Setting up bee hives at D-Town Farm in Detroit. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network runs D-Town Farm, teaches gardening skills, and educates about the food system. They also work on policy change and dismantling racism to build food security in Detroit’s Black community. Photo courtesy of Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.
By Beverly Bell, Tory Field, and Deepa Panchang
A shovel overturned can flip so much more than soil, worms, and weeds. Structural racism – the ways in which social systems and institutions promote and perpetuate the oppression of people of color – manifests at all points in the food system. It emerges as barriers to land ownership and credit access for farmers of color, as wage discrimination and poor working conditions for food and farmworkers of color, and as lack of healthy food in neighborhoods of color. It shows up as discrimination in housing, employment, redlining, and other elements which impact food access and food justice.
Many people involved in creating food – from Haitian tomato pickers organizing in Florida, to Native Americans saving seeds in Arizona, to Black Detroit residents growing gardens in fractured neighborhoods – are simultaneously chipping away at structural racism. In the Harvesting Justice series we touch on many of these issues, starting with a look at African-American farmers and what they doing to win justice in the food system.
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