Today we’d like to introduce you to Reign Hervey.
Hi Reign, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Growing up Black, femme, queer, and plant-based, I often struggled to make sense of my identities. I didn’t feel represented in mainstream animal advocacy spaces because they rarely included or outright dismissed conversations about race. Veganism has been associated with a particular race and class narrative that I didn’t quite fit into, and I was hungry to interrogate and challenge it. I was gifted the book, Aphro-ism by Aph and Syl Ko, which laid a theoretical framework for the threads I wanted to tie together. This is the real foundation for AfroLiberatedTaste, an unapologetically bold space rooted in self and community care.
I decided to create AfroLiberatedTaste as a space for social movements to be in conversation with each other, rather than at each other. My approach to healing racial trauma disrupts the effects of white supremacy using digital activism, strategic communication, and intuitive tarot all through a Black queer feminist lens.
Over the last ten years, I have worked for and volunteered with local, statewide, and national grassroots organizations. I hold my M.A. in Communication and B.A. in Sociology which I love incorporating through my content and the work I do with folks. My typical projects tackle anti-racism and decolonization, consulting, facilitation and public speaking, research, conference planning, publishing, content creation, and intuitive tarot.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The road as a Black woman creating content that directly addresses white supremacy, colonization, and racial trauma is not easy. The digital world is often not friendly and has a host of challenges that create barriers to connection and conversations. There’s also the pressure as content creators to constantly be available, producing, and responsive in order to gain more followers, likes, and other quantitative metrics.
What I’ve been focusing on this year is fostering more meaningful connections one-on-one via direct messages, in-person events, and working with folks who book my services. Considering what we’ve collectively experienced in the last two years, I have prioritized rest over production and it has made a world of difference.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My work is unique in that I work primarily with Black, brown, and queer folks in social justice spaces to unpack how harmful systems show up in our advocacy and ways to challenge them. The two biggest areas of work that I am known for are my anti-racist educational content and my tarot practice. I challenge animal rights groups and individuals to challenge the idea that we can’t fight multiple issues at once or that race is irrelevant to animal rights. I challenge social justice groups and individuals to consider ideological roots of oppression and how we can move through and away from them.
My tarot practice is grounded in calling back our intuition and reclaiming personal power so we can show up better in our community work.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
The biggest lesson I learned during the Covid-19 crisis is to slow down and be patient with myself and others. We all experienced this unprecedented moment at the same time and had to adapt and shift just to make it through to another day. Focusing less on being productive and more on making meaningful connections with others has done wonders for my mental health. I know that I can show up best when I am rested and give others the grace we all deserve.
Pricing:
- Live Tarot Reading ($75)
- Pre-Recorded Mixed Topic Reading ($60)
- Pre-Recorded 3 Question Reading ($50)
- Pre-Recorded Single Question Reading ($15)
Contact Info:
- Email: afroliberatedtaste@gmail.com
- Website: afroliberatedtaste.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/afroliberatedtaste
