Aïcha Bouchelaghem ABSTRACT

“Dick Gregory’s Healthist Anti-Racist Vegan Thought”

Aïcha Bouchelaghem, University of Geneva, Switzerland

 

Central to recent intersectional vegan theorizing has been to the challenge to “humanity” as the desirable existential standard. More generally, animal ethics and Black studies have called for post-anthropocentric methodologies. Yet tracing a genealogy of intersectional veganism(s) also requires analyzing how the “human,” while a questionable construct, has contributed to Black vegan thought. Specifically, “human” individual perfectibility – especially through health – significantly informs African American vegan discourse in the 1970s, as illustrated by the comedian and Civil Rights activist Dick Gregory’s Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat (1973). Gregory’s work reconciles early American veganisms with the anti-vegan sentiments of some nineteenth-century African Americans.

 

While anti-slavery veganism dates to eighteenth-century Quakers Benjamin Lay and Joshua Evans, these early theorizations overlooked (enslaved) African Americans. In the autobiographies of Charles Ball (1836) and Harriet Jacobs (1861), denial of access to meat is even said to imperil health and human status (i.e., recognition as a full legal subject). In contrast, the discourse of nineteenth-century African American activist David Ruggles concurs with another strand of early American vegan theorists – alternative health professionals – through their shared interest in the medical treatment hydrotherapy or the water-cure. Historically, then, health achieved through self-reliance is an empowering rhetoric, as African Americans’ lives were neglected by enslavers. In the 1970s, Gregory echoes this observation, arguing that optimal nutrition still correlates with race (and class). His advocacy reiterates a belief in self-help in the face of untrustworthy systems. Through the trope of individual health improvement, then, Gregory constructs a racially inclusive implied readership. Dick Gregory’s Natural Diet combines a humanist rhetoric of physiological self-perfectibility with the vegan principle of non-violence, already preached by the earliest North American intersectional vegans and which Gregory first adopted through his Civil Rights work with Martin Luther King, Jr. The case of Gregory thus suggests that a rhetoric that discursively elevates the “human” can coalesce with a radical vegan anti-racist politics.

 

Keywords: veganism, intersectionality, anti-racism, health, humanism