Barefoot Vegan Mag Jan_Feb 2017

Our psychological wounds can cause us to lash out at
ourselves and others, even those we’re working with
for a common cause and whose values of kindness we
claim to share. Acknowledging our personal and
collective shadow is key to learning to embrace
compassion for all, writes Katrina Fox.
“You’re a filthy little Arab who should go back to where
you came from.” So said my adoptive mother for the first
time when I was age six, after I’d spilled crumbs on the
floor from a biscuit I was eating. “No wonder your real
mother didn’t want you.” The impact of this cruel remark
was instant and lasted for decades. As humans are wont
to do, I made it mean that I was unlovable and would
never be good enough.
Factual inaccuracies aside (my birth father was
Persian, not an Arab), it was—unbeknownst to me at the
time—my first experience with racism. The idea that
anyone who wasn’t a white English person was inferior
was further solidified by my dad’s constant referencing of
“bloody wogs” to describe black people. I quickly learned
to deny my ethnic heritage right into my 20s—if anyone
asked, I said I was part Spanish or Italian. I even went so
far as to have a nose job in 1993, partly to remove a small
bump, but I can’t deny I was pleased the adjustment
made me look less obviously half Iranian.
Around the age of 10, in 1976, I became obsessed with
the women in the hit TV show Charlie’s Angels. I started
a scrapbook, and asked my classmates to save any
newspaper or magazine clippings featuring the trio of
glamorous female detectives. In addition, my best friend
Susan and I told everyone we loved each other. It was an
innocent enough comment, but a boy in our class said he
thought we were lesbians. It was the first time I’d heard
the word, and when he explained what it meant, without
any judgment, I was happy to take it on. But when I told
the teacher I was a lesbian, she was horrified and told me
not to say that word again or I’d be sent to the
headmaster to be punished. This was my first experience
with homophobia. And, in his typical uncreative manner,
good old dad confirmed my suspicions that same-sex love
and affection was bad by yelling “bloody poofs” at the TV
screen whenever footballers hugged each other after
one of their teammates scored a goal. Cue more
disempowerment.
My first experience with sexism happened around a
similar time, when I asked to play football and rugby
and was told by both the boys and the teachers that I
couldn’t because I was a girl.
So, before I’d even hit puberty, I’d learned that if
you weren’t white, straight, and male, there was
something wrong with you and you didn’t deserve to
participate in life on an equal footing. Essentially, you
were “lesser than” privileged others, although I didn’t
have the fancy language for it back then.
By age 11, I’d learned that animals had it even
tougher. My jaw literally dropped open when I learned
that the beef burger on my plate had once been part of
a beautiful, living cow. While I was brought up on a
council estate just outside of south London in the UK,
I’d visit my cousin in the country occasionally where
I’d climb over fences into farmers’ fields to stroke the
cows and give them apples, with no clue that they
would be trucked off to an abattoir and killed. Learning
that I’d been ingesting the dead bodies of these gentle
creatures made me feel sick, and I became—without
knowing the word at the time—vegetarian
immediately.
Although I embraced feminism, queer rights and
animal advocacy in my early 20s, and found a plethora
of examples of culturally entrenched sexism, racism,
homophobia, and speciesism, I didn’t make the
connections between these forms of oppression until
much later—almost a decade, in fact, when I was
introduced to veganism by a schoolteacher on an antivivisection
demo. It was finding out about the cruelty
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