is unfair; palm oil is just one of hundreds of problematic “vegan” foods we consume.  If we’re going to eliminate palm oil from our diets, shouldn’t we also be evaluating coffee?  Chocolate?  Tropical fruits?  At what point do we say that we’re “vegan enough,” since in today’s global economy, it’s a huge challenge to find a food or a product in general that doesn’t harm someone somewhere?  I completely agree.  Again, I’m in no position to tell others what to do, since I, too, am guilty of making these bad choices — just last night I bought mango juice, which probably traveled thousands of miles to get to me after having been grown by people making significantly less than a living wage.  I’d like to think, however, that if we allow ourselves to dialog about these issues — and not just assume that if something doesn’t list an animal product on the label that it’s “cruelty-free” — then maybe those choices will give us as much pause as the choice to purchase meat or dairy once did.  Maybe then we can push ourselves even further beyond what we thought we could do and create a world that is even more peaceful, respectful, and just than we imagined possible.

As an activist, I think that breaking down the barriers between groups of people — while still recognizing and respecting individual differences — is a key component to achieving equality and ending oppression.  When we stop thinking of beings who are different from us as the “other,” it becomes more difficult to treat them as “less than.”  I think recognizing that animals have an interest in being alive, not having their children taken away, not being beaten, etc. is the first step in making the choice to not use their bodies for our own purposes.  Similarly, acknowledging that people who have differently-abled bodies or different gender presentation or different ethnicities or insert myriad-other-ways-in-which-people-are-different here still have an interest in health, happiness, safety, bodily integrity, and choice is a first step to creating a world without oppression.

However, I’ve noticed lately that even within social justice activism there’s a pervasive “us vs. them” mentality that can totally undermine that vision of a peaceful world.  Believing that the western world, for example, is infinitely more forward-thinking than less-industrialized nations is one harmful way in which this occurs; even within the context of the United States, thinking that large cities are more progressive and subsequently dismissing the behavior of other cities and states as “backwards” is dangerous as well.  Activists are guilty of this all the time, and I think it creates unnecessary borders and divisions between potential allies.

Doris Lin wrote about this in a January 2010 article concerning animal activists’ propensity to blame an entire culture or an entire country for animal cruelty occurring within its borders.  She writes, “I’ve noticed in various social justice movements that it’s easy to demonize disempowered groups or groups that are considered ‘other.’  Whether the cause is human rights, environmental protection or animal rights, it’s always easy to get some people to agree with you by reinforcing their prejudices against ‘those people’ or ‘these people.’”  This mentality not only unfairly labels an entire culture or country as “backwards” or “barbaric,” but it also dismisses the efforts of progressive, anti-oppression activists within those countries’ borders, as if there’s nothing there worth saving.  Interestingly enough, we rarely see western cultures being described as “barbaric,” despite the fact that plenty of mind-boggling oppression happens right here on U.S. soil.  It’s only those people who are “other” who seem to warrant that label; it’s only appropriate to write off a whole country when our targets are different enough from ourselves to no longer remind us of our own abhorrent behavior.

It’s not just animal activism, either.  After atrocious immigration legislation was passed in Arizona, calls to boycott the entire state started peppering my news feed.  Have we forgotten that plenty of other U.S. states have criminalized, arrested, and deported people of color or immigrant citizens before, during, and after the passage of Arizona’s legislation?  (See this heartbreaking article from North Carolina.)  I reported some really vicious rules for intersex citizens in Australia, and someone commented that Australia is particularly “effed up” when it comes to governmental approaches to sexuality.  Have we forgotten that here in the United States, LGBT folks do not have access to marriage or that gender non-conforming individuals do not have federal protections for housing, employment, or the privilege to safely use a public bathroom?  Female genital mutilation is currently being funded and celebrated at an ivy league institution in the United States.  Transgender individuals are harassed, beaten, and killed in cities as “progressive” as New York and Seattle on a daily basis.  The examples go on and on and on and never fail to discourage me.  We (New Yorkers, Americans, vegans) have to stop thinking that we’re somehow better than other people, other cities, other countries.

It’s not fair to blame an entire population for the oppressive words or actions of a few individuals, especially when nearly every population on the planet is, in some way, committing similarly oppressive acts. And so much work needs to be done in our own backyards that it seems to make sense to focus there before we go pointing fingers at other communities.  This is why LOVE focuses so strongly on community-based activism and a holistic understanding of veganism and anti-oppression.  In my experience, it’s not effective to launch a campaign in a city or drop a hundred leaflets on a street corner and then blow out of town.  We have to listen to each other, respect differences, and work together to eliminate oppression.

Recently, members of the LOVE collective have been batting around the idea of adding some “Veganism 101″-type posts  to our blog, in the interest of sharing some of our experience and advice with fellow collective members and blog readers.  Everyone who has made the choice to adopt a vegetarian diet or who views the world through an anti-oppression lens has hit some stumbling blocks along the way — often in the form of fielding questions from friends and family, feeling some discomfort over making new choices, or trying to figure out the right way to express concern, criticism, or excitement about things happening in the world.  One of the reasons we created the Vegan Blog was to share these experiences with each other and learn from them; building this community, both virtual and physical, was one of my main goals, at least, in founding LOVE.

However, I’m struggling a bit with the idea of posting some set of rules or guidelines for other vegans to follow in their own lives.  My experiences are my own, and the way I handle a situation may be radically different from the way that someone else would choose to do so.  I’m certainly no expert on anything, and I don’t like the implicit authority that comes from being the author of the post.  I’ve wanted to write something in here for weeks, but I’ve been floundering, having only my own experiences to draw upon and certainly not feeling qualified to tell others how to live their lives.

Other writings on this site have talked about speaking your truth, and as I was gawking at my blank computer screen, I realized that this might be exactly what we have to offer.  Instead of worrying about having all the right answers or overstepping my bounds in directing others in how to live, it might be most useful — and most cathartic — for me to just write about experiences I have had as an anti-oppression vegan activist and solicit feedback from the rest of the collective (and other readers) about how to handle these situations.  I hope that the other LOVE blog writers will contribute similar stories; we can create our own version of “Veganism 101″ that will hopefully be more inclusive, more truthful, and more relevant.

I want to talk a little bit about my experiences with combating despair.  Sometimes, as activists and compassionate people, the weight of the world’s problems can really suck the life out of us.  With a greater understanding of the forces that keep humans and animals oppressed comes a heavy sadness that can immobilize us.  The media seems to be a never-ending parade of oil spills and abuse of dairy cows, violence and war; even worse is when around us in in the flesh is apathy, sexist jokes, animals on plates, and “allies” who don’t understand us at all.  It’s enough to make a person want to hide under the covers and never come out.

So, what’s a vegan to do?

Personally, I’m working really hard on a few different approaches to this gut-wrenching feeling.  First and foremost, I’m acknowledging that I spend a LOT of time thinking about and writing about and living anti-oppression; most of the people I meet are not going to have given these issues as much consideration as I have, and I can’t expect them to be on the same wavelength as me.  It took a lot of time and reading and talking these things through to get to the understanding I have today, and tempting though it may be to throw a fit each time someone falls short on his analysis of power and privilege, it’s not fair or productive to do so.  What’s more, the general mission behind LOVE is to build and strengthen our communities; when we focus on that goal and proliferate the ideas of anti-oppression activism beyond the relatively small group of people who currently devote themselves to these issues, there will be fewer people causing me such anguish.

Terrible things are happening in the world, to people and animals.  Every time I write a letter to someone in prison or meet an animal who is obviously traumatized by her experience on a farm or in an abusive home, I worry that I’m not going to be able to handle the next atrocity that comes down the pike.  Sadly, I sometimes feel like my horror or disgust or despair wouldn’t be understood by anyone around me; or worse, when I try to express these feelings to friends and partners, I end up debating or justifying myself instead of getting the support that I needed.

How do we maintain hope when there seem to be so few people hoping right there with us?

I’m trying to live more by example than continuously and aggressively shoving these ideas down the throats of everyone I meet.  The latter approach seems to be just exhausting for everybody involved and no doubt contributes to that weighted-down feeling that seems to run my life from time to time.  LOVE is currently working on a new video and an updated version of our vegan brochure that will hopefully facilitate the conversation about veganism and anti-oppression beyond what we’re able to do in our day-to-day lives.  In short, my goals are to not alienate people and not lose myself in the fog of sadness that sometimes rolls in with the sunrise.  The bigger this community becomes, the more allies we will have in fighting that despair, and the less alone we will feel.

If anyone has any similar experiences or wants to discuss any of these ideas further, please feel free to share in the comments.  I’d really like to hear how you find the strength to keep fighting so that I can draw upon it in some of those difficult moments.

This is the text of a presentation given at the 2010 Institute for Critical Animal Studies Conference.

I am always shocked and saddened when I hear yet another story about an activist who has been arrested and put in prison.  We heard earlier today about the Green Scare, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the unconstitutionality of the laws that exist to put our comrades behind bars – and, yet, every time that happens, I am stunned.  I mean, these are our friends, our colleagues, our family members.  Some of them are finding themselves locked up for ten, fifteen, twenty years.  Our criminal justice system, clearly, is wreaking havoc on the hearts and minds of the people fighting for change for animals, and their families.

Maybe I’m always so shocked because as a relatively privileged person, it’s not likely that many of my closest friends and family members will end up in jail.  It’s only really through this road of animal activism that I’ve had any brushes with law enforcement.  But the prison-industrial complex has been thriving for years on striking that same fear into the hearts, minds, and families of poor people, of communities of color, and gender non-conforming individuals long before the advent of the Green Scare.

I am one of the founders of a group whose opposition to violence is so central to the work that we do that we have actually chosen to incorporate it into the very name of our collective – Living Opposed to Violence and Exploitation.  And yet, the act of calling the police on someone, the act of putting someone in jail – in a cage – is not widely viewed as the act of violence that it is.  In fact, there are some animal advocacy organizations calling for stricter penalties and harsher punishments for animal cruelty.  Of course, we all want to see the end to animal abuse and exploitation, but is putting people in jail – overwhelmingly, people who are already oppressed by the same systems of power and privilege that allow animals to be abused – really the solution?  Does incarceration actually address the broader societal issues of animal exploitation?

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any country in the history of the world.  One in every 100 adult Americans is in jail.  While the United States has just five percent of the world’s population, it is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners.  These numbers are startling.

I’m going to posit that the U.S. criminal justice system – the Prison-Industrial Complex – serves as a political tool to keep poor people, people of color, and gender non-conforming people under the control of those in power.  It’s a well-oiled machine of oppression that systematically denies people wealth, value, and freedom.  And it is not something I, as a vegan and animal advocate, can endorse.  It feels imperative to me to be working to empty the cages that confine and repress all animals, including humans.

Before I started researching prison abolition, in fact, before I was much of an activist, I had this idea that law enforcement and incarceration existed to keep us safe.  That notion was eroded slowly over time, as I saw abuse of police power at demonstrations, as I watched friends get locked up for having the audacity to speak out against unjust systems, and as I started seeing the parallels between animal oppression and human oppression.  But I still didn’t really know what to do otherwise.  What about the “criminals” who are imprisoned and thus not on the streets?  Isn’t that a sign that the system is working?

As it turns out, prison operates a lot differently than what is told to us through the dominant cultural narrative.  Of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States, about 1% of those people are actually there for a “violent crime” – the rest are typically related to drug charges, fraud, or other minor offenses.  I don’t think that the solution to poverty or drug addiction is to lock people in cages, but this is exactly what we’re doing.

What’s more, the incarceration of millions of people has done very little to deter future crime.   Women are still afraid to walk down the street.  Families are still torn apart by violence.

Prisons are not about reducing harm in our communities and in fact, imprisonment actually serves to destabilize our communities.  Prisons are violent institutions that only perpetuate violence, and prisons as a public policy solution have failed to create safe communities.  They do nothing to address the cultural conditions that lead to so-called criminal behavior.

Over 500,000 of the people currently languishing in U.S. prisons are there because they simply can’t afford to post their bail.  They’ve been judged not a threat to society and have not been found guilty of anything, but are stuck in prison for the months it takes for their case to wind through the court system because they can’t afford the bail fee.

Class and wealth play a huge role in the “who” of prison.  Approximately 30% of women arrested had been receiving public assistance before their arrest.  Fewer than 40% of women had held a full-time job prior to their arrest, and 2/3 of women under supervision – either in jail, on probation, or on parole – had never held a job making more than $6.50 per hour.  Opportunities to get education or employment while in prison are severely limited, if available at all, which ensures that inmates will continue to be poor even after they are released.

More than 60% of the people in prison are people of color.  Compare that to the ethnic composition of the United States: less than 45% of the population identifies as non-white.  There’s a huge disparity here.   For Black males in their twenties, 1 in every 8 is behind bars on any given day.  Three-fourths of people in jail for drug offenses are people of color.   At this point, you have young Black and Latino men just assuming that one day, they will go to prison.  It tears apart their families, it hobbles them in terms of future opportunities, and it does very little to actually deter crime.

Women in prison also face incredible challenges.  By the end of 2006, over 112,000 women were behind bars, compared to 44,000 women imprisoned in 1990.  Women of color, like men of color, are actually overrepresented in the prison system.  Women’s individual histories of trauma and abuse also makes prison an incredibly hostile environment, and guards often take advantage of the power dynamic between guard and inmate.  Barriers to health care, especially female-related health issues, like reproduction, breast cancer, and childbirth, can make prison a deadly experience for women.

Trans- and gender non-conforming individuals face even more opposition in prison, as they are often housed with people of opposite genders, are denied medical care and treatment, and are assaulted and harassed simply for their gender identity or gender expression.  Because it’s still legal in most places to discriminate against trans-identified people, it can literally be impossible for these individuals to go to school, get a job, or otherwise support themselves.  Prison seems almost inevitable when the deck is so stacked against them.

Whenever I talk about prison abolition – or the idea that criminalization is not the solution to society’s problems – people inevitably ask, “if not prison, then what?”  I ask myself that question all the time, too.  The idea of incarceration is so ingrained in our societal narrative that we have difficulty visualizing any other way to keep the peace.  Two really important considerations have helped me to embrace the idea of abolition and encouraged me to work toward a different model:

1)    There is a lot of violence and “crime” being committed that goes unpunished, and a system that doesn’t address all violence equally is one that I cannot endorse.  For example, in 2008, a number of slaughterhouse workers in California were sentenced to jail time for the abuse of animals in their facility.  Some of these people were undocumented workers, who will be deported once their jail time is served.  However, what about the executives at the top of those corporations, whose orders directly result in the murder of billions of animals every year?  Why are they allowed to exploit those workers?  And why, instead of getting punished, are they some of the richest folks in the country?
2)    There is a lot of violence occurring within the U.S. prison system.   Sexual assault and murder run rampant through prisons and jails.  Prisoners are denied adequate health care, opportunities to make contact with their friends and families, education, and income.  Women are physically shackled to tables and beds during childbirth.  Immigrants are deported to countries in which they may know no one after serving their jail sentences here.  It’s a system that completely devalues the lives and bodies of the people struggling within its walls.

I have a really nice quote from Andy Stepanian, one of the SHAC7 activists, who served two years and seven months in prison for “conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act.”  Andy says that he doesn’t believe incarcerating either social justice activists or animal abusers is the answer to society’s woes.  “I oppose the prison industrial complex and all forms of oppression. I don’t relish seeing a single piece of kindling thrown into that fire no matter how despicable the animal-abusing wretch is.” Andy views cruelty to animals as a sickness that is exacerbated when the abuser is behind bars. “I think we need to get proactive in healing our culture’s illnesses, and in turn these abusers — whom I see as symptomatic — will be a less-frequent phenomenon.”

But how will we be safe without prisons?  Take a minute and think about what makes you feel safe — your home?  Your family?  Your friends?  While some people may say that prisons and police in your community make you feel safe, many of us most impacted by prisons and policing will not.  In fact, the Prison-Industrial Complex has stolen those very things from millions of people.  We see that prisons and rampant policing have served to destabilize our communities — removing family members from our communities, draining resources for essential social services, and pushing us to fear each other.

Of course, the notion of abolishing prisons is, admittedly, ambitious.  I think a lot of people are really exhausted by the idea of doing all this work, just as the task of bringing about a vegan world can feel so daunting to those of us working toward change for animals.  It’s easy, unfortunately, to think, “Well, this will never happen in my lifetime.”  But that line of thinking is so dangerous.  I’ve watched veganism get co-opted by organizations looking to make a dollar and declare victories – we’re pushing for alternative methods OF exploitation, like humane farms, instead of alternatives TO exploitation.  And prison reform feels that way to me as well.  I think the best way to advocate for prisoners and to make their lives better is to get them out.  A system that puts people into cages is no more ok by me than a system that ultimately kills animals for our enjoyment.  Neither of those can exist in a vegan world.

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