Black vegan rhetoric: race, healing, and conflict in Black women’s blog posts

Abstract

ABSTRACT Making intersectional interventions within ecofeminism and rhetorical studies, this essay examines Black women’s vegan rhetoric on the website Black Vegans Rock! We argue that Black women’s vegan rhetoric includes two primary themes. First, their vegan rhetoric reveals how Black women find healing and love through veganism. In a world that shows little compassion for their needs, Black women turn to veganism to embrace radical acts of self-love and heal from trauma caused by misogynoir. Second, their vegan rhetoric underscores the challenges of Black women’s self-identification. Black women must navigate the whiteness of vegan spaces and restrictive social norms involving their body and hair, creating hurdles for Black women’s existence in both mainstream (white) vegan movements and Black communities. Through our analysis, we chart Black women’s decolonial ecological practices, which continue to go substantially understudied in ecofeminist and rhetorical studies scholarship.