The rising awareness of food insecurity within the United States has launched many organizations and non-profits that address solutions to problems such as a localization of food within communities. While many organizations are trying to find solutions to the problem of hunger around the US they need to be conscious of the food justice issues which surround why many of the people they are trying to help, are suffering from food insecurity in the first place. Food insecurity is usually found in families living in poverty that cannot afford to buy enough grocerys to feed their families, do not have access to nutritious food to feed their families, or do not have the resources or time to get to food with nutritional value to feed their families. In most cases the families that live in poverty are minorities, which in turn means most of the people living with food insecurities are people of color. This connection of race and class is important when looking at food security because money and household income is directly related to how much a family can eat, which means that the organizations dealing with food issues are primarily working with people of color.
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n “Anti-racist Practice and the Work of Community Food Organizations” Rachel Slocum talks about how one of the flaws in many community food organizations is that the leaders are primarily white while the people the organizations are helping are primarily American Indians, Latinas and African Americans. This type of organization structure with roughly 84% of leadership positions held by white people and 16% held by people of color further perpetuates privilege and advantages held by white people. This structure also leads to people of color becoming, “the objects of the work but not the leaders of it” (Slocum, Pg.4). With primarily white people leading organizations that are set up to help people of color, it is easy for racial injustice to occur. An example if this would be when a North East food organization put up security cameras around their office in an urban location due to an unrelated, nearby killing. This installation of surveillance cameras irritated local members who thought them to perpetuate a racial stereotype. The cameras normalize a social violence between blacks and crime and perpetuate state discrimination against those surveilled because of skin color (Slocum Pg.7). Would this same type of situation happened if the people leading the organization were people of color as well? It is easy for people of color to get racially discriminated against when they are being led by white people in a society with so much institutionalized racism. It probably didn’t occur to the white leaders of the North East organization that installing security cameras would provoke any type of uproar by the members. There have also been examples of African American students resenting the fact that they are forced to work for free on farms owned by white people during Farm to School programs (Guthman, 440). With leadership that is representing the community in which it is working for, issues like this might happen less often, or not at all. It might seem obvious to a person of color the reasons why African Americans would feel uncomfortable working of farms owned by white people, but a leader who is white might not think twice about the fact that it would make some students uncomfortable. The leadership structures of community farming organizations are just one way how social justice inequalities specifically race, can get perpetuated if not treated with extreme care and understanding for the members in the community.
Work Cited
Slocum, Rachel. “Anti-Racist Practice and the Work of Community Food Organizations. Antipode, 2006.
Guthman, J. “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice.” Cultural Geographies 15.4 (2008).
You make such a valid point. Often times we go about making “Progress” especially with issues of race and in fact we are perpetuating the very structures that support racist oppression. In the videos we watched on urban farming, though, there were strong images of strength within communities of gardener because they were coming out as volunteers or workers who wanted to support the garden. The question I want to raise is, how can we use these successful examples of community support as as a role model for other communities like the university campus or places of employment?