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

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I have been reading the writings of Aph and Syl Ko since the beginnings of APHRO-ISM and Black Vegans Rock as blog sites.

Syl Ko provides a crucial perspective to the movements seeking to secure rights for humans and nonhumans alike. Back then it was already very exciting to see people coming out with ideas that were not only tackling topics at the root of huge fighting and divisions between vegan, animal lib, and social justice communities, but doing so in fresh new ways. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Rather than taking an intersectional approach, where the two separate movements supposedly ‘meet’, Ko posits a multidimensional angle which recognises the inextricability of the ideologies from the start. So much to dig into and some exciting ideas for how the mainstream animal rights movement can adapt to be more effective, inclusive and important.But maybe racial thinking actually means to judge beings differently based on their race, rather than simply to acknowledge race? Author Aph Ko, states in the opening of this book, that she and co-author, Syl Ko, intended for "Aphro-ism" to read like “an intellectual journal between two sisters” and that is exactly what it feels like. There’s no better metaphor for the failures of white supremacist capitalism than mortar, since it is the white slime that holds stone together. The Ko sister's work challenged me deeply and aided me--encouraged me to reflect (which they promote as a form of activism) as well as inspired me to action. If we use the existing framework or model—the established mindset—to articulate a “solution” to a problem that that model sustains, in what way are we “dismantling”?

Aphro-ism was described by Black Youth Project as "conceptualiz[ing] veganism in a way that de-centers whiteness and critiques the intersection of colonialism, race-thinking, and animality.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 oppressions, and offer conceptual ways of moving forward expressive of Afrofuturism and black veganism.