The Food Apartheid Series Part 1: Land
This is the first in a three-part series providing context surrounding the issue of food apartheid. Food apartheid involves more than just our proximity to grocery stores, and lives on as the product of racism intermingling with the founding principles of our food system. It tells the story of labor, land, and access. Though violent, the context is available for us to draw from, to understand this regenerative cycle of hope and restoration. Here is part one.
Land
I was 4 years old when I visited Georgia for the first time. I remember my great grandmother’s property and my mother pointing out the fields where she and her siblings used to work every summer. I remember bits and pieces of our visit down south, but with the most clarity, I remember the land and the way it felt. It is my earliest memory of grass and soil on my hands and feet, and the one that flashes through my mind each time I walk barefoot on the Earth.
Not too far away from that memory lives my first trauma with the land. I got a rose thorn stuck in my foot while running barefoot in the backyard, just after my fifth birthday. My mother held me tightly as my father pulled it out, and it took nearly a year for me to go outside again barefoot. Never due to my parent’s reminders, but fully out of my fear of the land and not knowing what she was capable of anymore. After some time, I reclaimed my connection, but only once my longing to run freely through the grass became so great, it forced me to work past the trauma I had attached to it.
Through the stories of my parents and grandparents, I learned of my lineage of Earth Keepers and our struggle to keep our land in the deep south, then buy property up north. I grew up understanding our history of being separated from the land and have always felt a deep longing to return to it. It’s not a popular choice in the Black community though; to be one working with the land, but that is a trauma response. In order to heal our relationship with the land, we have to understand our history of violent dispossession.
It started with families from Western Africa stolen to work on land stolen from the Indigenous People here in America. That alone would have been difficult to overcome. We were forced to bond with land that was never asked for forgiveness. We underwent severe dehumanization and forced labor during slavery that continued through convict leasing and sharecropping. Through it all, Black Americans were still able to learn the land, grow culturally relevant foods, and even own property after becoming free. By 1910, 16 million acres, about 14% of land in the US, was owned by Black people.
Over time, Black Americans were able to establish farms and create agency in the food system. Bringing in indigenous African farming techniques, Black farmers were not only successful in their work, they were innovators and pioneers of modern organic farming and community-supported agriculture. Continuing with the history of violence, murder by the KKK went up in correlation with Black land ownership in the south. So much so that over 4,500 people reported their farms and properties being burned down around 1910, causing a structural shift in land ownership that we still see today.
Racism ran deep regarding land ownership, going beyond enraged former slave owners and neighbors, and reaching towards government. The USDA discriminated against Black farmers by denying them loans, crop insurance, and allotments. Black people were discouraged from registering to vote and join the NAACP by their grant and subsidy applications being denied or destroyed by the USDA upon the finding out they had done so. Their long documented racial discrimination ultimately led to The Pigford case, the largest civil rights class action suit in United States history.
Black people who were violently exiled from the south, migrated north to be met with more discrimination and violence. First with being forced into ghettoization with redlining and property destruction, and then with environmental racism and violent policing in Black communities. Our collective distaste for working the land influences our love and respect for it and its caretakers, and it is conditioned by the violence carried out on the land. In order to heal that, we have to acknowledge that the violence was done on the land and not by the land, and that we are living now after a long history of separating land from people through both internal and external barriers.
Today, we are able to witness the results of this continuous and deliberate separation of Black and Brown people from the land. We see:
Grocery stores redlining adding to the lack of access to basic goods in communities of color.
Black and Brown people living in unsafe environmental conditions with substances like lead contaminating soil and water, and the subsequent health and wellness disparities as well as predispositions to long-lasting issues.
A 16:1 wealth gap with 98% land ownership by white people in the United States, and lower instances of property ownership with the number having dropped to just 1.6% in Black people.
Inherent dehumanization and undermining of the communities we have built yet again, by the violent policing of our people.
The dehumanization of Black and Brown farmers inside the farming community, like when growers are met with discrimination at the farmers market or culturally insensitive growers associations.
These are just a few of the repercussions. Most of the wealth in America is inherited. Due to land being the primary source of wealth, the striking wealth gap between Black and white America is a direct result of an inequitable system of land ownership. There is economic power in land, and if the distribution of land is uneven, then the power also becomes uneven. We’ve come too far in history to simply remove people from their land and give it away without starting another civil war, but there are ways to address these external barriers equitably.
Here are a few:
Make it easier for Black people to own and maintain their land, especially the land they farm or do agricultural labor on, by providing more financial and legal assistance.
Take actionable steps toward mitigating environmental racism.
Stop disrupting Black and Brown communities with state-sanctioned violence.
Internally, we can push forward by using the land we do have, to build shared economic hubs where business owners can share land and resources in order to build community sufficiency and economic growth. There are many solutions beyond this one, but my background is in community resilience and rebuilding, so this is the solution Fennigan’s Farms was founded on. Here, we go beyond providing individuals with grow spaces, because our profits go directly into the building and hosting of shared economic spaces rooted in agriculture. We use our resources to start things like interconnected community gardens linked to food-share programs in communities left behind by food apartheid, and sustainably built year-round farmer’s markets with spaces for small businesses to reside. In this way, we can help communities use the land they have access to, to regain agency in the food system and create legacies based on systems outside of just land ownership. We can collectively decide to stop the cycle of trauma with a more equitable system for everyone founded in our sovereignty.
Land is a key component of food apartheid because it is where we have to start our healing. If we can work on the pain response we feel when we work the land, then we can return to it with reverence to sow our freedom and build a just and equitable food system. We must acknowledge our trauma with the land in order to find our voice in a system built to ignore us. Many of us feel a calling back to keep the land. It is our duty as those who feel and hear that calling to go back to it, nourish it, and claim a reverent space on it to feed a future outside the systems that are intentionally keeping us hungry. Just as the violence between them is interconnected, the freedom we can find in our food can be found as we return to the land.
Follow along for part two of The Food Apartheid Series: Food Access