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| People's Grocery- West Oakland, CA |
Working as a food justice organizer,
one of the first actions I took was to scour the internet, libraries,
bookstores and organizations for faces like mine. I knew there had to
be brown faces in the food justice movement somewhere and it was
vital to my survival as a person dedicated to food, health, and
economic justice to find people of color who “got” it. Folks who
didn't overuse “vote with your fork” and think that everyone has
“time” and resources. Folks who saw the reality and spoke to
systemic issues that made it all the more difficult to be “green”
and “sustainable” and a “locavore.”
Which systemic issues, you ask? Not
having enough money for some organic food. Not having access to
healthy foods because you live in a neighborhood with only convenience
stores and fast food restaurants and no grocery stores. Not having a
backyard to grow food in or a community garden in your neighborhood.
Not having time to buy and cook healthy food let alone grow your own
food. Not being told that your ancestors diet was healthy and not
being told the truth behind our behaviors today and the way that
capitalism has bred our community's sickness and contributed to an
obscene amount of preventable deaths....genocide.
The narrative that we frequently hear
obviously comes from mostly privileged white folks who seem to omit
race and class from their conversations. It's convenient and
comfortable for them. All the work our ancestors did devoid of labels
such as “local” and “organic” seems to also get left behind.
Which predecessors? Great black agriculturalists such as George
Washington Carver who may have been one of the first to have been
concerned with sustainable agriculture. Great brown farmers and
activists like Cesar Chavez who saw firsthand the toxic affects of
what was being put on the crops farmworkers harvested (and continue
to harvest).
In the dominant narrative it seems like
black and brown folks are ignorant about health and healthy food.
Perhaps we're “too lazy” to start a garden and grow our own food.
We don't want to just spend the extra money on the “front end”
instead of on hospital bills due to our eating “habits” on the
back end. It seems much easier for food activists
to focus on our behaviors and glaze over issues of time and
employment (working two and three jobs), space (maybe we don't own
land or don't have access to community gardens or live in food
deserts full of fast food restaurants and corner stores with unfresh
and processed foods). There's an overall assumption that we just
don't want to be healthy and that we don't care about our family's
health. Very little is said about discrimination within the health
care system, decreased access to health care, limited access to
healthy foods and land, and other issues that communities of color
haven't had a lot of control over.
It's easier to play the blame game.
It's easier not to check detrimental and erroneous assumptions and to
be guided by stereotypes and biases. It's easier to be exclusive and
not include brown folks into the food movement. Race talk just ruins
things. There are tokens to report back about what's going on in the
community. Even though the reports aren't needed because it's all the
community's fault. Obviously they like to eat that food, live that
way. Quick get together a brigade to get them all to Vote with their
Fork...
even if they can't afford one.
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