Food justice racial projects: fighting racial neoliberalism from the Bay to the Big Apple

Abstract

Food justice scholarship utilizing racial formation theory has largely analyzed race and racism within the conventional food system and the food movement, leaving under-examined the political projects of food justice organizations to realize racial equity. This article recovers the dialectical spirit of racial formation theory, that of oppression and resistance, and interjects a distinct focus on activism in the context of racial neoliberalism to investigate two food justice organizations, ‘Planting Justice’ and ‘East New York Farms!’ These organizations reveal through their work some of the heterogeneity of food and urban agriculture related race-making practices, namely antiracist racial projects that challenge racial and economic inequities. We show how these projects intervene in the system of mass incarceration, reclaim land for cultural reproduction, and build racial and class solidarity. We argue that the food justice movement, which is comprised of many racial projects, contributes to setting in motion emancipatory racial formation processes. In closing, the article reflects on the possible range of food justice racial projects, how these antiracist projects might work to transform race relations, and some of the limitations that food justice activists might encounter resisting racial neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• food justice
• food movement
• neoliberalism
• race
• racial formation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who spoke with us for our research. Your views and practices ground the theorization we undertook in this article. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and Stewart Lockie for their many helpful comments and suggestions. Obviously, our work rests ultimately on our shoulders, but we could not have produced this article without the insights of others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Our ethnoracial terminologies are limited to the US context and align with how scholars use them in food justice and critical race literatures.

2. When referring to specific racial projects after their first use (e.g. antiracist racial project), we drop the ‘racial’ from subsequent uses in order to simplify reading.

3. Examples include redlining, urban renewal, benign neglect, planned shrinkage, white flight, segregation and mass incarceration.

4. All names have been changed unless quote comes from a public source.

5. The dialectical process of political struggle in Oakland between racist and antiracist projects from World War II to the present follows the broader pattern identified in our discussion of racial formation theory (Self 2003).

6. As of August 2016, 21 of the staff were formerly incarcerated, most of whom are black. For more details on the staff see, http://www.plantingjustice.org/about-us/staff/ and http://www.eastbaytimes.com/breaking-news/ci_30206784/urban-farm-planet-justice-adds-east-oakland-site. Roughly 30% of the staff is white and roughly 30% has a college degree. The rest of the staff is black and Latino/a, and most of the staff have only a high-school diploma or some college.

7. For details on programming, see ‘Programs’ (Transform Your Yard, Food Justice Education, Grassroots Canvass, 5 Acre Farm) at http://www.plantingjustice.org/.

8. For some public reporting on this see Bolsinger (2014) and Burke (2015).

9. Redlining was a discriminatory practice used between the 1930s and late 1960s by white lenders who refused to give loans or insurance to people of color by deeming where they lived poor and therefore a financial risk.

10. For ENYF!’ history see Daftary-Steel and Gervais (2014).

11. ENYF! privileges hiring from the community, promotes from within and has been made up of staff who live in Eastern Brooklyn and identity as white, Indian, Latina/o, African American, Caribbean and black. Based on its birth from a community-based planning project and organizational practices that privilege community voice and decision-making power in the organization, it continues to respond to what the community wants ENYF! to be.

12. For UCC’s history, see Eisenberg (1999).

13. Although the Great Recession is generally understood to have lasted in the United States between 2008 and mid-2009, the effects lingered until 2015, with many places, particularly low-income people and people of color in those places, experiencing the recession years longer than the ‘official’ end announced by economists and the United States government.

14. A similar point was made by Pellow (2016) who recognized in his suggestions for a critical environmental justice studies the significance of intersections between environmental justice movements and the Black Lives Matter movement. There are clear parallels with how we have discussed food justice projects in this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Sbicca

Joshua Sbicca is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. His work focuses on food politics, social movements, and inequalities. He is currently writing a book on the politics and practices of the food justice movement and how this converges with a range of social struggles.

Justin Sean Myers

Justin Sean Myers is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marist College. His research utilizes historical and qualitative methods to understand how marginalized communities are organizing against food inequities. He is currently writing a book on food justice movements in New York City.