7 Inspiring Vegans of Color to Follow Online

People of color are the core of the vegan movement — but you wouldn’t know that based on what’s shown in the mainstream

Björn Jóhann
Tenderly
Published in
5 min readJul 31, 2020

--

Tabitha Brown posing in a kitchen while wearing a bold graphic print dress.
Photo: Tabitha Brown

American vegans are disproportionately BIPOC. While non-whites make up 34% of the US population, they make up 46% of the US vegan population, according to a 2018 survey. Minority voices are eating vegan food, creating vegan recipes, and promoting vegan ideology.

Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian vegans are not followers of this movement, they’re the core of this movement.

Even though veganism is prevalent in minority communities, mainstream images of veganism are typically thin, white women. Men, overweight individuals, and especially BIPOC people are often excluded from the popular narrative. If you fancy a non-scientific experiment, go to Shutterstock and type in “vegan person” into the search bar. Try and guess how many images you will have to sift through before finding a vegan BIPOC representation. (hint: it’s a lot).

So as vegans, especially those like me who are white, it’s a good practice to think about whether people of color are represented in your social media feeds — if you’re not already following them, these influencers are a great place to start.

--

--

Björn Jóhann
Tenderly

A queer, herbivorous, leftist Viking. I write about society, justice, and popular media. UChicago grad.