On April 6th at International House, Dr. A. Breeze Harper gave her talk on Anti-Racism, “White-Fragility” and the “Third-Reconstruction,” on a critical race and vegan praxis of survival, resistance, and hope.
Over the past decade of scholarship dedicated to ethical consumption ("good food", locavorism, vegetarianism, Fair Trade, veganism), scholars and food justice activists who are focused on intersections of food, ethics, and race have noticed a pattern: the mainstream ethical food movement rarely, if ever, addresses how race (i.e., racism, whiteness, racialization, anti-racism) operates when it comes to food, sustainability, and ethics. Even though critical race applications within the ethical food movement are slowly gaining momentum, many people of color involved struggle with how to navigate, intervene, and break past the barrier of “white fragility” and build intersectional anti-racist based "good" and "ethical" food models and praxis. "Intersectional" in this context means that even though anti racism is the central goal, one must practice anti racism while not reproducing other "isms" (i.e., heterosexism, cis-sexism, ableism). Intersectional frameworks, most importantly, take into account that race does not exist in a vacuum, and is deeply affected by factors such as class, gender, region, age, sexualities, and ability.
As an African American food and health scholar, Dr. Harper specifically talks about key strategies to identify conscious and unconscious racism, “white Fragility”, and the health and nutritional consequences of “racial battle fatigue” within the ethical foodscape of veganism. Dr. Harper creatively uses real life examples of how systemic racism and white fragility operate, how to intervene, and how to create intersectional anti-racism for empowerment within veganism. Most importantly, even though Dr. Harper’s focus is on food, veganism, and race, this talk is interest to anyone who desires to gain literacy and action around intersectional approaches to health, veganism, food, and racial justice during what Dr. Barber of the North Carolina NAACP calls the “Third Reconstruction” of the USA. It is a timely talk during a new era of American politics that threatens decades of social justice and civil rights work collectively and successfully achieved by thousands of human beings. When the advancement of civil rights and social justice for human beings regress, the power to create justice for non-human animals is compromised; Dr. Harper shows how they are all interconnected.
About Dr. A. Breeze Harper
Dr. A. Breeze Harper is a diversity strategist and analyst with Critical Diversity Solutions and the founder of the Sistah Vegan Project. Dr. Harper has a PhD in Social Science with emphasis on leveraging diversity challenges for social impact. She holds a MA in Educational Technologies (emphasis in black feminist theory, social impact, and educational technologies) from Harvard University, where she received the Dean’s Award for her masters thesis work. She earned her BA in feminist geography from Dartmouth College and received the Innovative Thesis award for her work on heterosexism in rural geographies. She has 10+ years career experience as a diversity and inclusion consultant, ranging from curriculum development, to conference planning, to research and reporting, to publishing books and articles. Harper is also an accomplished writer. Dr. Harper created and edited the ground-breaking anthology, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak On Food, Identity, Health, and Society. Her most recently published book, Scars: A Black Lesbian Experience in Rural White New England(Sense Publishers 2014) interrogates how systems of oppression and power impact the life of the only Black teenager living in an all white and working class rural New England town.
This event is sponsored by International House Global Voices Program and The University of Chicago Animal Welfare Society.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to mdestefa@uchicago.edu.
5 окт 2024
