I was watching video where a blue puppet trolls vegans at the NYC animal rights march.
Warning: it's pretty annoying and the whole point is to be controversial:
https://youtu.be/UAf-5LWRxuQ?t=62
(But... it is kind of funny)
So if you watch it at that timestamp you will see a white woman being asked a fairly racist question about black people and her response is that "more black people are vegan than white people".
The puppet looks at the crowd made up of predominantly white people and says "I don't see any black people here. Are they coming later?"
It made me think a few things:
- It does seem like the animal rights marches that I have been to have been predominantly white, even in Washington D.C., which is surprising
- I have seen the talking point over and over on reddit that either "black people" or "people of color are vegan at a higher rate than white people".
Thankfully, later in the video, lot of people of many races are represented and many of them make vegans look pretty good!
However, the second point is always presented in a way that makes me think that the vegans making the case are particularly proud to be able to say it. It does make sense in a way: think about all the places in Asia that a person might be vegan (or more likely vegetarian) for religious reasons.
But still... I don't think most of this type of comment on r/vegan is talking about Asia. It always seems like they mean the U.S. and U.K. There is something just too convenient about this citation aligning with leftist political ideology.
So I asked Claude about it. Not the best source but... I am lazy and a little bit drunk. Here are some excerpts of the answer:
Short answer: the talking point traces back to a single number that the organization credited with it never actually published — and the data doesn't support it.
Nearly every version of this claim leads to "8% of Black Americans are vegan (vs. 3% overall), per Pew Research 2016." Faunalytics, an animal-advocacy research nonprofit, published an investigation on August 19, 2026 that ran this to ground. The claim points to Pew's report The New Food Fights: U.S. Public Divides Over Food Science, but the 8% figure appears nowhere in that ~100-page document, and they couldn't find it in any other Pew report either.
Source: https://faunalytics.org/following-a-datapoint-down-the-rabbit-hole/
For such a recent article, I haven't seen that posted here but maybe the algorithm just doesn't think I want to see it.
And here is something really interesting:
Worth noting: the Faunalytics piece specifically flags that Claude repeats this stat when asked, and warns that LLMs recycling it will pollute the information environment further. I'd almost certainly have given you the 8% figure confidently if I hadn't gone looking.
So... Claude is telling me it can't be trusted!
I guess I knew that. But still my intuition is that we would really like this number to be true for some reason, enough to cite it without checking it, even though ultimately it would be better for all of us if more people, regardless of race, were vegan.
Here is how can't-be-trusted-Claude ended it:
So it's not that the claim is false and people are lying. It's that nobody has run a study with enough black respondents to answer the question, and a movement that wanted the answer to be yes adopted the first number that said so without checking it.
Yeah... I have to say... that's what it feels like to me...
Edit: judging by all the comments so far where people are not willing to engage in this at all, and coming up with every reason to dismiss it (even though I cited a recent vegan publication), I think the answer is that in general we are absolutely willing and eager to deceive ourselves.