i was just informed that a vegan company based out of portland, oregon US is claiming to have made a breakthrough in “Asian cuisine.” they premise the necessity for their product based off of ignorant, disrespectful claims -

CLAIM 1: “the number of vegan alternatives [to fish sauce] is staggeringly small” -  to which i say do you think maybe you’re just ignorant? that you didn’t grow up SE asian? so you don’t have access to our vegan fish sauce? are you saying that it doesn’t exist because white people can’t have it? because surely you aren’t so deluded to think that SE asian buddhism didn’t mean that veganism was a thing there long before it was a thing here, in the white american world? do you think that that white supremacy and first world veganism have colluded to make everyone think that non-white vegans don’t exist or that we do but we’re just doing it wrong? because i assure you, it exists

CLAIM 2: fish sauce is “gross.” i don’t know where to start with this one. i’ve let this culture’s white supremacist anti-vietnameseness translate into raging self-hate long enough to still tolerate this disrespectful “FREAKY EXOTIC ASIAN FOOD” bullshit. fish sauce is vietnamese blood. you cannot begin to understand its role in our culture. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, you know your veganism is shit when you rely on old racist tropes to promote it

yeah yeah. fuck you too.

End of last year Julian and I had a conversation for a magazine (that I don’t need to name) in which we openly had a conversation for an hour, talking about music, racial politics and our past. This magazine in question didn’t want to put the interview out without it being edited… fair enough. So we took it elsewhere.

Oyster magazine agreed to post it un edited. 

They just posted the interview, I don’t know who it was involved, magazine, publicist… so i won’t fully point blame in any true direction right now… but they fully edited and censored it without telling us. Cutting out everything to do with race and my past that I discussed, which was not easy for me to do. Why? So they can have another bullshit piece to add to the noise of the internet? Keep us talking about prince & MJ, of course… but lets take out the section about the million man march… Let’s keep the section talking about first bands we played in… but take out the part where i talk in detail about being assaulted by security and having my knee knocked out of place at Lollapalooza. 

It’s very disheartening… & yet again left with the feeling of a lack of trust & hope. In fact, i’m certain that you don’t even see what the real problem is here? I’m sure most people won’t. It’ll be seen as “Dev lashes out at oyster magazine” or “why is he moaning about being featured in a magazine…” it’s not about that to me, I could care less about any of that shit, none of that matters on a day to day in the real world… but the idea of being able to speak freely about things that I think are bothersome to me & to JC, and to others, when told that I could.. was really special to me. I don’t do many articles/interviews because it’s all the same noise, not even slightly an ego thing, in fact it’s more like the opposite. So I was happy when this opportunity arose to talk openly and un-edited with a friend.  

I spoke about such personal things, things that weren’t easy for me because I thought that it could be helpful maybe for someone somewhere out there, as well as myself, and you just took it out… like it was nothing… nothing but a distraction to your own world distraction.