When Vegans Appropriate Atrocity

The Movement's Race Problem

WHEN VEGANS APPROPRIATE ATROCITY

The Movement’s Race Problem

Quinn Que ❁

In 2015, a vegan Twitter account posted an image that should have been unthinkable: a black man hanging from a tree beside a pig, with the caption “Then we had racism, now we have speciesism.” The post was eventually deleted, but the damage—and the mindset—persists. Years later, mainstream vegan organizations continue to treat the horrors of slavery, lynching, and the Holocaust as rhetorical raw material for animal rights advocacy, apparently unconcerned that these comparisons might alienate the very communities whose suffering they’re instrumentalizing.

The problem isn’t that vegans care about animals. The problem is how they’ve chosen to make their case—by co-opting the language and imagery of human atrocity, flattening centuries of racialized violence into a one-to-one equivalence with industrial farming, and treating historical trauma as metaphor rather than ongoing legacy. It’s rhetorically lazy, historically illiterate, and reveals more about the movement’s priorities than its advocates might care to admit.

White Faces of Animal Rights

Mainstream veganism has a diversity problem. Major animal rights organizations—PETA, Mercy For Animals, the Humane Society of the United States, the Humane League, the Animal Legal Defense Fund—are largely staffed with white executives and carry out the will of largely white funders and priorities. Mercy For Animals’ own leadership acknowledged that larger animal rights organizations remain “predominantly white when it comes to leadership, board members, major funders, and funder advisors,” and that this insularity makes it difficult to attract and retain black talent or create messaging that resonates beyond white audiences.

We will stop here to point out that race is an invention of the 17th and 18th centuries, not a fact of science. “White” and “black” are terms denoting one’s complexion, not one’s essential nature. However, even with that in mind, it is awkward and telling that a movement with wide ranges of complexion in its global adherents would nonetheless have overwhelmingly only one complexion in its visible leadership and advocacy. One can imagine that its cultural sensibilities, and potentially limited perspective, would necessarily follow.

The vegan movement’s penchant for comparing animal agriculture to slavery and the Holocaust isn’t happening in a vacuum; it’s happening in organizations where the people making these decisions have little personal stake in how such comparisons land, and apparently little interest in finding out. In a 2018 study into “burnout” among animal rights activists, written by Paul Gorski, Stacy Lopresti-Goodman, and Dallas Rising, all the non-white activists interviewed cited racism in their organization and the broader movement as a reason for their departure from the movement.

Speciesism, A Morality Trap

At the heart of the comparisons of the killing of animals to crimes against humanity lies “speciesism”—the vegan framework that treats discrimination against animals as morally equivalent to discrimination against humans based on race, sex, or other characteristics. The argument goes: Just as racism arbitrarily privileges one race over another, speciesism arbitrarily privileges humans over other animals. Therefore, farming animals is essentially slavery; slaughterhouses are essentially death camps; and anyone who fails to see this equivalence is trafficking in the same moral blindness that enabled historical atrocities.

This framework is philosophically contested at best and morally obtuse at worst. It collapses distinctions that matter: between the moral status of humans and animals, between systems of racial domination and agricultural practices, between the specific historical contexts of slavery or the Holocaust and contemporary debates about food production. The equation only works if you accept the premise that all sentient beings possess identical moral worth, a claim that’s far from self-evident and certainly not beyond debate.

But even if we granted that premise for argument’s sake, the rhetorical move remains deeply problematic. Using images of lynched black bodies or Holocaust victims to promote veganism doesn’t elevate animals to human status—it reduces human atrocity to a teaching tool. It treats the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, Auschwitz, and Treblinka as metaphorical resources rather than as events with ongoing consequences for living people and communities.

It is again worth wondering whether the makeup of the leading vegan and animal rights groups is to blame for this tone-deafness. One might imagine that a more physically diverse and ideologically free community, rather than one which is heavily homogeneous in appearance and outlook, would avoid such blunders. It certainly seems like a real possibility.

History as Metaphor

The most revealing aspect of these comparisons is their temporal framing: “Then we had racism, now we have speciesism.” The lynching image presents racism as a settled historical matter, a problem successfully addressed, so that we can now turn our attention to the “real” issue of animal suffering. Never mind that racial tensions between groups remain pitched in many areas and contexts. Never mind that antisemitism is on the rise, with some local and national governments bringing in armed police or military personnel to protect Jews from terrorist attacks. Never mind ongoing disparities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity. The vegan appropriation of historical atrocity depends on treating that atrocity as past, freeing it up for metaphorical deployment.

Holocaust survivors themselves have drawn parallels between their experiences and animal agriculture—most notably Alex Hershaft, founder of the Farm Animal Rights Movement, who connects his experiences at Warsaw to his advocacy for animals. But there’s a crucial difference between a survivor choosing to frame their own trauma and an activist instrumentalizing someone else’s. When a predominantly white movement deploys Holocaust imagery to sell veganism, it’s not survivors speaking—it’s opportunism.

The same applies to slavery or racial oppression comparisons. Yes, some Black vegans make connections between plant-based eating and resistance to systems of oppression. Breeze Harper’s concept of “decolonizing the diet” and the work of organizations like Black Vegans Rock represent thoughtful engagement with these intersections. That’s not what PETA was doing with its 2020 Super Bowl ad featuring animals taking a knee with #EndSpeciesism, or what vegan influencer Lauren Perez meant when she declared that “veganism, Black Lives Matter … is all the same fight.” That’s coercive and condescending.

Persistent Blindspots

The racial insensitivity extends beyond inflammatory imagery. Mainstream veganism has a habit of treating foods long central to non-Western cuisines—chickpeas, quinoa, tofu, coconuts—as novel discoveries of the plant-based movement, scrubbed clean of their cultural origins and repackaged for upscale grocery stores. These foods become “superfoods” in vegan marketing, with little acknowledgment that they’ve been dietary staples elsewhere for generations, or that increased Western demand often exploits the labor of indigenous farmers in the Global South.

The persistent theme is clear. The use of slavery and Holocaust comparisons, the co-opted foods, all despite years of criticism, reveals something essential about mainstream veganism: it’s more committed to looking cool, edgy even, than to being legitimately persuasive. More interested in performative moral purity than in building coalitions. The animal rights movement treats itself and its rhetoric as self-evidently correct—and anyone offended by them as simply not enlightened enough to grasp the equivalence.

This is narcissism as activism. Real persuasion requires understanding your audience, anticipating objections, meeting people where they are. Instead, veganism has chosen shock value over strategy, appropriation over alliance-building. The result is a movement that alienates the very communities it claims to care about, not because those communities lack compassion, but because the movement has shown so little of it toward them.

A Better Path

Animal welfare concerns don’t require historical atrocity as a selling point. Factory farming, environmental degradation, health disparities, labor conditions in meatpacking plants? These issues can stand on their own merits without conscripting the Transatlantic slave trade or Auschwitz as rhetorical support. A veganism that respected both animals and humans would make its case without instrumentalizing the suffering of black and Jewish communities. It would center the voices of non-white vegans rather than tokenizing them. It would recognize that food justice involves more than just dietary choice; it requires addressing the economic and systemic barriers that make healthy eating inaccessible for many.

Most fundamentally, it would understand that moral arguments are not strengthened by offensive analogies. If your case for veganism depends on equating a hamburger with a lynching, you don’t have a strong case—you have a cheap provocation. And if years of criticism from the communities you’re exploiting haven’t prompted any reconsideration, you’ve revealed that your commitment to justice begins and ends with non-human animals. A reverse speciesism, if anything. And a dark, anti-human approach to politics.

The vegan movement could be a force for genuine change—environmental, health-related, even ethical. But first, it needs to stop treating human atrocity as a metaphor and start treating human beings as mattering on their own terms.

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Quinn “Edokwin” Que is a journalist, commentator, and artist featured in a variety of publications. His blog, the Edokwin Editorial, and his prolific Twitter (X) account are great sources of insight. A larger portfolio can be found on his Bento. His primary areas of interest are arts, entertainment, philosophy, and politics. His previous essays for the Journal of Free Black Thought include “Reforming the DEI Reforms,” “Racebending—What It Is and Why It Should End,” and “Which Violence Against Black Lives Actually Matters?” He appeared as a guest on a Free Black Thought Podcast episode titled “Race Is Astrology for Melanin Content.”