Omowale Adewale (vegan): A Peaceful Fighter for a Just World, Part 2 of 2

Having grown up in Brooklyn, where the community members were always very politically aware and engaged, it is no surprise that Wale uses his activism skills to bring veganism and animal-people rights to the public, especially to people of color and other population groups who may have been marginalized. Another huge impact that Wale helped bring to the Black community is the Black VegFest in Brooklyn, which he founded in 2018. It is an event to nurture and support vegan beginners and provide opportunities and new realities for veteran vegans.

Wale has been to many VegFests in New York City, and what he noticed was that there were hardly any Black vendors. That changed soon after the establishment of Black VegFest. “70% of our festival is attended by Black people. A lot of the people were not vegan before. That's what we wanted to do. We don't want to just speak to the choir. We made that impact on people. People essentially end up signing up, start following Black VegFest, started asking for more events. Also, other places around the world started popping up with their own Black VegFest.”

As an enthusiastic father of three, Wale certainly does a wonderful job of educating his children to be compassionate, by teaching them that being vegan also means not to disregard animal-people. “When you stop eating animals, essentially, you become better. You’re going to benefit [at] the same time as the animals benefit.”

Humans are the deadliest animals on Earth. Each year, humans kill more than 72 billion land animal-people for food, which is over 900% of its own population, and at least one trillion fish-people. Worst of all, humans also kill their own kind and rank second behind mosquito-people as the deadliest to humans!

Our beloved Supreme Master Ching Hai recently shared some of Her thoughts on this as follows: “All this is because of the killing karma; Humans’ karma is too heavy. Humans’ violence is so overwhelmingly… just overwhelmingly huge. First of all, just stop killing humans and animal-people. I hope people will wake up and remember God, and give thanks every day, and be grateful, be humble, and change their way of life.”