Rethinking My White Vegan Advocacy at Thanksgiving

By Sarah Withrow King

Five years ago, I wrote an article for CreatureKind called “Turkey Talk: Christians and the Thanksgiving Meal.” Even though all the facts about turkeys remain true, I wouldn’t write that article today.

I confess that the article as it’s written upholds settler colonial ideas, failing to spend even one line of text interrogating participation in U.S. Thanksgiving, a day with origins tied to the mass deaths of the Wampanoag and other Indigenous peoples after my settler colonial ancestors sailed from England and landed at Plymouth. And I neglected to discuss the ways that turkeys, native to Turtle Island and both hunted and domesticated by Indigenous peoples, were hunted to dangerously low population numbers by the same settler colonists and their descendants. Wild turkey populations were then manipulated in order to rebuild numbers to allow hunting by colonizers (regulated by and profiting individual state governments). 

I confess that the article as it’s written gives short shrift to the ways that industrial agriculture in the United States harms BIPOC and marginalized humans. The slaughterhouse workers, migrant and farm workers, farmers, food service workers, residents of communities experiencing food apartheid, and communities fighting for food sovereignty deserve more than six words of attention. And, in fact, repeated failure to center the experiences and struggles of the human creatures in the food system perpetuated an environment in which COVID-19 ran unchecked through communities of employees and families on whose exploited labor our food system depends (here, here, and here, for example). 

I confess that the article as it’s written upholds an approach to animal advocacy that is deeply rooted in white veganism, and a white racial frame. Aph Ko says, “Within a Eurocentric analysis, activists have to spend all of their time ‘connecting’ issues because everything is always and already singular and separate at the root. This should be our first sign that the theory we’re using is designed around the experiences of the white elites, not our own.” For many years, my animal advocacy and writing was rooted in my white privilege, without my awareness of that fact. I assumed it was possible to “focus on the animals” because I assumed my (white, educated, privileged) position was the norm.

I would write a different article today—and I look at Thanksgiving very differently now—thanks to the friends, partners, and teachers I have encountered in the last five years as we have begun to build and shape CreatureKind and as my own approach to advocacy has been reshaped. Of course, my continued oversights and blunders don’t reflect on the quality of my teachers or my own commitment to forging a better path forward than the one on which I’ve come. My teachers include:

  • CreatureKind co-director Rev. Aline Silva

  • Rev. Dr. Christopher Carter

  • The training team at Soul Fire Farm

  • Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley

  • Dr. Elaine Nogueira-Godsey

  • Dr. Loida Martel

  • Mark Charles

  • Writers and teachers who I have learned from, but never met, including: Aph and Syl Ko, Dr. A. Breeze Harper, Eleazar Fernandez, Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Vine Deloria, Ada Maria Isasi Diaz, Layla F. Saad, and Delores S. Williams.

  • And current and past CreatureKind staff and contributors, including Shae Washington, Megan Grigorian, Ashley Lewis, Karla Mendoza, Liesl Stewart, and Rachel Virginia Hester. 

As the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday approaches this year, I lament that the food system in the U.S.—a system which is rapidly spreading its tactics throughout the world—creates hunger, environmental destruction, and brutal suffering for humans and animals alike. I lament my own participation in that system. I lament the miserable lives and violent deaths of 46 million turkeys for the U.S. Thanksgiving meal and the uncounted and unknown number of human deaths in slaughterhouses each year. I lament the continued marginalization and abuse of Indigenous communities and that I live in a home that sits on unceded land of two Native tribes

I commit to working towards food sovereignty in my community, by growing and giving away food and seeds, by supporting Indigenous seed-savers, and by continuing to interrogate my own food practices instead of resting on the laurels of a label (vegan, vegetarian, localvore, etc.).  

I commit to continue the work of recognizing and dismantling the colonial, white supremacist impulses into which I was acculturated, to work with others to reconstruct a new way, and to breathe deeply of the Holy Spirit as I resist the urge to give up or to wallow in shame or self-pity.

And I commit to continue working  to embody the interdependence of God’s whole Creation—to be a creaturekind advocate, in joyful community with God, with God’s Church, and with all creatures.