Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals podcast, sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec, and you can find all our past episodes at our website, HopefortheAnimalspodcast.org. We have a really special guest today. I’m going to be interviewing Michelle Rojas-Soto. She is with an organization called Encompass that’s a racial equity organization working in the animal advocacy movement, and I really think you’re gonna get a lot out of this interview. I know that I learned a lot.
But first, before we get to the interview, this month, February is Black History Month, and I wanted to point out some vegans of color or people of the global majority. This is actually a new term that I’ve just learned from Encompass that we can and should use instead of people of color, and Michelle we’ll be unpacking this term later in the show. But just briefly, we think in the US people of color as being a minority, but that’s a very Eurocentric framing, since black and brown and indigenous people make up 80% of the world’s population so they are a majority globally. Hence the term, the global majority, and Michelle will be giving us some more information about this term later in the interview. So, we have vegans in our recent history who have been making a fantastic contribution to the vegan movement who might not get the same recognition as others do. So I wanted to feature a few here, and then we’ll get into the interview.
The first is Monique Koch of the Brown Vegan Podcast, and I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing her last name correctly. It’s K-O-C-H. Monique has been hosting this podcast for many years now, I think it’s been like five years or more and I love her show, it’s informative, she tackles community issues as well as self care and wellness issues. So if you are someone who likes podcasts and you probably are since you’re listening to this podcast, I recommend the Brown Vegan Podcast with Monique Koch.
Another person I want to feature is Dr. Milton Mills. Dr. Mills is an ER doctor, critical care doctor and a longtime vegan and plant based nutrition advocate, and he has really been just a wealth of information during the pandemic and promoting real science which I appreciate very much. He’s very active on social media, and speaks at events frequently. His website’s called Plant Based Nation. And you can find all his lectures and videos there. He’s very knowledgeable, so I encourage you to check out Dr. Milton Mills for some great nutrition and health information.
I also want to talk about someone I just learned about and that is Iye Bako on Instagram. Her handle on Instagram, I’ll just spell it’s her first name I-Y-E loves life, so ‘Iye loves life’ is her handle, and she was recently a guest on the Bearded Vegans Podcast, that’s how I learned about her and I thought she really had some awesome stuff to say, and she has started an online platform called Vegans Against All Oppressions. It’s an online community, I think she co-founded it, and it’s an online community to share information resources for anti-oppression work and animal advocacy. On the site they say they are “… an international vegan coalition working to transform and confront oppressive structures and human society today. We facilitate human and non-human animal activism through our network. We aim to change the narrative around veganism to help create a better future for our planet.” So, you should check that out, Vegans Against All Oppressions, the website is we are VAAO, the VAAO, of course, standing for Vegans Against All Oppressions, wearevaao.org. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes.
So I just want to say that caring about other oppressions, of all beings oppressions, will only strengthen our movement. It’s really easy for us to fall into that ‘animals only’ vegans only focus, and I totally get it. We feel deeply the suffering of the billions of billions of animals and the terrible cruelties that they endure, but educating ourselves about other oppressions and other abuses of power and suppressions of rights, it doesn’t mean taking energy away from the animals. On the contrary, I really believe that it enhances our activism, it increases our outreach, it makes us even more effective. Our movement is only as strong as the diversity of voices within it. So today we’re also going to feature a fantastic organization called Encompass, so let’s get to the interview.
Hope:
Alright, so I want to introduce our guest for today. Today we have Michelle Rojas-Soto, Michelle has over 18 years of leadership experience in nonprofit and social enterprise work always focused on equity systematic change, and community building. She holds two master’s degrees, one in Biology and the other in Business Administration. She is currently the Social Justice Director at the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council and the chair for the inclusion committee for a Parent Advisory Council. She also serves on the Glendale police community advisory panel, and on the Coalition for an Anti-Racist Glendale. She was the founding member of Gender Equality and Animal Rights (GEAR), where she launched the Amplify Career Sponsorship Program for women and gender nonconforming people, and she’s now the managing director for Encompass a racial equality and animal advocacy nonprofit, and I’m just so glad that Michelle has taken the time to talk to us today. Welcome Michelle.
Michelle:
Thank you for having me, Hope.
Hope:
All right, so you are involved in a lot of activist and social work of a really impressive list of all these wonderful groups you’re working with. So what got you into activism? And also, when and why did you go vegan? What’s your story?
Michelle:
Well I’ve been advocating for racial equity for a very long time, from my days in grad school when I was tutoring the children of the custodial staff which were mostly Mexican and Central American heritage. When I had my business I was intentionally hiring unhoused women to try to interrupt that pattern, and I’ve always tried to use whatever powers I’ve had to make things better for the community.
I went vegan almost nine years ago. My sister-in-law was vegan at the time and she implored my husband and I to watch “Forks Over Knives.” And when we finally watched it, it was a Sunday night, we looked at each other and said we really need to make some changes, and we switched our diet overnight for health reasons. Yes, I was very concerned about what I would do to feed a family, because I didn’t think I had the cooking skills to cook vegan but that’s what the library is for. I got lots of cookbooks. After we switched our diet then I really became curious about animal lives and started seeking out books to help me learn about that. And the first book I read was Melanie Joy’s, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. And I also read the Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. And at that point, having that additional knowledge, my commitment to living a vegan life personally became very, very strong beyond any urges or any nostalgia that I had for the food I used to eat and the food I considered to be comfort food.
But even with that change, even though I was very strong in my personal connection, it took me years to become an animal advocate, because I just detected it from the outside to be a very homogeneous place and somewhat hostile place, at times, to people like me, so I really needed to develop my own confidence and my own tough layer of skin to decide to engage in this work.
Hope:
Wow, I’m so glad that you did, and that you found your voice, because we need that and it breaks my heart to hear that it would be a hostile place, that animal rights or veganism, would be a hostile place for anyone. And that is something we’ve got to change, so thank you so much for doing this work. And on that note, what is the connection between racial justice and animal advocacy? How do they intersect?
Michelle:
Yes. Well animal advocacy is about evolving past animal oppression and racial justice is also about evolving past oppression. The roots of all oppression run very deep. It is a very strong, well-nourished system, even in the 21st century, and we are conditioned to notice particular instances of oppression, we notice animal oppression, we notice gender oppression, we notice racial oppression, and we see them as separate, but underneath, the roots of all of those manifestations are the same.
There’s an ideology that there’s a group that’s better than another group. And then there’s the power of the dominant group over all others. That is really the foundation of all of these systems. So when we break down those barriers that keep us from seeing the connections, we start to notice that if we make improvements, we dedicate our efforts to one particular instance, but do nothing to try to make things better in the other instance of oppression, as soon as we met up the pressure from our work, whatever that work is, the system regenerates itself. And up to the 21st century really, through the 20th century, we’ve considered it very important to sort of specialize in our advocacy.
The 21st century advocacy is all about seeing the vital connections between justice issues. And really, then working to break the underlying root causes that have led us here. So our challenge I think as for myself, certainly and the premise of my work in general at Encompass is to help us expand our consciousness to hold multiple issue areas in our hearts and our minds simultaneously.
Hope:
Yeah. And so you mentioned Encompass, tell us about Encompass. What is the work they’re doing? What are their services? Why is this work important? And how do they promote racial equality and animal rights?
Michelle:
Encompass is a small group in terms of staff. We are a group of three. It was created three years ago and our reason for being is to create a racially equitable animal advocacy movement. We’re a nonprofit organization fully committed to helping the animal movement become racially equitable. The professional animal movement is sort of the institutional nonprofit animal movement we know is founded on white supremacy, because all of dominant Western society is built on white supremacy. It’s in the air we breathe from before we are born. And so we are conditioned to think that if we’re not actively trying to uphold white supremacy and racism, then we’re not part of the problem. However, the dominant paradigm is so normalized, we don’t see it anymore. It’s like when you smell a flower, after a few whiffs you don’t notice the fragrance anymore. It becomes part of our day to day, and it becomes part of the background.
And then in animal advocacy, we’re so committed to justice and we think that somehow it protects us from white supremacy. But the truth is that we must actively take steps to evolve past white supremacy in order to be something other than a white supremacy movement. It doesn’t happen by default, there’s no statute of limitations on it, it doesn’t get diluted over time. So in order to be better, we have to actively take steps.
And so Encompass exists to support animal organizations and leaders who are ready to take active steps to evolve and to create racially equitable culture inside the organizations, and in the movement as a whole. And we also exist to support advocates of the global majority directly. People who like me were at risk or are at risk of leaving the movement because of racism they experience in the course of doing work for animals. To support organizations, we provide consulting racial equity assessments training and coaching, and to support the advocates of the global majority, we provide community building activities and skills development training.
Hope:
Yeah. And can you give a specific example of how you work with an organization?
Michelle:
Yes. So typically we are called because either a member of leadership or a member of the staff has noticed some dis-grumblings in the organization or maybe they realize racial equity should be an area of focus but they don’t quite know how to start, or perhaps they’re hiring for a position that’s open, and they’re noticing that they’re getting very few people of the global majority applying. And so they reach out to us because they notice symptoms, so to speak, and we help them take a step back, develop some racial literacy to understand the breadth and depth of racial equity work, understand how we got here, so that when we create strategies for addressing it in the organization, we’re not chasing symptoms, but we are truly focusing our work on making change at those root levels.
Hope:
So you’re using a term that is new to me, and I actually just heard it for the first time recently and that is the ‘global majority’. Please explain this term, people of the global majority, and should we now be using that instead of people of color and why?
Michelle:
That’s a great question. People of the global majority refers to a black, brown and indigenous people around the world. The term people of color is used in the United States, but it’s meaningless in other parts of the world. So even if I tried to talk to a black person in Europe, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about, if I used that term. In the culture it’s not used. And then also, people of color is effectively defining these folks on a whiteness scale, which in and of itself serves to uphold white supremacy. So instead of continuing to promote that through our use of language, because there is a very strong correlation between how our words shape our thinking. We reject that premise and we focus instead on how black, brown, and indigenous people are the majority. Around the world, literally, there are more black, brown and indigenous people than other groups. So ‘global majority’ is a direct reference to that. And I do recommend that we use it in general, because it helps to sort of make our words intentional, and also in the animal movement we are truly concerned about animals around the world and our work for animal advocacy will continue to be more and more global over the next decades. And so in order to facilitate that, we should make sure our language reflects a global intention.
Hope:
And is that the term that is used globally?
Michelle:
So the conversation about racial equity in animal protection is very young. People in my field, in service of other movements, and in service of the for-profit world, etc., are beginning to use the term ‘people of the global majority.’ But again, I think it’s worth it for me to say that our language continues to evolve and the words are imperfect, they’re the best we can come up within a moment in time. And when we learn better, we do better. So the term ‘people of the global majority’ is a step in that direction, but I do not know if it will be the ultimate term that we stay with 50 years from now, but it certainly helps clarify our thinking now. You know, it serves this moment.
Hope:
Well, I will try to shift my language and start using it. So what are some other terms and terminology that we should know about?
Michelle:
One very important term is ‘racial equity,’ so that we know what we’re talking about. Oftentimes we have conversations, and we use words that are sort of layperson’s language. But without taking the time to clarify them, we discover much later that we were talking about different things all along even if we were using the same words. So racial equity is important to define. I define it as being a state of being, where everyone has what they need to succeed. What they need to succeed, not what I need to succeed. And also, a state where racial identity doesn’t predict outcomes. So right now, if I know someone’s race, I can make some assumptions, some educated assumptions about their education level, their income, their career, the status within that career, where they live in the city, etc., on and on. Racial equity is the state we’ll achieve when knowing someone’s race does not help me predict, education, income, etc. And the same is true for any other areas of equity that we’re pursuing, you know, gender equity, same thing. When gender does not predict outcomes, we will have achieved that.
And then a second term that I would recommend is ‘white ally,’ which has become very prominent in recent times. There’s a lot of focus with the awakening of many folks to racial oppression and people, white people wanting to be good allies, and I support that awakening, it is absolutely essential, but I want to challenge white folks who are moved to act, to put themselves at the center of the work, and not at the center of the pain or not at the center of public recognition, but to really own the work itself. And so an ally, by definition, cannot be the owner of the work. We, at Encompass, we’ve followed the lead of some other racial equity leaders, outside the movement, outside the animal movement and begun to use the term, actor, as, as someone who is central to the story of creating change, so that we can have white folks working alongside people of the global majority to deconstruct this current system, and using each and every one of our personal powers to do so.
Hope:
Along these lines, I wanted to ask you about a specific incident, and to get your take on it. Some activist friends of mine on Facebook, they recently posted a photo of a flyer or like a poster that they had made, and it said, All Lives Matter, go vegan. And they had put it up on a telephone pole or something public, and there were a few people, myself included, that commented on the picture on Facebook, and tried to explain that this was now a problematic term that we really shouldn’t be using anymore. And one of the defenses given was that they had made those flyers five years ago. And again, we tried to explain that language evolves, just like what we were talking about, and that this used to be a very common tagline in the animal rights movement. But now, it means something different, it’s a very hurtful statement for a segment of the community and we need to evolve our language and not use it anymore. So, what do you think would be the best thing to do in a situation like this? What would you tell these activists?
Michelle:
I would say that it’s much more important to consider the impact of our actions than the intent. I hear you retelling their perspective about their intent to uplift non-human animals’ lives through their posts. That is a wonderful intent. It sits together with the impact of devaluing the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black Lives Matter movement is critical because Black lives are not valued, are not respected, are not upheld the same as other human lives. And so it is important to highlight Black lives. It is a statement, it is a hashtag that seeks to change that, to disrupt that pattern to change that dynamic. And so when we say things like, All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, we are saying yes, you’re suffering, but Black people are suffering but it’s not as important as something else, and that is extremely painful.
So, if we consider the impact of All Lives Matter, I don’t recommend litigating the past, but if you said it, that’s done. It doesn’t end there. There’s amends that we can make. If there’s learning that happens, and you now see things differently, say that, and why. And that process is extremely powerful, not just for the individual who is having that realization, but for the community around them. We’re conditioned, you know, in this age of Photoshop and everything gets edited, we’re conditioned to see the final product. And it looks perfect. We don’t look at the process behind that and that process of learning and growth is extremely, extremely powerful. So I encourage us all to be more forthcoming with our missteps and our journey, and that’s where the learning comes from. It’s not from seeing someone who did it perfectly. It’s from seeing someone who’s walking just a few steps ahead of you.
Hope:
Yeah, it was something I felt that I wanted to say to them is that you’re saying All Lives Matter, but it doesn’t mean now that All Lives Matter. What you’re saying is there is a segment of the community that doesn’t matter as much. And so it doesn’t have the same meaning, it doesn’t mean what it did before, because even though you were saying All Lives Matter, including animals, I believe very much at the heart of the sentiment is that, yes, All Lives Matter, all human and animal lives matter, but that has completely changed now.
Michelle:
That’s right.
Hope:
Just wanting people to evolve and realize that we need to make changes so that everyone is comfortable and included in our movement.
Michelle:
Yes, and I applaud you for taking the time to reply. Even if you don’t feel like you’re changing someone’s mind in that moment, we do see that they cannot unhear, they cannot unread your comment. And even if you don’t witness a transformation in real time, it plants a seed that might germinate much later, so I’m glad that you took the time to comment, and I think it is an essential part of the work is to take the opportunities that we have in front of us, in our daily lives, to speak up, even if it doesn’t change a policy right then and there, it, but it’s a very important step to get there ultimately. We have to engage as citizens in the everyday. Absolutely.
Hope:
Yeah, and also just being brave and realizing that you may say something that’s not quite right, but it’s important to speak from your heart and do what you can and learn, and maybe you didn’t say it exactly right and you’ll learn what you did wrong and say it right the next time. I’m trying to find that voice myself.
Michelle:
That’s great, you’re doing wonderfully. I can see it, I can hear it already.
Hope:
So I want to ask what you and Encompass has accomplished in 2020?
Michelle:
Yes, so our programs began in late 2019, and so 2020 was really the first year in which all our programs were up and running.
Hope:
Yeah, just in time for a pandemic though.
Michelle:
Oh my goodness. You’re absolutely right. It was an additional challenge, yes. So we are in the process of doing a number of transformational cultural projects and organizations. We’ve conducted a number of racial equity assessments for groups. And we’ve also engaged with some folks on racial equity coaching, similar to executive coaching. This is coaching that’s specifically to help someone who is in leadership and who is actively trying to change their own patterns in service of their leadership of others.
And then with the people of the global majority, we launched a caucus in late 2019, and we’re so surprised and delighted and proud that we now have 130 advocates of the global majority in 23 countries that attend our events for community building and skills development. It’s really wonderful. There’s so much interest in community building and connecting across countries, across languages, and we’ve just begun to scratch the surface with that work. And we will continue to support people of the global majority through community building and a new Executive Leadership Development Program. And also, we are just launching a talent database featuring advocates of the global majority so that recruiters for paid staff positions, board positions, speaking engagements, can more readily identify eager and qualified candidates of the global majority, first and foremost.
Hope:
So, what can listeners of this podcast do to promote racial equity? How can the animal rights and vegan community support and incorporate anti-oppression into our activism and our social media and all that?
Michelle:
There’s so much that we can do. So much, and that’s why I wake up in the morning. There’s always something to do. Racism lives in our systems, in our institutions and in our interpersonal communications one-on-one with each other. And everyone has power, at least at the interpersonal level. So, if you’re a person who is engaging in promoting racial equity for the very first time, ask yourself what you can do to disrupt racism in your day to day conversations. Can you interrupt racist jokes that are told in passing? Can you make amends to someone who, In retrospect you realize you’ve hurt with words in the past? You know, make sure that your black colleague gets heard around the table. You would be surprised how often we hear in the caucus from people who say, I said something in the meeting, and nobody reacted. Then another white person said the same thing, and then they addressed the concern. And it’s something that happens to all of us regardless of where we work. Encompass works in the animal protection movement but the animal protection movement is not special in that regard. These are human dynamics and the human dynamics are the same across this society.
So what can you do to disrupt current patterns? And you don’t need a particular job title to be doing that. However, if you do have leadership power, how can you use it to create equitable strategy and programs and culture? You know, can you convene a group and say this is something that I think our organization needs to be mindful of going forward? We haven’t in the past, but we should, and how do we engage with that now? You know, raising those questions is extremely powerful. You know you mentioned earlier how hard it is to feel like we know what to say. But we often can ask wonderful questions, and we can discover the answers together. So instead of coming at it and saying, You know what, folks, I read 30 books, and now I know exactly what to do, how about you raise the question together. Yes, and have the group discover together. That’s extremely powerful.
Some of us also have financial power, how can we use the financial power to fund people of the goal majority doing work, often grassroots work, and particular communities, how can we use it to fund organizations that are investing in creating equitable programs and campaigns? And there’s many other powers that we can think of if we had more time, you know?
The ultimate answer is, what’s in your control, and what’s in your sphere of influence, and how can you use your platform to advance equity? It takes so many different touch points for people to learn, you know we’re slow learners. And so, if I plant seeds on my end and you plant seeds on your podcast, and on and on and on, we then, truly start to see big changes.
Hope:
Let’s hope so. So does Encompass offer webinars to the general public, not organizations that you’re working with, but more generally so people can learn about these issues?
Michelle:
We offered a webinar in July of 2020, and we do have it recorded. I’m happy to share that with you and your listeners. We also have resources on our website for people who want to learn, either from reading articles or books or watching videos and/or movies. There are so many resources out there for getting engaged. I truly encourage anyone who feels like their time to step in has come, but don’t know where to start, to reach out to me personally and I can help them uncover powers that they may be unaware of, for how to proceed. But I find that even the folks who have taken our trainings, oftentimes at the end of day two, they said, “Oh my goodness, I know so much that I could be doing that I didn’t know two days ago.” And so I say that because even though it feels inaccessible, it really is accessible and it doesn’t take months or years of preparation to be ordered to engage in a meaningful way.
Hope:
Yeah, I would love to put those links to that webinar and to your resources in our show notes, so I’ll be sure to do that. Thank you for that, and for your offer of support for those that want to get involved and learn how to do better and make change in this area. It’s just very important and something we need to focus on more and more, so I appreciate the work you’re doing. Thank you so much. So, Michelle, what gives you hope for the future?
Michelle:
I am very very hopeful. I’m hopeful because the current generation of advocates are very creative. Because in this 21st century we’ve already begun the work of focusing on vital connections between justice issues, between race and gender and animals and abilities and age and location and income. We’ve begun to see those connections and we began to discover new and more powerful strategies to advance equity and justice and health for all beings and the Earth itself. I am convinced that 21st century advocacy is all about vital connections across justice movements, instead of working in silos, and that gives me great hope that we’re going to see tremendous progress and growth in the next 80 years for sure.
Hope:
Nice for systematic change across the board.
Michelle:
Yes, and global change. You know, it will not be nations individually, it will be humanity and it will be, you know, the problems of the earth are impacting us regardless of where we live, not just because of the decisions we made in our own vicinity. You know, the impacts travel far. And so that’s making us understand the ramifications of our inaction and our inaction. And I think that’s a wonderful motivator. And I do see young people being very attuned to that.
Hope:
We do need to wrap it up. This has been a really wonderful discussion. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I’m inspired to do more. Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share before we wrap up?
Michelle:
Yes, I say to people that doing racial equity work does not require an advanced degree, it doesn’t require someone giving you permission to do it, and it is vitally important to our work in animal advocacy. It gives credibility and it strengthens our work in ways that I can foresee, and also in ways that I cannot. And I am really interested and looking forward to working with everyone who feels the same way and everyone who is working to advance all justice causes. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and gives me so much energy, and I know I’m not alone in that. Thank you for giving me the chance to connect with you and with your listeners today.
Hope:
Oh, absolutely. I’m so glad you were able to and thank you for all your work, your wonderful work with Encompass and the greater community and, yeah, we’re just so grateful that you are doing the work you’re doing, and we’re going to change this world for everyone.
Michelle:
Thank you Hope.
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. Going back to the beginning of the interview with Michelle, and something she said, it just really hurts me deeply, to hear someone say that they didn’t feel comfortable coming into the animal advocacy movement or working for animals, even when they wanted to. And it just makes me reflect that there could be so many people that don’t feel comfortable going vegan or learning about veganism, because they also don’t feel comfortable in that space, and it’s something we really need to work on. I know I need to do more. I know that I need to learn more.
I usually ask here at the end of the episode for support in some way for the podcast, but today, in honor of Black History Month, I’m going to ask you to support individuals or groups doing anti-oppression work in the animal advocacy space. To share their content, make donations if you can, support in any way that you can. Like I said in the beginning, our movement is only as strong as the diversity of voices within it. So please educate yourself and others on these important issues and live vegan.
