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

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Aph and Syl’s anti-racist and anti-speciesist framework shifts the paradigm of nonhuman and human liberation. Colonialism has given us an image of the ideal human (something like a white, european, able-bodied, male) and the further you move from this point, and the more “animal” you are seen, the worse. In the end, it's not a book about how to become a vegan, rather it's a philosophical undertaking to argue for a more profound consideration of where mistreatment starts and how it can be significantly reduced in our future. In other words, those who are most eager to juxtapose these kinds of images or discuss how animal slavery is relavently like human, black, slavery many times are the same people who tend to be dismissive of, or resistance to, views in which animal oppression and human oppression are thought about together and in the same spaces with the aim of taking to task racism, sexism, speciesism, ableism and so on, or coloniality in general, in tandem. Groundbreaking way to think about animal rights/liberation that is applicable, if not fundamental to other social justice causes.

any and all discussions that incorporate animals and oppressed humans, especially black people, in the same space are now forbidden at the risk of a collective meltdown. Within the framework of intersectionality individual experiences are still valid, (“Saying someone can't be sad because someone else may have it worse is like saying someone can't be happy because someone else may have it better”- unknown) and maybe even more so; instead of isolating one part of a person’s identity and dealing with that alone, we get a more informed perspective if we consider the many layers to oppression and marginalisation. Writing this review took me many hours and was a great chance to dive back into specific parts of Aphro-ism, but I definitely want and need to keep digesting these ideas. Having said that, it was still such a great read, and mind-blowing how everything you think you know about anti-racism and veganism is almost certainly through a Eurocentric lens. Negative conceptions of animals provide the "ideological bedrock underlying framework of white supremacy.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. Whether your social justice lens leans single-issue or multi-issue, these essays offer razor-sharp critiques of hierarchical foundations and systemic oppression, while also providing frameworks for broad-scale liberation. Pulling together posts they have published over the years on Black Vegans Rock, Sisters, Aph and Syl Ko offer up a compelling argument for veganism people of color and other marginalized groups.

As an established vegan, I grow bored with familiar introductory content on vegan viewpoints, so this was welcome to me.

What action could there possibly be that would fit for all non-human animals to have this adjective make sense? One of the joys of reading is surely to be invited into a world you might otherwise have little knowledge of or not necessarily be privy to. Aphro-ism was a digital space dedicated to critical thinking, intellectual conversations, and probing essays centering on decolonial feminism, veganism, animals, and anti-racism.

It's easy to become defensive when you hear ideas outside of the mainstream but the Ko sisters constantly challenge this to the point where it doesn't sound so radical after all.Using popular culture as a point of reference for their critiques, the Ko sisters engage in groundbreaking analysis of the compartmentalized nature of contemporary social movements, present new ways of understanding interconnected opressions, and offer conceptual ways of moving forward, expressive of Afrofuturism and Black veganism. How do we make the shift in talking about valuing black Life in terms of valuing black thought and frameworks?

One of the clinchers introduced by colonial thinking is that we are not just different and special when measured against all the other animals, but we are the OPPOSITE. Using popular culture as a point of reference for their critiques, the Ko sisters engage in groundbreaking analysis of the compartmentalized nature of contemporary social movements, present new ways of understanding interconnected oppression's, and offer conceptual ways of moving forward expressive of Afrofuturism and black veganism.Aphro-ism is a groundbreaking suite of original essays on the entanglements of race, empire, gender, and species. At the end of chapter 11 Syl says “to think in that way is to participate in racial thinking, the very kind of thinking this project intends to dissolve” but at another point in the point Aph or Syl said they were against post-racial messaging. Society has recently agreed for the most part to care about black people when they die (at least we are outraged and upset for the cases that grace our newspapers) but does it care about them when they live. Now that is beautiful (though I don’t like that it sounds like an argument against Attenborough documentaries 🥲). In 2019 PETA said through the site Ko "has arguably done more to give black vegans a voice than any other media outlet today.