Hey you — the McRacist munching on a Big Mac. And you, the Royal Racist eating a Burger King Whopper: Listen up.
You probably didn’t know that the act of eating meat is akin to racial oppression. So let me enlighten you. A self-described “Racialized Ethical Vegan” named Sinem Ketenci has taken Toronto’s Ryerson University to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal because her fellow Ryersonians aren’t keen on her pro-veganist postgraduate work. It’s an anti-veganist blackballing that she chalks up to everybody being big meat-eating racists.
“This systemic discrimination and harassment that silences marginalized minority peoples’ voices, such as me as a Racialized Ethical Vegan, is a serious threat towards freedom of speech and freedom of belief,” she argues. “I believe that the faculty’s reaction has its basis in the strict religious belief of ‘men’s domination over animals’ that racialized people’s suffering should not be spoken about in the same context of animal suffering and that sympathy for animal suffering is not as important as sympathy for racialized peoples’ suffering.”
But Ryerson is sticking to its guns. According to Ms. Ketenci, a school official (presumably a carnivore) responded to her accusation by very racistly accusing Ms. Ketenci herself of racism. To which Ms. Ketenci (who was born in Turkey, which practices an especially delicious skewer-based, doner/kebabic form of Anatolian racism) responded: “How am I being racist if ‘race’ is a part of my identity?”
Such a good question. Really makes you think. But the larger issue is this: How long must Ryerson students toil under the reactionary carno-racist, vego-phobic academic syndicate run by Jennifer Peto, Judy Rebick and Alan Sears? Rise up, campus vegans, for you have your champion: Say the words “Sinem Ketenci” with a mouth full of alfalfa, and it sounds a lot like “Rosa Parks.”