Humanity vs animality; these descriptions are part of a hierarchy where anything “animal” is valued less, and Aph and Syl discuss how it’s a racialised system. I can’t find the exact wording but Aph and Syl say we have to fight not just for vapid superficial representation, but also for the right to produce knowledge, to create theory, and to rearticulate the way oppression manifests itself. The distance that we place between ourselves and nature that allows us to be amazed is also what gives us permission to treat the environment as an object to be exploited. However, that does not mean that I do not have to consider the interests of the random person nor can I absolve my duties to them only on the grounds that they are not my family member. Unfortunately, intersectionality doesn't really trouble the systems looming over us that we never created.

Let's use our exclusion and invisibility as a power to create impermeable spaces for ourselves, unburdened by the ridiculous and biased premises of the dominant class. Soon after using a jargon bomb, the authors use a simple metaphor or real world example that makes everything crystal clear. There is seemingly nothing worse for an activist than being introduced to a new perspective or theory that challenges the way you've been doing things. But we're clearly seeing a movement forming here, and that makes this book's publication even more exciting.

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

Reading the work of Aph Ko and her sister Syl within the pages of Aphro-ism will build the perfect foundation needed for activists or anyone wanting to end the oppression of all, by not being the oppressor of one.If we aren’t organising around the human-animal divide we aren’t focused on the root of the problem. This difference is a functional device, and only showing similarities (through philosophy, or (social) sciences) between races and humans and animals will thus never be sufficient for facilitating the liberation of the latter by the former.

The authors mention how it came out during the Rodney King trial that Los Angeles public officials in the justice system routinely used the acronym N. The exception to this is when “clueless though well-intention activists repeatedly share graphic images and frighteningly empty slogans about the connections between animal slavery and human slavery (usually they mean the trans-atlantic slave trade from the old days)”. The word "animal" will then take on negative connotations, and parallels can easily be drawn between the oppression of animals and the oppression of minoritised groups. Aphro-ism was a digital space dedicated to critical thinking, intellectual conversations, and probing essays centering on decolonial feminism, veganism, animals, and anti-racism. I'm still pondering through a lot of what I've learned, and I'll probably have to read it again at some point to allow more of it to sink in, but it is such an enlightening work.If you pick up this book because you find yourself drawn to one facet of their work, you'll be sure to come away engrossed by the inseparability of each facet from every other facet. 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.

The essays in APHRO-ISM explore critical theory in ways I find somewhat more accessible than a lot of critical theory out there. She also contributed a short essay about race and animal oppression in the first African American Vegan Starter Guide. You are an enemy to true diversity if your only concern is to recruit black and brown bodies instead of black and brown ideas. Non eurocentric conceptual resources” mean people view the world in a fundamentally different way to those of us in Europe or influenced by colonial legacy.Yet a refusal to back down from the conversation permeates these lovely, thoughtful essays by Aph and Syl Ko. As long as animals are oppressed, as long as 'animal' means something degrading, we will never be set free. This stays with the consistent theme of the need to decenter whiteness in movements for justice and liberation. One part I kept thinking about is how a group of indigenous peoples in South America have “no concept of nature in their language.