Answering "White Privilege" (Vs. Joey Carbstrong!)
24 May 2018 [link youtube]
Vegans should be prepared to deal with questions of how our claims clash with traditional, indigenous culture —with or without the language of "privilege". We need to be prepared for this type of rhetoric because Veganism is a challenge to every cultural tradition: indigenous or not, white or not, privileged or not. Here's how I address it —in contrast to Joey Carbstrong.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
bonus yen I personally would ask you do
you think culture dictates morality like I like it come on expect both explicitly and implicitly a large part of what we deal with in veganism are questions of cultural change how do you stimulate a change in modern Western culture so it's interesting that so many vegans deal with it so poorly when they're taken out of the the familiar confines of Western culture and you know or just challenged by saying hey what about Aboriginal Australian culture what about indigenous culture here are their what about a contrast between more than one particular type of culture we should be totally self confident and comfortable in dealing with these questions but it seems that many of us are not now I have addressed this on the channel before a relatively popular video on my channel ie popular when you consider how obscure and specific the subject matter is was titled quote stop treating Native Americans like infants close quote and that video which you can look up I'm gonna say it's it's impressive that over 2,000 people watched it because this is a really specific question that I think only would be asked within the vegan movement but vegan activist thinking about how they can broach and cope with these ideas and these challenges how they can deal with challenges when they either come from white Western people offering the traditions of indigenous peoples as a justification for modern white Western people just continuing what's traditional for them also but how do you deal with it when these questions comments or complaints come from people who are themselves members of indigenous minority cultures whether in the United States Canada or in this case Australia we don't have expansion yeah honey to make that choice a constitutional necessary value judgment on things that made necessary me like part of a culture like my mother country teachers called Gina and it's like an important part of their culture bit they realized like becoming a patandjill in English be respectfully and they hated it like once you judgment on that and when they can't make that choice to like have it be a meeting or like incentive they'll tell those people that they're necessarily worthless because you complement as with every single question that Joey took from the audience in this video my reply my answer if I had been there if I have been the one doing the Q&A session is completely utterly different not just in terms of style but also in terms of substance when this particular student challenges me if hypothetically if I'm the one taking the the question that a vegan diet is a privilege I would absolutely embrace that fact I would say yes it is a privilege washing your hands with soap and water is a privilege brushing your teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste is a privilege and I hope that you with your tribe with your hometown wherever it is you come from as an indigenous person because this person identifies as connected to some and digital indigenous group of people within Australia I hope all of your people have access to soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes even though it's utterly alien it's your tradition and in fact if either the government or the free market is feeling to provide your people with access to soap and water hygiene the real basic fundamental benefits of science that modern Western civilization now it takes for granted I think that would be a travesty and I would get up on my soapbox and get articles in the newspaper saying hey here's this group of people whether they're on a native Reservation in Canada or in maybe Northwest Australia or something here's a group of people who don't even have even have access to soap and toothpaste this is terrible this is unspeakable so yes it is a privilege yes it's something that's the the product of scientific progress in recent centuries and it's something we're discussing here and now with reference to the future I think it's very important in all these discussions to shift them towards an aesthetic of Futurity I'm not gonna sit here and debate with you what I would do if I were born 500 years ago or 1000 years ago when technologically in many cases there were no substitutes for for example leather today leather is completely obsolete but certainly an argument to be made that one thousand years ago was impossible to have an entirely vegan society because of the ways in which civilizations relied on the exploitation of animals for labour and for these kinds of raw materials but regardless whether or not it was possible 1,000 years ago it was desirable and today it's not just desirable it's attainable and yes I'd like you and your people in the next 1000 years to join in the benefits of this the same way I'm inviting you to and join in using soap toothbrushes toothpaste and so on this is a positive sign document in relation to challenges to cultural traditions for all of us even within Europe when people first encountered the technology of soap it was a challenge to our cultural traditions people first encountered toothpaste and when people first learned that tobacco was terrible for them and there's two waves of that when they first encountered tobacco that's it that's recorded history and then when they discovered the tobacco wasn't good for your health it had no medicinal properties that was actually terrible for yourself these were these were all challenges to cultural tradition one after another we live in an era with changing attitudes towards tobacco changing attitudes towards alcohol and yes fundamentally changing attitudes towards meat agriculture animal ethics ecology etc these are things are changing these are things we have to question looking ahead to the future these aren't value judgments on the past and traditions of your people and they're not really value judgments on the past and tradition of my people I used to study Korean a Jib way at First Nations University Canada where sometimes everybody else in the room was indigenous except me you know there were a couple white people I have no Native American ancestry but you know I'd be certain of these people remember at one point I said to somebody came up spontaneously conversation I said you know you do realize that my people also used to hunt with bows and arrows like they would be talking about these things as if it were a unique problem or unique legacy or a unique ethical burden they were dealing with in their culture alone it's like no the history of England also was built on hunting and specifically archery archery is a huge part of the cultural tradition and so on in England you know these are also you know traditions where we had to adapt and you know they were once a huge huge part of our identity all right this is sort of the positive side of it now the negative side is because with these types of discussions about culture the selection of examples is is really very important it's to look at example like circumcision circumcision is not unique to Judaism it's not unique to Islam it's not unique to the monotheistic religions the Aboriginal people of Australia have horrifying traditions of male circumcision truly horrifying and the same type of language employed by this question here the same type of rhetoric can be used to justify male circumcision as a cultural tradition right this is most basic terrifying unforgiveable thing of you know mutilating the genitals of a newborn baby or a young child right it can be justified in the same way should it be justified will it be justified isn't it a very different thing to rationalize it when looking back historically and say well why did our people do this in the past why did this group of people do this in the best and today here and now to try to rationalize it and enforce it on children looking forward in the name of tradition right yes the discovery of modern medical science is a challenge to these traditions but one of the worst ways you can evade the implications of modernity of rational and scientific thinking is precisely to try to offer excuses for tradition in the guise of scientific reasoning and that's going on within Judaism Christianity and Islam now for more than a century people trying to claim that circumcision can be carried out for hygienic reasons for medical reasons that it's a legitimate form of surgery or medical procedure and it's not it's not a legitimate medical procedure it's not even a legitimate form of cosmetic surgery this is something that removes about 50% of the nerve endings and the penis this is something that does permanent physical damage to infants and that can only be justified by appealing to a mode of magical superstitious reasoning that people today rightly feel ashamed of yeah so within Australia for the Aboriginal people of Australia they look back at their history and they have this truly nightmare-inducing tradition of male circumcision you can google it if you want to you might prefer not to it's horrifying to behold what their circumcision tradition entails they had a long history of this and the question is today should this not merely be part of the past but should this be part of the present in the future ok so this is a challenge to ethical assumptions that every culture in the world has to deal with we all have to take responsibility for the decisions we're making here and now with the access to information that we have here and now but what could be more absurd what could be more hypocritical and indeed what could be more evil than to say that refusing circumcision that to live without circumcision is merely a form of white privilege that casts aspersions and casts a negative judgment on an indigenous tradition and by the same token what could be more absurd than saying using hand soap using toothpaste using toothbrushes that this is merely a form of white cultural imperialism that's going to make indigenous people feel ashamed of their own traditions of their own traditional lifestyles what could be more absurd than making the excuse for eating meat than to claim as this young man claims that this is part of their traditional culture and how dare you how dare you hold up a contrast between that indigenous tradition and frankly an outside set of influences and ideas I'm gonna take a moment here to answer a hypothetical objection to this video and it's hypothetical objection I'm unlikely to get because I've already made so many other videos stating what my political position on indigenous culture is First Nations culture First Nations languages the Cree in the edge it's error within Canada especially but it's an issue I've dealt with in Cambodia Laos even Taiwan a lot of these countries do have the problem of colonized indigenous native minority people definitely where I was just living in Yunnan fascinating an important area of politics in the 21st century that I care about passionately but someone might object if this the first video they'd ever seen in my channel someone might hypothetically object do you see nothing positive in these indigenous cultures do you see nothing worth saving in native traditions and of course you could ask the same thing about Judaism do I see nothing worth saving in Judaism just because circumcision is bad my answer to that is twofold one when you think of culture do you think of a weakness or a strength I'm dead serious really think about it is your culture something holding you back is it dead weight is it a burden you're gonna place on the shoulders of the next generation is it something bad and shameful and awkward or is it something that actually makes your life more meaningful more wonderful I mean look at homophobia almost every culture in the world not all almost all were intensely homophobic up until just a few decades ago and this had to be challenged and you know what's interesting people thought that was a straw people really thought having an intensely homophobic culture that celebrated a certain narrow idea of masculinity made them strong made them tough need them better as a people and that's been challenged in just the last few decades and know we can have a culture that's warm and tolerant and accepting of homosexuals in a broad range of sexual identity expressions sort of sexual orientations and we can still be as tough as we want to be you know we can still win at the Olympic Games or fight pointless Wars and drop bombs all over the world whatever you can butch it up as much as you want within a non homophobic paradigm instead of but people really thought that was a strength and it was a big change in our way of thinking was a big change in our cultural paradigm to see that instead as a weakness all right so it's tough to think about these things that way it's tough to think is circumcision a strength or weakness old old pseudo scientific ideas handed down from your grandmother about health and hygiene and medicine all kinds of cultural traditions over the world maybe it makes you feel strong to carry on this tradition eating something that turns out to be poisonous the people used to think was a medicine you know doing all kinds of thing is this a weakness or a strength and then point to is if you're going to go through that cultural tradition and engage in cherry-picking if you're gonna engage in the cynical selection of some elements of that cultural tradition to be preserved as millions of Christians do they leaf through the Bible and they cherry-pick the elements of biblical Christianity that they want to preserve the 21st century and the elements that either want to rationalize make excuses for or simply ignore if there's something worth saving in Judaism or a Native American culture or Aboriginal strong culture it's not it's not going to be circumcision is it it's not going to be slavery is it it's not going to be the status of women or the status of homosexuals and any of these culture traditions is it so given that we're cynically engaged in scrutinizing these traditions to select what's in and what's out by a 21st century standard can we now start to engage in an honest and open and discussion of to what extent animal sacrifice hunting and meat-eating belong in the dustbin of history along with homophobia and the other oppressive elements of that traditional culture one discard and to what extent it's going to belong in the 21st century evolution
you think culture dictates morality like I like it come on expect both explicitly and implicitly a large part of what we deal with in veganism are questions of cultural change how do you stimulate a change in modern Western culture so it's interesting that so many vegans deal with it so poorly when they're taken out of the the familiar confines of Western culture and you know or just challenged by saying hey what about Aboriginal Australian culture what about indigenous culture here are their what about a contrast between more than one particular type of culture we should be totally self confident and comfortable in dealing with these questions but it seems that many of us are not now I have addressed this on the channel before a relatively popular video on my channel ie popular when you consider how obscure and specific the subject matter is was titled quote stop treating Native Americans like infants close quote and that video which you can look up I'm gonna say it's it's impressive that over 2,000 people watched it because this is a really specific question that I think only would be asked within the vegan movement but vegan activist thinking about how they can broach and cope with these ideas and these challenges how they can deal with challenges when they either come from white Western people offering the traditions of indigenous peoples as a justification for modern white Western people just continuing what's traditional for them also but how do you deal with it when these questions comments or complaints come from people who are themselves members of indigenous minority cultures whether in the United States Canada or in this case Australia we don't have expansion yeah honey to make that choice a constitutional necessary value judgment on things that made necessary me like part of a culture like my mother country teachers called Gina and it's like an important part of their culture bit they realized like becoming a patandjill in English be respectfully and they hated it like once you judgment on that and when they can't make that choice to like have it be a meeting or like incentive they'll tell those people that they're necessarily worthless because you complement as with every single question that Joey took from the audience in this video my reply my answer if I had been there if I have been the one doing the Q&A session is completely utterly different not just in terms of style but also in terms of substance when this particular student challenges me if hypothetically if I'm the one taking the the question that a vegan diet is a privilege I would absolutely embrace that fact I would say yes it is a privilege washing your hands with soap and water is a privilege brushing your teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste is a privilege and I hope that you with your tribe with your hometown wherever it is you come from as an indigenous person because this person identifies as connected to some and digital indigenous group of people within Australia I hope all of your people have access to soap and toothpaste and toothbrushes even though it's utterly alien it's your tradition and in fact if either the government or the free market is feeling to provide your people with access to soap and water hygiene the real basic fundamental benefits of science that modern Western civilization now it takes for granted I think that would be a travesty and I would get up on my soapbox and get articles in the newspaper saying hey here's this group of people whether they're on a native Reservation in Canada or in maybe Northwest Australia or something here's a group of people who don't even have even have access to soap and toothpaste this is terrible this is unspeakable so yes it is a privilege yes it's something that's the the product of scientific progress in recent centuries and it's something we're discussing here and now with reference to the future I think it's very important in all these discussions to shift them towards an aesthetic of Futurity I'm not gonna sit here and debate with you what I would do if I were born 500 years ago or 1000 years ago when technologically in many cases there were no substitutes for for example leather today leather is completely obsolete but certainly an argument to be made that one thousand years ago was impossible to have an entirely vegan society because of the ways in which civilizations relied on the exploitation of animals for labour and for these kinds of raw materials but regardless whether or not it was possible 1,000 years ago it was desirable and today it's not just desirable it's attainable and yes I'd like you and your people in the next 1000 years to join in the benefits of this the same way I'm inviting you to and join in using soap toothbrushes toothpaste and so on this is a positive sign document in relation to challenges to cultural traditions for all of us even within Europe when people first encountered the technology of soap it was a challenge to our cultural traditions people first encountered toothpaste and when people first learned that tobacco was terrible for them and there's two waves of that when they first encountered tobacco that's it that's recorded history and then when they discovered the tobacco wasn't good for your health it had no medicinal properties that was actually terrible for yourself these were these were all challenges to cultural tradition one after another we live in an era with changing attitudes towards tobacco changing attitudes towards alcohol and yes fundamentally changing attitudes towards meat agriculture animal ethics ecology etc these are things are changing these are things we have to question looking ahead to the future these aren't value judgments on the past and traditions of your people and they're not really value judgments on the past and tradition of my people I used to study Korean a Jib way at First Nations University Canada where sometimes everybody else in the room was indigenous except me you know there were a couple white people I have no Native American ancestry but you know I'd be certain of these people remember at one point I said to somebody came up spontaneously conversation I said you know you do realize that my people also used to hunt with bows and arrows like they would be talking about these things as if it were a unique problem or unique legacy or a unique ethical burden they were dealing with in their culture alone it's like no the history of England also was built on hunting and specifically archery archery is a huge part of the cultural tradition and so on in England you know these are also you know traditions where we had to adapt and you know they were once a huge huge part of our identity all right this is sort of the positive side of it now the negative side is because with these types of discussions about culture the selection of examples is is really very important it's to look at example like circumcision circumcision is not unique to Judaism it's not unique to Islam it's not unique to the monotheistic religions the Aboriginal people of Australia have horrifying traditions of male circumcision truly horrifying and the same type of language employed by this question here the same type of rhetoric can be used to justify male circumcision as a cultural tradition right this is most basic terrifying unforgiveable thing of you know mutilating the genitals of a newborn baby or a young child right it can be justified in the same way should it be justified will it be justified isn't it a very different thing to rationalize it when looking back historically and say well why did our people do this in the past why did this group of people do this in the best and today here and now to try to rationalize it and enforce it on children looking forward in the name of tradition right yes the discovery of modern medical science is a challenge to these traditions but one of the worst ways you can evade the implications of modernity of rational and scientific thinking is precisely to try to offer excuses for tradition in the guise of scientific reasoning and that's going on within Judaism Christianity and Islam now for more than a century people trying to claim that circumcision can be carried out for hygienic reasons for medical reasons that it's a legitimate form of surgery or medical procedure and it's not it's not a legitimate medical procedure it's not even a legitimate form of cosmetic surgery this is something that removes about 50% of the nerve endings and the penis this is something that does permanent physical damage to infants and that can only be justified by appealing to a mode of magical superstitious reasoning that people today rightly feel ashamed of yeah so within Australia for the Aboriginal people of Australia they look back at their history and they have this truly nightmare-inducing tradition of male circumcision you can google it if you want to you might prefer not to it's horrifying to behold what their circumcision tradition entails they had a long history of this and the question is today should this not merely be part of the past but should this be part of the present in the future ok so this is a challenge to ethical assumptions that every culture in the world has to deal with we all have to take responsibility for the decisions we're making here and now with the access to information that we have here and now but what could be more absurd what could be more hypocritical and indeed what could be more evil than to say that refusing circumcision that to live without circumcision is merely a form of white privilege that casts aspersions and casts a negative judgment on an indigenous tradition and by the same token what could be more absurd than saying using hand soap using toothpaste using toothbrushes that this is merely a form of white cultural imperialism that's going to make indigenous people feel ashamed of their own traditions of their own traditional lifestyles what could be more absurd than making the excuse for eating meat than to claim as this young man claims that this is part of their traditional culture and how dare you how dare you hold up a contrast between that indigenous tradition and frankly an outside set of influences and ideas I'm gonna take a moment here to answer a hypothetical objection to this video and it's hypothetical objection I'm unlikely to get because I've already made so many other videos stating what my political position on indigenous culture is First Nations culture First Nations languages the Cree in the edge it's error within Canada especially but it's an issue I've dealt with in Cambodia Laos even Taiwan a lot of these countries do have the problem of colonized indigenous native minority people definitely where I was just living in Yunnan fascinating an important area of politics in the 21st century that I care about passionately but someone might object if this the first video they'd ever seen in my channel someone might hypothetically object do you see nothing positive in these indigenous cultures do you see nothing worth saving in native traditions and of course you could ask the same thing about Judaism do I see nothing worth saving in Judaism just because circumcision is bad my answer to that is twofold one when you think of culture do you think of a weakness or a strength I'm dead serious really think about it is your culture something holding you back is it dead weight is it a burden you're gonna place on the shoulders of the next generation is it something bad and shameful and awkward or is it something that actually makes your life more meaningful more wonderful I mean look at homophobia almost every culture in the world not all almost all were intensely homophobic up until just a few decades ago and this had to be challenged and you know what's interesting people thought that was a straw people really thought having an intensely homophobic culture that celebrated a certain narrow idea of masculinity made them strong made them tough need them better as a people and that's been challenged in just the last few decades and know we can have a culture that's warm and tolerant and accepting of homosexuals in a broad range of sexual identity expressions sort of sexual orientations and we can still be as tough as we want to be you know we can still win at the Olympic Games or fight pointless Wars and drop bombs all over the world whatever you can butch it up as much as you want within a non homophobic paradigm instead of but people really thought that was a strength and it was a big change in our way of thinking was a big change in our cultural paradigm to see that instead as a weakness all right so it's tough to think about these things that way it's tough to think is circumcision a strength or weakness old old pseudo scientific ideas handed down from your grandmother about health and hygiene and medicine all kinds of cultural traditions over the world maybe it makes you feel strong to carry on this tradition eating something that turns out to be poisonous the people used to think was a medicine you know doing all kinds of thing is this a weakness or a strength and then point to is if you're going to go through that cultural tradition and engage in cherry-picking if you're gonna engage in the cynical selection of some elements of that cultural tradition to be preserved as millions of Christians do they leaf through the Bible and they cherry-pick the elements of biblical Christianity that they want to preserve the 21st century and the elements that either want to rationalize make excuses for or simply ignore if there's something worth saving in Judaism or a Native American culture or Aboriginal strong culture it's not it's not going to be circumcision is it it's not going to be slavery is it it's not going to be the status of women or the status of homosexuals and any of these culture traditions is it so given that we're cynically engaged in scrutinizing these traditions to select what's in and what's out by a 21st century standard can we now start to engage in an honest and open and discussion of to what extent animal sacrifice hunting and meat-eating belong in the dustbin of history along with homophobia and the other oppressive elements of that traditional culture one discard and to what extent it's going to belong in the 21st century evolution