Sistah Vegan Conference 2015: An Interactive Web Conference, The Vegan Praxis of "BLACK LIVES MATTER" April 24-25, 2015

Designed by Alise Eastgate (www.eastrandstudios.com)

Shared from http://sistahvegan.com/upcoming-sistah-vegan-conference-2015/

Registration and Ticket Purchase: CLICK HERE


The Sistah Vegan Project’s Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter conference will bring together scholars, writers, activists and community organizers to examine the intersections of the #blacklivesmatter movement and veganism.
Designed for black vegans, vegans of color and their white allies, this interactive, online event, offers an opportunity for collaborative discussion, building networks of engagement and knowledge sharing. The conference will also work to bring forward suggestions and inspiration to build momentum for collective change.


In this time, when large numbers of people are taking to the streets under the #blacklivesmatter banner, this year’s conference’s workshops and talks ask:


– How do veganism and #blacklivesmatter intersect?

– What does a vegan praxis of “black lives matter” look like?

– What does veganism that ignores “black lives matter” look like, and what are the unintended consequences?

– Why do race and whiteness matter, and how do they operate within veganism and beyond?

– What does allyship look like within the #blacklivesmatter movement amongst non-black vegans and black non-vegans?

#Blacklivesmatter is happening in and because of an America in which “post-racial” rhetoric dominates the mainstream and has been accepted as truth by many white Americans.

This narrowness of perspective/thought/rhetoric extends to vegan (largely white spaces) in which embracing anti-oppression is limited to non-human animal rights and specieism and does not acknowledge other forms of oppression (systemic racism, xenophobia, etc.).

In this context, black lives really do not matter and instead work to combat racism and other forms of human oppression is seen as an unnecessary distraction from the “real work” for non-human animal liberation.
Many of us, as black vegans and as non-white and white allies, find that our politics cannot be single issue. As much as veganism provides an anti-oppression framework it must do so holistically.

We cannot ignore the connections between child slavery on cocoa plantations and the enslavement of non-human animals on factory farms. “Cruelty-free” cannot simply mean that no non-human animals were harmed during production but that the workers who produce our goods are also well treated and well compensated.

We challenge the racial and class privileges that allow mainstream vegan rhetoric to speak of lower income people of color who don’t adopt plant-based diets as lazy without seeing and understanding their realities of lack of access to good, affordable food. We question the ease with which many white vegans shrug off the Thug Kitchen controversy ; their inability to see this minstrel show as reinforcing pernicious stereotypes about black people that make it easier to accept violence against them.

We note that from the beginning #blacklivesmatter activists have insisted that queer people, feminists, people from the spectrum of classes, those who are differently abled, etc. not only be part of the movement but that their perspectives help define its strategies and goals instead of accepting “traditional” hierarchies that would put straight, cis-gender, able-bodied, middle class men in the lead.

We call and fight for a vegan, collective praxis that uses a true anti-oppression lens and embodies anti-racism, Black liberation and the dismantling of white supremacist systems and institutions in a supposed post-racial era along with the systems that abuse and oppress non-human animals.

Registration and Ticket Purchase: CLICK HERE
Sponsor the conference: Find out more about sponsorship here.
Nominate the Vegan Anti-Racist Change-makers of 2015: Click Here.

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Schedule (Tentative)

Final Schedule will be confirmed by April 5, 2015

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS WILL ALSO BE RECORDED FOR REGISTRANTS TO ACCESS IF THEY CANNOT ATTEND IN REAL TIME

April 24, 2015

10:00 am. Introduction: Why a Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter? | Dr. A. Breeze Harper (Director and Founder of the Sistah Vegan Project)

10:20 am.”Dispelling the Myth of ‘Cruelty-Free’ Commodities Within the Context of Black Lives Matter and a Racist Food System: A Dialogue Between Lauren Ornelas (Director, Food Empowerment Project) and Dr. A. Breeze Harper

11:00 am.  “Cooking Up Black Lives Matter: A Critical Race Dialogue with vegan Chef Bryant Terry” | Panelists: Chef Bryant Terry and Dr. A. Breeze Harper

11:30 am. “Locating Intersections and the Decolonization of Veganism through Black Womanist Theology” | Candace Laughinghouse, PhD Candidate (Regent University)

12:00 pm. Break

12:30 pm. “‘The Pig is a Filthy Animal': Challenging Speciesist ‘Race-Conscious’ Black Liberation Rhetoric (Before, After, and Beyond Ferguson) | A. Breeze Harper (moderator) and Kevin Tillman (Founder, Vegan Hip Hop Movement).

1:00 pm. “From Critiquing Thug Kitchen to Revealing Vermont’s Speciesist White Agricultural Narrative: pattrice jones tells us about her Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter as a White Ally” | Speakers: A. Breeze Harper (moderator) and pattrice jones (co-founder, VINE Sanctuary)

1:45 pm. “Dear White People, Black Lives Matter: An Introductory Workshop For White Vegans on Being an Ally”| Speakers: Dr. Paul Gorski (George Mason University) and Dallas Rising

2:30 pm. “ALL Black Lives Matter: Exposing and Dismantling Transphobia and Heteronormativity in Mainstream Black ‘Conscious’ Plant-Based Dietary Movement” | Speaker: Toi Scott (Afrogenderqueer.com)”

3:20-4:00 pm. Funding Pro-Vegan Anti-Racist Projects: Challenges and Strategies in a ‘Post-Racial’ Era” | Panelists: Alissa Hauser (Executive Director, The Pollination Project) and Dr. A. Breeze Harper

April 25, 2015

10:00 am. “Animal Liberationists for No More Prisons and No More Police”| Speaker: Dr. Anthony J Nocella II (Institute for Critical Animal Studies and Save the Kids From Incarceration)

10:30 am “Black Lives [Don’t] Matter: Michael Vick and the Demonization of Blackness Among White Vegans and Animal Rights Activists”| Speaker: Harlan Eugene Weaver, PhD (Davidson College)

11:30 am. “Pro-Vegan Self-Care for Racial Justice Activists: Building a Long-Term Community of Support”| Speaker: Jessica Rowshandel, LMSW

12:00 pm. Break

12:20 pm. Announcement of the Anti-Racist Changemakers of 2015 Award Winners

1:00 pm. “Memory and Betrayal: An Inquiry into Race, Empire, and Relationship During an Era of Black Lives Matter” |Speaker: Martin Rowe (co-founder and senior editor of Lantern Books)

1:30 pm. “[TITLE TO BE DETERMINED]” | Speaker: Christopher Sebastian McJetters (Vegan Publishers)

2:00 pm. “We Need a Holistic Revolution: Vegan Ethics and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement”| Speaker: Nevline Nnaji  (cofounder, New Negress Film Society)

2:30 pm. “Abolitionist Veganism and Anti-Oppression Within the Context of Black Lives Matter” | Speaker: Sarah K. Woodcock (Founder, The Abolitionist Vegan Society)

3:00 pm.  “The Origins of the Criminalization of Blackness in the Context of a ‘Race Neutral’ Analysis and how it Helped Shape Policing Policies” | Speaker: Liz Ross (Founder, Coalition of Vegan Activists of Color)

3:50-4:45 pm. KEYNOTE ADDRESS (TBD).

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HOW TO REGISTER AND PURCHASE A TICKET

For this year’s conference, we ask that participants support the ongoing work of the Sistah Vegan Project by paying for a ticket to access the event. A limited number of full and partial scholarships will be available to apply to, starting the first week of April 2015. Send an email to sistahveganconference@gmail.com for inquiries.

Your monetary support will help the many goals of the Sistah Vegan Project such as:

• Supporting the groundbreaking book project by Dr. A. Breeze Harper: Black Masculinity, Veganism, and Ethical Consumption (The Remix).
  
• Organizing yearly Sistah-Vegan conferences that leave participants with concrete tools they can implement into their personal and work lives to dismantle systemic racism with a pro-vegan/ahimsa foundation.
  
• Supporting the production of an edited volume of the proceedings of the Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter conference which a publisher has already expressed interest in publishing.
  
• Provide financial support for operating costs for The Sistah Vegan Project (i.e. travel to conferences, utilities to run the project, internet and web technologies, editing services, design services, etc).
  
• The creation of ongoing tools and resources, such as webinars, toolkits,  and short publications that use critical race feminism and anti-speciesism to educate people about how to effectively dismantle systemic oppression and violence against people, non-human animals, and Earth’s natural resources.
  
• Food and Nutritional toolkits with an emphasis on marginalized populations.

Registration and Ticket Purchase: CLICK HERE

“7 Ways to Eat Good on a Hood Budget” by Stic of Dead Prez

We at The Feral Space have been livin the vegan hood diet this way since we started and wanted to share this with everyone. Health is wealth ya'll!

“7 Ways to Eat Good While on a Hood Budget“ by Stic of Dead Prez founder of www.rbgfitclub.com
In the work I do in promoting holistic health and fitness through the RBG FIT CLUB, I have run into the following sentiment more than a few times: “I want to eat healthier but it’s too expensive!”. Many people are interested in ways to upgrade their diet without breaking their bank. Well, I can dig it. And since I been striving to sustain the healthy grind in my life personally since way back in the food stamp days, I think I may have a few tips to share.

The following are 7 Ways to Eat Good While on a Hood Budget. But bottom line always remember, we can pay now or pay later (in suffering and doctor bills etc) when it comes to our dietary discipline and choices.

1. Choose Produce not Packages: People think eating healthy is about buying a lot of expensive boxes and packages of processed foods, but that isn’t the case at all.

The cheapest most nutrient dense food in a grocery store in the produce isle. Fresh vegetables and fresh fruits. Trying to buy costly packaged goods, potato chips and sugary juices and all kinds of over processed items, even at a health food store is when the budget starts to soar. When we feel we don’t have time to cook we often go for a lot of “quick fix” items like pizzas and pre-cut bags of French fries and stuff like that. That’s where the money adds up. But if you fill your basket with fresh greens and fruits and some basic staples like rice, noodles, beans you will not only have an optimal basket of nutritious foods … you will have saved a great deal of money of the food bill and subsequent doctor bills. Eat real foods and save real money. If you worried the fruits and veggies will spoil before you eat them, read on to number 2!

2. Cook Big and Save Some for Later: Cooking meals in large batches and freezing the leftovers for later in the week or month can save you a lot of time and money.

Instead of buying fast food or eating out at restaurants, or even cooking a full meal every time you get hungry, it’s way more cost effective and time saving and healthy for you to pull something out of the freezer and warm it up than it is to wash/chop/slice/boil/bake/wait in line/wait to be served etc.

Pre-preparing and freezing weekly sized portions of rice or salad choppings or beans etc will simplify your meal duties. Even if you have to do a little cooking you will still save money and time seven days a week. Spend an hour or so over the weekend like on a Sunday evening preparing food for the week. Then, during the week, all you have to do is pull something out of the freezer and heat it up. Them big Ziploc bags ain’t just for the D-boys! Lol

3. Soup Up your Options: Large vegetable soups over brown rice or whole grain noodles pack in vitamins and nutrients, fill you up and are easy to make and delicious. Also Bean burritos, chili, and bean soup can be easy to prepare, cheap and good for you. Going totally meatless a couple of times a week (or for good) also helps your budget and gives your palate a variety to enjoy. Frozen veggies, which are inexpensive, work great in Soups. Nothing compares to that good and filling, good feeling of a hot and hearty bowl of Soup. Cheap, packed with nutrients, easy to prepare. Its the new “Soup-er” food! Lol!

4. Make A Plan and See Where Ya Values Are:. In the hood, in all honesty, We spend a gang of money on cable, hair dos, sneakers, weed, parties expensive bottles of alcohol,video games, big screen tvs, rims, jewelry, strip club tricking, trendy name brand clothes, car accessories, headphones, cigarettes all kinds of overpriced things. But when it comes to our health, we often skimp and look for the cheapest food we can find.

But in our best interest, We have to value our health above all these other things, and make eating healthy a priority in terms of how we spend the resources we have. Makes no sense to be fronting like a rich person on the outside ,but in reality, in poor health on the inside, right? But it’s easy for any of us to make excuses without looking at at a budget, so that’s where budgeting comes in handy.

Budgets help us see where our money is really going not where we feel like its going. Budgeting is also a master ingredient to financial stability in general, so not only will it help identify funds that can be used toward more healthful food choices; its an essential tool to manage our financial responsibilities better in general. Usually when we make a budget we can see plenty of stuff we can do without to make room for healthier eating choices. You may say “shoot, I dont make enough money to budget it!” lol, but you don’t have to make a lot of money to benefit from budgeting. Budgeting helps what ever we make stretch farther and get more of what we truly value out of what we have. When we values ourselves more than our things we make healthier choices. Budget, prioritize and prosper.

5. Season your Food: Eat fruits and vegetables that are in season, that is! Otherwise you’ll be paying a much higher price. For example, if you live in the north east United States and you want some watermelon in the middle of the Winter of December, it’s gonna have to be shipped from where ever it is in season to your local market and you pay that extra cost. Also, eating foods that are current in their natural growing season helps strengthen your immune system for that season. Seasonal Fruits can be frozen and blended to smoothies. Frozen vegetables also can be used to make a stir fry. They’re convenient and they don’t spoil quickly like fresh fruits and veggies.

6. Join a Co-op or Local Community Garden: You get discounts on your groceries by being a member of grocery store co-ops. In exchange for your minimal volunteer work hours per month, you get your groceries at Co-op member’s only price. Same thing goes for community gardens. And not only that you get to learn a WHOLE lot about nutrition and health being in that kind of environment.

There are many urban farm movements popping up all over the place where folks are going back to the land, utilizing whatever small plots there are right in the hood, to grow food. Participating with these farms are awesome ways to educate ourselves on growing food. Also, there are usually harvest markets where the food is sold for really affordable prices and you can get first dibs by being a community member. Places like DTown Farms and Freedom Freedom in Detroit and Truly Living Well Farms and Habesha Gardens in Atlanta are great examples of gardens in the hood that you can google and “dig” into! If you have even the smallest plot of land in your yard growing your own food from heirloom seeds (non-gmo varieties) is also another way to save on the grocery bills while mastering a very useful and fun survival skill.

My wife Afya, has been a great source of inspiration in this area in our household. You can Follow her instagram (@AfyaIbomu) blog to see our latest harvests. And last but certainly not least….

7. Drink more water. Many times we think we are hungry, it may be actually a sign of thirst.

The fact that it is recommended by holistic healers and medical experts alike that we drink half our body weight in ounces of water each day, it’s safe to say many of us are chronically dehydrated and as Rocko’s song lyric says “we don’t even know it”. When we are drinking enough water it curbs our appetite so we don’t over eat. Drinking water also says us money on all the sugary drinks on the market that are often what we choose to wet our whistles due to the drug effect of the high sugar, high fructose corn syrup content of most beverages sold in the hood. We can save our money and our internal organs by saying no to the liquid sugar caffiene crack juice aka sodas and artificial energy drinks and just sip on nature’s good old original elixir -H20!

oh…Bottle water getting too expensive? Get a basic filter for your tap, some for as low as $20 bucks and like Kendrick Lamar’s song says “pour up, drank!”


In summary, the main thing to remember for eating good on a hood budget is that it is doable! People often say things are not possible that they haven’t truly dedicated themselves to figuring out. Many of us say it’s too expensive to eat healthy but we spend and waste a lot of money that could have been spent in a wiser manner. The reason that many of us think health food is expensive is because we are not clear on what health food is. Health food is not going to Whole Foods and stocking your pantry with fancy processed boxes and packages of this and that. Health food is simple and is the least expensive most nutrient dense food in the grocery store, basically fruits and vegetables, beans and simple whole grains. Those are affordable staple foods and even on a food stamp budget (I know from experience) have been scientifically applauded for their health benefits.

It’s important that we not be intimidated by all the health information nor swayed by all the different opposing views on what health is. A lot of it is simple common sense, if you will. We know a bag of chips isn’t a health food. We know that McDonald’s isn’t exactly a health food restaurant either. We can begin to take ownership and be ever vigilant in studying and learning all we can to educate ourselves on how to make healthier choices. Do your own research and take ownership for your health. To live a healthy life its not about always depending on the doctors and medications. One has to in essence become a lifelong student of your own holistic health so you can make wise choices for yourself and your families. Most graduating Doctors spend very little class time studying nutrition when getting their degrees. So they may have a lot of knowledge on surgery and medicine but few mainstream minded doctors are trained in Nutrition. They are trained to diagnose symptoms and prescribe medication, for the most part. However, a holistic nutritionist (as opposed to even a conventional nutritionist) is trained to help us understand the ways in which our food choices can help us heal and keep us healthy without the use of medicines and surgeries.

As mentioned, its important to plan ahead and have a weekly goal and vision on the meals and needs your family has so that we are making less impulsive decision when hunger strikes and more pre-planned long term health affirming choices based on wise consideration and preparation before hand. When we cook in bulk for the week it’s one of the biggest helpers in saving money and eating less fast food and junk food. With realistic budgeting we can see what we really have to work with and choose consciously to value our health over things. Each season nature gives us plenty of fresh foods to nourish us in harmony with our environment and these foods are plentiful in there natural seasons so they are less expensive.

And lastly, but not leastly, we need to realize that our taste buds are conditioned and can be re-conditioned. When we only eat for taste we become slaves to taste alone. And as we learn from seeing far to many of our relatives sick and miserable and overweight and diseased, eating for taste without regard to health leads to self destruction. We can eat healthy on a hood budget. We deserve the best and we can start living like we understand our value by choosing to adopt healthier habits. When the hood is strong, we are truly unstoppable. Salute!