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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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U.S.

One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics

By JOHN ELIGON NOV. 18, 2015

When the Democratic National Committee recently rejected adding a presidential debate focusing exclusively on issues affecting black people, it got divergent responses from two groups widely associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Campaign Zero, whose agenda centers on ending police violence, quickly embraced the offer for a town hall forum instead and began working to arrange forums for Democratic and Republican candidates. But members of an organization named Black Lives Matter, which first asked for the debates, asserted that only a debate would demonstrate the Democrats’ commitment to their cause.

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag and grew into a protest slogan — after prominent police killings of blacks over the past year — and became an Internetdriven civil rights movement. The phrase is as much a mantra as a particular organization, with the general public lumping numerous groups under the Black Lives Matter banner, even if they are not officially connected.

Yet amid the groups’ different approaches has been a swirl of political activity.

Local affiliates of the Black Lives Matter organization have disrupted numerous Democratic presidential campaign events, pushing the candidates to support policies to end mass incarceration and police brutality.

That organization now has 26 chapters, and one in Canada, that largely set their own direction. In Boston, that has meant protesting the city’s short-lived Olympic bid, which activists said would have been harmful to black neighborhoods.

The Grand Rapids, Mich., chapter has held workshops on nonviolent organizing http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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The Grand Rapids, Mich., chapter has held workshops on nonviolent organizing and the prison industry. In St. Paul, Minn., organizers have held rallies to call for more minority vendors at the state fair and protested police shootings.

Yet as the rift over debates versus town halls underscores, the young and sometimes cacophonous movement is struggling to find its voice, as the activists who fly its banner wade into national politics.

Many of those activists and groups favor protest, distrust conventional politics and have no intention of supporting candidates. Others have begun lobbying candidates and elected officials on legislative issues. And still others are hoping to use money to make a difference in elections. Campaign Zero, whose founders gained prominence during protests in Ferguson, Mo., has issued a detailed policy platform on preventing police violence and increasing police accountability. It has also met with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders to pressure them to embrace its racial justice platforms.

Two groups have started political action committees to back candidates who support ideas espoused by Black Lives Matter activists. One, Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee, started by a St. Louis radio host, plans to raise money for voter education in races for law enforcement-related offices, including for district attorney and judgeships. The second, Black Lives Matter Super PAC, was started by New York activists who hope to raise large donations from celebrities to influence campaigns for a variety of offices.

“At this point, marching and protesting, it’s not going anywhere,” said Tarik Mohamed, treasurer and a founder of the super PAC. “So we’re trying to find new avenues of engaging people for change.”

And, in a sign of its growing influence, the movement is attracting the attention of deep-pocketed Democratic donors, who met with activists in Washington this week to discuss how they can support the budding movement.

The diffuseness and decentralization of the movement is viewed by many activist leaders as a source of energy, with local organizations tailoring solutions to problems in their communities. The broader movement has also fomented a new brand of activism on college campuses, most notably at the University of Missouri.

Reacting to what they saw as the administration’s tepid response to racism, activists at the university organized marches, one held a hunger strike and the http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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activists at the university organized marches, one held a hunger strike and the football team threatened a boycott, forcing the president and chancellor to resign.

“There’s nothing wrong with being decentralized and dispersed,” said Allen Kwabena Frimpong, an organizer with the New York chapter. “The problem is being disconnected. If we are going to build political power, we have to build connections.”

Yet for all the movement’s impact, even some of its sympathizers question whether it needs a clearer organization and more concrete plan of action.

“There has to be a reckoning, I agree with that,” Mrs. Clinton told a group of Black Lives Matter activists after an August campaign event in New Hampshire.

“But I also think there has to be some positive thing you can move people toward.”

The name Black Lives Matter was born when Alicia Garza, a California-based activist, used it in a Facebook post after George Zimmerman was acquitted two years ago in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, in Florida.

She then teamed with two fellow activists to create the Black Lives Matter hashtag and social media pages. But the movement gained prominence after a white police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, in Ferguson last year, and the Black Lives Matter founders arranged a national “freedom ride” to Ferguson.

But the ubiquity of the name itself — and the fact that anyone can use it — has caused complications. At some protests, for instance, marchers’ chants have called for violence against police officers. Critics, including several Republican presidential candidates, then equated Black Lives Matter to promoting attacks against the police.

“I don’t believe that that movement should be justified when they’re calling for the murder of police officers,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said recently on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He repeated the charge in the fourth Republican debate last week.

But leaders within the movement said that they reject violence and that antipolice chants are the acts of individuals, not the movement.

“It’s like saying, ‘Because the Ku Klux Klan calls themselves Christian, Christianity has a problem and needs to answer for the Ku Klux Klan,’ ” said Kenneth Murdock, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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who hosts a political radio show in St. Louis.

Mr. Murdock, who has worked for politicians in Missouri, started the political action committee over the summer. He declined to disclose how much money he had raised, saying he hoped to endorse candidates in local races across the country.

The Black Lives Matter Super PAC, in addition to contributing to campaigns next year, hopes to capitalize on new technology, such as virtual reality software, to help people understand experiences like solitary confinement, Mr. Mohamed said.

Members of the Democracy Alliance, an influential club of liberal donors, met on Tuesday with groups allied under the Black Lives Matters banner — including ColorOfChange.org, Black Youth Project 100 and the Black Civic Engagement Fund — to discuss possibly directing funds to the movement, said Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an alliance member. The organizations represented only a sample of the groups that donors wanted to shed light on, she said.

“It was just a really real conversation about the complexities of funding movements and the need for more infrastructure, especially black-led infrastructure,” said Ms. Hunt-Hendrix, who has inherited wealth from an oil company her grandfather started.

Specific funding commitments were not made, she said, and it would be up to individual donors to follow up with organizations they want to support.

“We don’t want to raise expectations that this is a secretive group of donors hoping to raise tons of money,” she said.

DeRay Mckesson, a founder of Campaign Zero, has been focusing much of his energy on trying to organize Black Lives Matter-themed forums for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Town hall forums are more in line with the spirit of the movement, Mr. Mckesson argued, because they allow ordinary people to ask questions. He said he has been in negotiations with television networks to broadcast the forums.

Mr. Mckesson got support for the town halls from an unexpected source recently when Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said on NewsOne that Republicans would participate “if we were smart.”

“They are drawing attention to issues that need to be drawn to,” Mr. Paul said. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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“They are drawing attention to issues that need to be drawn to,” Mr. Paul said.

Some activists have criticized Campaign Zero as being too focused on legislative remedies for police violence, and were concerned the public would think of them as “a silver bullet” for injustices against blacks, Mr. Frimpong said.

Mr. McKesson has responded by saying, “We acknowledge that this isn’t the radical change required to rethink the system, but we can’t discount or devalue the immediate, practical benefit this can have on people’s lives.”

While Campaign Zero has, among other things, called for investing in better police training and body cameras, other Black Lives Matter activists are demanding that public funds be used for anti-poverty programs that could drive down crime.

When New York City officials sought to add 1,000 new police officers to the force this year, local Black Lives Matter members and other activists argued those funds would be better spent on youth summer jobs, transit access for low-income people, school social workers and teachers. Such programs would address the root causes of crime, the activists argued, but the City Council voted for adding more officers.

Many members of the Black Lives Matter organization also continue to promote protests of presidential candidates in addition to more conventional political activities, such as voter registration or education. The tactic has proved effective with Democrats.

Activists disrupted a Clinton campaign event in Cleveland in August, calling for her to stop accepting contributions from groups affiliated with private prisons and investing in causes that help black transgender women. Months later, Mrs. Clinton said she would stop accepting those contributions. In August, activists took over a stage in Seattle when Mr. Sanders tried to speak, and the senator promptly released a racial justice platform.

“I think that it’s not just about changing hearts and minds, it’s not just about changing laws, it’s about actually changing action,” said Elle Hearns, a strategic adviser to the Black Lives Matter organization who is based in Ohio.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York and an observer of the movement, said that many Black Lives Matter activists seemed to be advocating change beyond laws, which they say are unfairly applied to blacks. But history, he said, suggested that activists http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics - The New York Times

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they say are unfairly applied to blacks. But history, he said, suggested that activists might have to work within the traditional political system.

“They may have to accept that some people are going to have to sit at the table,” he said, “and work this stuff out.”

Correction: November 20, 2015 A picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of an article about the political aspirations of the Black Lives Matter group misidentified the location of a protest in September before an N.F.L. game between Minnesota and Detroit. It was near a light rail station, in St. Paul — not outside TCF Bank Stadium, in Minneapolis.

Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Lives Matter Seeks Political Voice From the Din of Protest.

© 2016 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/us/one-slogan-many-methods-black-lives-matter-enters-politics.html?_r=0

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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Scene from Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, after the unarmed Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson.

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you needed to IN THE 1960S,

get some urgent news out to the rest of the world —word of a beating or an activist’s arrest or some brewing state of danger—you would likely head straight for a telephone.

From an office or a phone booth in hostile territory, you would place a call to one of the major national civil rights organizations.

But you wouldn’t do it by dialing a standard long-distance number. That would involve speaking first to a switchboard operator—who was bound to be white and who might block your call. Instead you’d dial the number for something called a Wide Area Telephone Service, or WATS, line.

Like an 800 line, you could dial a WATS number from anywhere in the region and the call would patch directly through to the business or organization that paid for the line—in this case, say, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

N A R S M F

T

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R

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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On the other end of the line, another civil rights worker would be ready to take down your report and all the others pouring in from phones scattered across the South. The terse, action-packed write-ups would then be compiled into mimeographed “WATS reports� mailed out to organization leaders, the media, the Justice Department, lawyers, and other friends of the movement across the country.

In other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South.

Massive crowds of media and mourners congregate around the casket of Michael Brown at Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church on August 25, 2014.

On April 30, 2015, demonstrators in Baltimore make their way to city hall, demanding justice for Freddie Grey, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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Any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it and tailors its goals, tactics, and rhetoric to the media of its time. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 7, 1965, when votingrights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were run down by policemen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the WATS lines were in heavy use. (“Here come the white hoodlums,” an activist said from a corner pay phone at 3:25 pm.) But the technology that was most important to the movement’s larger aims was not in activists’ hands at all: It was in a set of film canisters being ferried past police blockades on Highway 80 by an ABC News TV crew, racing for the Montgomery airport and heading to New York for an evening broadcast. That night, 48 million Americans would watch the scene in their living rooms, and a few days later Martin Luther King Jr. would lay bare the movement’s core media strategy. “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” he said. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”

“It was a rare admission,” writes media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy. “King and other civil rights organizers seldom acknowledged their own self-conscious use of the mass media.” Today’s AfricanAmerican civil rights organizers, by contrast, talk about the tools of mass http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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contrast, talk about the tools of mass communication all the time—because their media strategy sessions are largely open to everyone on the Internet.

If you’re a civil rights activist in 2015 and you need to get some news out, your first move is to choose a platform. If you want to post a video of a protest or a violent arrest, you put it up on Vine, Instagram, or Periscope. If you want to avoid trolls or snooping authorities and you need to coordinate some kind of action, you might chat privately with other activists on GroupMe. If you want to rapidly mobilize a bunch of people you know and you don’t want the whole world clued in, you use SMS or WhatsApp. If you want to mobilize a ton of people you might not know and you do want the whole world to talk about it: Twitter.

And if, God forbid, you find yourself standing in front of the next Michael Brown or Walter Scott, and you know the nation’s attention needs to swerve hard to your town, your best bet might be to send a direct message to someone like DeRay Mckesson, one of a handful of activists who sit at the apex of social networks that now run hundreds of thousands strong. “The thing about King or Ella Baker is that they could not just wake up and sit at the breakfast table and talk to a million people,” says Mckesson, a former school district administrator who has become one of the most visible faces of the movement. “The tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that’s existed before in black struggle.”

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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A man yells, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” in Ferguson, Missouri, while protesting the death of Michael Brown in August 2014.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

#BLACKLIVESMATTER BECAME A HASHTAG

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in the summer of 2013,

when an Oakland, California, labor organizer named Alicia Garza responded on her Facebook page to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who gunned down Trayvon Martin. Since then it has become the banner under which dozens of disparate organizations, new and old, and millions of individuals, loosely and tightly related, press for change.

Any phenomenon that seizes the nation’s attention this much needs a name—headline writers make sure of that. But it is hard to talk about the national Black Lives Matter movement without imparting a false sense of institutional coherence to it. Of course, the civil rights movement of the ’60s was itself far from monolithic, but there aren’t really analogues to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in today’s activist scene. “It’s decentralized but coordinated,” says Maurice Mitchell, an organizer with a group called Blackbird. “There are no top-down mandates.”

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

On April 30, 2015, hundreds of demonstrators in Baltimore make their way to city hall, demanding justice for Freddie Grey, a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody.

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Members of the Nation of Islam gather near Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church, where the funeral for Michael Brown was held.

You could look at it this way: The movement of the ’60s needed a big institutional structure to make things work—in part because of the limitations of the tech at the time. Now that kind of structure has come to seem vestigial. After Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, Missouri, and the city became a lightning rod for activism, Mckesson says he had a kind of epiphany about movement-building: “We didn’t need institutions to do it,” he says. Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information.

It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives with the force of a few thousand retweets.

Of course, some level of institution-building is still crucial, as the http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

Of course, some level of institution-building is still crucial, as the

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movement has realized. And there are downsides to the media environment that today’s activists have adapted to. Despite its success in making videos of police violence go viral, social media itself has become another arena where black people are abused.

Harassment, threats, and insults are basic hazards of online activism today, but they are especially pervasive for anyone speaking on the touchy subject of race in America. Mckesson, for one, says he has blocked more than 15,000 people from interacting with him on Twitter. He retweets some of the haters. It’s occasionally hard to read. (There’s a stale, conventional wisdom that says overt racism is largely a thing of the past in America.

Whoever says this clearly has not spent much time on Twitter.

God help them if they start reading comments on YouTube.)

This might seem like an opportunity: Drawing hate out into the light was, after all, a signature tactic of the civil rights movement.

Televised footage of well-dressed white people heckling black children as they walked to school were powerful because they were so public, says Lisa Nakamura, a professor of media and race at the University of Michigan. “But when that happens on Twitter, it’s really, really private.” Any given tweet might be public, but http://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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online threats are disembodied and anonymous. Bystanders don’t seem to take them as seriously. Plus, the full experience of receiving a thousand threats may only really be felt by the recipient. Even in the panopticon of social media, mobs aren’t all that visible.

And of course, social media is also profoundly susceptible to surveillance. We know now that many leaders of Black Lives Matter have been monitored by federal law enforcement agencies.

That has prompted many to start seeking out more secure channels; in nearly all my conversations with activists about how they use different platforms, there was a point when they told me they didn’t want to say any more for security reasons.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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On the 11th day of protests after Michael Brown’s death, state and local authorities scream at demonstrators and the media to stay back while they make an arrest.

Still, this movement, as diffuse and protean as it may seem, has mounted some of the most potent civil rights activism since the ’60s. It helped secure the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol. It helped pressure the federal government to investigate police practices in Ferguson and Baltimore. It has successfully pushed Democratic presidential contenders to come forward with policy proposals on the issues that specifically concern black people in America. And an offshoot of the movement, a project called Campaign Zero that was organized in part by Mckesson, has put forward a bunch of specific policy proposals to uproot police violence. A huge reason for all this success is that, perhaps more than any other modern American protest movement, they’ve figured out how to marshal today’s tools.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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Protesters walk up West Florissant Avenue, near the street 
where Michael Brown was shot by a police officer.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

THE MOVEMENT HAS

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also had another profound but less concrete

effect: I believe that Black Lives Matter has changed the visceral experience of being black in America. I see this in the way it has become a community reflex to record interactions with police—a habit that is empowering, even as it highlights black vulnerability.

I see it in the rise of a new group of black public intellectuals and in the beginnings of a new political language. And I see it in my own experience.

I grew up in Tyler, Texas, a small city in the eastern part of the state, in the 2000s. I attended the local Catholic high school—not the local public school named after Robert E. Lee, where the majority of the student body was nonwhite. No one called me a nigger, though white friends would sometimes use the slur to refer to other black people; in the next breath, they’d assure me I was different. Despite constantly feeling like I was a token, or that I had to tiptoe around white sensitivities, I couldn’t have told you what ailed me. I wasn’t politically conscious. I didn’t have the language to speak about microaggressions, aggressionaggressions, or structural prejudice. I just endured a thing I wasn’t totally sure I was enduring.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

Missouri State Highway Patrol Captain Ronald S. Johnson points to a demonstrator he wants detained during the protests over Michael Brown’s death.

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A protestor in a stand-off with police in Ferguson, August 18, 2014.

But I can still remember the fluorescent lighting of my high school’s hallways and the pervasive sense that something was deeply wrong. The air itself felt toxic. I had nightmares about nuclear reactors sending clouds of poison into the sky. On those nights I’d wake up and look through my window at the moon and wonder how long it would be before I could escape.

Does it seem strange that I now associate those dreams with racism? That I see the unease I felt then as a species of profound

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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racism? That I see the unease I felt then as a species of profound alienation that I wasn’t at all able to comprehend, because nothing I’d experienced before had prepared me to understand unthinking hate? This kind of clarity about my own experience has come with time and distance. I can’t help but think that if I’d been a few years younger—if my upbringing in Tyler had overlapped with the past two years of digital and intellectual ferment in America—I would have realized far earlier that what I felt wasn’t particularly unusual. “All of a sudden,” Mckesson says, “you see that there’s a community of people who share the same symptoms.”

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

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Of course, shared symptoms are not enough. That’s why Black Lives Matter beRioters shifting a new phase.Ferguson “Thein the wake of Protesters celebrate asappears an auto storeto burns. set fireinto to businesses throughout the grand jury decision to not indict police officer Darren Wilson. movement doesn’t win if there’s only a small set of people who

understand the solutions,” Mckesson says. The movement wins when there’s a broad understanding that we need a system that doesn’t kill people, when a critical mass of citizens can envision what that looks like, and when concrete steps are taken to make it happen.Historians of the 1960s talk about how the media of the time helped establish a “new common sense” about race in America. I think the new common sense being established now is that racism and the struggle against it do not exist somewhere in the distant past; racial activism didn’t end after King and the Black Panther Party. Technology has helped make today’s struggle feel both different from and continuous with the civil rights era.

All the terror and greatness we associate with that moment is right in front of our faces, as near to us as our screens.

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How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power | WIRED

BIJAN STEPHEN

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(@bijanstephen) is an associate editor at the

New Republic.

This article appears in the November 2015 issue.

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Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement Katharine Bradley Geography Graduate Group, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA; kbradley@ucdavis.edu

Hank Herrera Center For Popular Research, Education and Policy, Pinole, CA, USA

Abstract: Over the past 15 years social movements for community food security, food sovereignty, and food justice have organized to address the failures of the multinational, industrial food system to fairly and equitably distribute healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate real food. At the same time, these social movements, and research about them, re-inscribe white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege. We argue that in order to correct this pattern we must relocate our social movement goals and practices within a decolonizing and feminist leadership framework. This framework challenges movement leadership and scholarship by white people who uncritically assume a natural order of leadership based on academic achievement. We analyze critical points in our collaboration over the last four years using these frameworks. Doing so highlights the challenges and possibilities for a more inclusive food justice movement and more just scholarship.

Keywords: food justice, decolonization, feminism, anti-racism, reflexivity

Introduction and Problem Statement

In 1996, a group of academics and activists formed the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) as a response to race and class disparities in access to healthy, culturally appropriate, and affordable food in the United States. By many accounts, the CFSC played a critical role in uniting activists in alternative food systems fields (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Morales 2011; Patel 2011). In creating a national network of activists working in low-income communities, the coalition cultivated what we know today as the food justice movement. We open this paper with stories from Hank’s experiences as a leader in the early years of the CFSC. These stories demonstrate the promises of the movement and its failure to meaningfully represent people and communities of color. Thus they also represent what we see as the colonization of the food justice movement and research about it.

The founders of the CFSC were all committed, passionate, brilliant, successful leaders—and all white. Two of these individuals, a graduate student at the time and his professor, participated in a seminal study of food insecurity in South Central Los Angeles (Ashman et al. 1993). Subsequently, they provided a preliminary explanation of community food security: “For one, food security represents a community need, rather than an individual’s condition, as associated with hunger.

Antipode Vol. 48 No. 1 2016 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 97–114 © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

doi: 10.1111/anti.12165

98

Antipode

A definition of food security in this context refers to the ability of ‘all persons obtaining, at all times, a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local, non-emergency sources’” (Gottlieb and Fisher 1996:24, emphasis added to definition).

They and several of their colleagues and mentors went on to successfully advocate for inclusion of the Community Food Security Act in the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 and subsequent farm bills—landmark legislation that provided funding for 294 local community food projects in its first 10 years (Tuckermanty et al. 2007).

The founders of CFSC emphasized a focus on low-income communities. The Articles of Incorporation of CFSC stated as the first purpose of the organization: …to increase the visibility and understanding of community food security, a concept designed to ensure that individuals in low-income communities have access to food and nutritional information and that such communities are able to provide for a greater share of their residents’ food needs through various efforts, including promotion of the urban retail sector and encouragement and support of local agriculture and family farming in order to insure the availability to such communities of fresh, nutritionally adequate food …

(Community Food Security Coalition 1997, emphasis added).

For Hank, as a person of color working in a low-income community of color to increase access to fresh, healthy, affordable local food that he and his fellow activists produced in their communities, these accomplishments and concepts ignited promise and hope that their work could gain widespread support. However, over time this promise and hope faded. While their work did gain broader support, their roles in local grassroots leadership, national movement leadership, and research about the movement also shrank.

For example, Hank vividly recalls the first annual meeting of CFSC in Los Angeles in 1997. One of the field trips went to a very large community garden in the heart of Watts, a largely African American community. The garden manager was a very pleasant young white man who had completed his apprenticeship at the UC Santa Cruz farm at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. As he described the gardeners, he talked about the Latino gardeners growing plants he did not recognize, that they then sold in street markets about which, he said, he knew nothing. His lack of knowledge of indigenous plants and markets while in a position of power at this garden represented a problem with the practice of food justice in this community and in the CFSC’s leadership’s understanding of food justice.

Other challenges emerged in the Coalition. Even spaces designed to foster leadership by people of color within the Coalition were not safe from troubling dynamics. Early in the history of CFSC, the Outreach and Diversity Committee (ODC) was charged with addressing race and class issues in CFSC and in the food system. A young white scholar who previously conducted research about the ODC and with their support announced her plan for another research project with Coalition members. Members of the committee asked to see her proposal, but she refused, insisting that it would compromise the independence of the research but maintaining that the research would benefit the committee. They barred her from any further participation in ODC activities, although she planned to use data she © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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collected during her earlier work with the committee. The committee then wrote to her and her department to request that she not pursue further research about them. Nevertheless, she ultimately did publish about anti-racism work within the CFSC using data she had collected in ways that benefited her personally but not the ODC, CFSC, or food justice movement.

At the Oakland CFSC meeting in 2011, the last meeting before the coalition’s dissolution, Katie listened to a white CFSC board member adamantly insist that there was no need for a people-of-color breakout session. What Katie perceived as an entitlement to lead was just a more recent example of how the CFSC’s original promise faded for Hank and other leaders of color. These stories represent colonizing, dominating, hegemonic propensities of white, patriarchal systems of power and privilege within the food justice movement and research about it.

In this paper, we explain the personal and theoretical ways we understand the colonization of food justice. First, we offer our own brief biographical histories, since our backgrounds shaped how we came to view and engage with the food justice movement. Second, we present our argument that the process of colonization unfolded in the food justice movement through the emergence of moralist food justice from the original notion of food justice. We link moralist food justice to the history of colonization of native foodways, which underscores the damage moralist food justice can do. Third, we review scholarship on decolonizing methodologies and feminist leadership. Fourth, we draw inspiration from this body of scholarship and apply it to our own collaboration. Ultimately, we show that applying these concepts to collaborative research resists some colonizing forces and fosters a more just form of scholarship.

The Problem of Problem Definition As … [people] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas 1928:572).

In this section, we identify aspects of our identities that shape our engagement with the food justice movement. The determinants of the ontological questions we undertake are complex, and the particular variations in how we define similar situations are consequences of these identities (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Despite shared interests, we come from different cultures, parts of the country, professions, and generations. Our different backgrounds and our common values are the foundation of our activism and scholarship.

Our experiences as people, one Native American-Chicano-Mestizo man (Hank) and one European American woman (Katie), shaped how we engage with the topic of the colonization of food justice and with each other. Hank has been involved in local food systems, community food security and food justice work for over 20 years. He has long recognized racist and oppressive forces at work in constraining opportunity for people and communities of color. His family made space for his education through constant struggle against poverty and racist stereotypes. He earned a medical degree, trained in psychiatry and served on the faculties of two medical schools. He participated in the civil rights struggles and eventually © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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committed himself to neighborhood and community development in oppressed communities, with a specific focus on what we now call food justice. The structural violence imposed on youth motivates him above all else. Katie has been assessing the influence of her race, education, and economic privilege on her capacity to contribute to social justice movements. At the same time she has critical awareness of how her gender can erase some of her power and privilege. More recently she has dedicated herself to the struggle against racism and oppression in the academy and the food movement.

We met in early 2010 when Katie invited Hank to speak to her Alternatives in Agriculture seminar, part of her graduate program in Community Development at the University of California, Davis. In our first meeting, we recognized many common interests and shared values. When Katie began studying food justice, she noticed many parallel ideologies and circumstances to the field of international development, which she studied as an anthropology major in college. In conversations with Hank, Katie shared her observation that the voices of the food insecure were largely absent from the academic literature on food security. Hank concurred.

Indeed, frustration with this dynamic—the absence of the voices of people impacted by problems from the academic research on those problems—contributed to Hank leaving his academic career in order to pursue community-based work. It is through these histories that we understand the field of food justice and the problems that plague it.

We have worked together since 2010 in several scholarly and community-based food justice projects. Based on the common concerns, Hank invited Katie to intern and conduct her master’s thesis research at Dig Deep Farms & Produce later that year. Dig Deep Farms & Produce is an urban farm that aims to create jobs, improve the quality and accessibility of fresh produce in urban, unincorporated areas of Ashland and Cherryland, CA and that Hank co-founded (Bradley and Galt 2014).

At Dig Deep Farms & Produce, Hank worked as General Manager, supervising a team of employees who were new to farming, learning on the job, and responsible for promoting the farm and its Community Supported Agriculture program in the surrounding neighborhoods. Katie began her internship and research by working with the farm team, although she spent a considerable amount of time at arm’s length before gaining their trust. As a supervisor and founder of the farm, Hank’s relationship with the farmers differed greatly from Katie’s. Whereas he was in a position of authority in their eyes, farmers came to see Katie as an ally and confidante. This gave us very different perspectives with which to examine leadership within the food justice movement.

“Original” and “Moralist” Conceptions of Food Justice

The food justice movement is fundamentally a social justice movement. It takes issue with inequalities in access to food, exploitive labor practices in the food system, and environmental degradation associated with conventional agriculture and environmental racism (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010).

In both discourse and practice, early CFSC efforts de-emphasized individual responsibility in favor of systemic accountability. Many explain these priorities as © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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originating in the civil rights movement and the Black Panther Party (Alkon 2007; Green et al. 2011; McCutcheon 2011; Patel 2011; Slocum 2011; Sbicca 2012).

These descriptions contribute to what we refer to as the original notion of food justice, in which struggles against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food system (Hislop 2014) are integrated with practical efforts to establish fair, equitable access to fresh, healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food in vulnerable neighborhoods, especially low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, with ownership and governance of the means of production and exchange accessible to the people who eat this healthy food.

Alternative food movements, in contrast to food justice and despite similarities,1 evince many primary concerns, from the environmental degradation associated with conventional agriculture to the health consequences of consuming industrial food. These concerns have a moral dimension, in common with traditional environmentalism in which engendering environmental protection relies upon environmentalists accepting a moral obligation (Taylor 2002). As with environmentalism, a moral component comes into play in alternative food movements in such a way that proponents see local, sustainable, environmentally friendly foods as universally good things to which everyone should have access. Implicit in this belief is the assumption that with access, people make the right, or moral, food choices. Thus, a moral imperative to establish “access” to local food without regard for the ownership and governance of the means of production and exchange represents a moralist notion of food justice. Although this work is carried out under the banner of food justice, it is distinct from the original notion of food justice.

The moralist notion of food justice is the most recent manifestation of a legacy of social reform and conservation practices. Social reformers and environmentalists have long used food and humans’ relationship with nature to reinforce white privilege. Before the advent of environmentalism and the alternative food movement, dietary practices and health more generally have functioned as markers of belonging, ability to work, and expressions of identity, religiosity, self-restraint, and morality (Berlant 2010; Coveny 2000; Crawford 2006; Farrell 2011). Indeed, today, within the alternative food movement, and including in the moralist food justice movement, eating more kale, for example, can mark one’s morality or sense of cultural distinction, and more specifically one’s sense of responsibility towards the environment, support for small, local farmers, and defiance of the power of corporate, fast food (Johnston et al. 2011; The Economist 2012). Members of social or religious movements usually make a deliberate choice to use food in these ways, yet, as Coveny (2000) explains, people still unintentionally internalize conflated conceptions of morality, science, citizenship, and health. And, more importantly, we assert that these internalizations are both reinforced by and reinforce the institutionalization of racism masquerading as scientific knowledge.

Conflating dietary advice and morality are quite harmful. Crawford (1994) explains, “health and its pursuit have become increasingly valued and thus have become a crucial terrain upon which contemporary, personal identity is fashioned … the ‘healthy’ self is sustained in part through the creation of ‘unhealthy’ others, who are imagined as embodying all the properties falling outside this healthsignified self”. These “unhealthy others” are often women, the poor, the colonized, © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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and conquered. Moreover, their non-compliance with nutritional advice offered objective evidence of their immorality and thus justification for denial of their rights (Farrell 2011). For example, Native American scholars contest the claim that western medicine improved the health of Native people, arguing that western medicine too often leads Native people to “neglect the social, the people, and their cultural models and their mental states when we clinically study foods” (Salmon 2012:80; Wilson 2005). This exacerbated the impacts of such colonizing acts as provisioning of tribes with US commodities, the industrialization of food, and the contamination of traditional food sources (Cozzo 2009; Mihesuah 2003; Norgaard et al. 2011).

Thus, institutionalizing nutritional knowledge further institutionalized the marginalization of women, the poor, the colonized, and conquered.

The last quarter century has provided yet another layer to the morality-diet conflation. Under neoliberal capitalism, non-conformers to specific dietary and nutritional advice, even those who have been systematically excluded from complying (DuPuis 2007), are immoral because of their failure to participate in a market-based democracy (Guthman 2011b). As Guthman explains, under neoliberal capitalism, people are encouraged “to act through the market, or like the market, by exercising consumer choice, being entrepreneurial and selfinterested, and striving for self-actualization and fulfillment”. Unfortunately, neoliberalism has permeated some food justice activities. This contributes to conditions that prevent the poor, colonized, and conquered from participating in these markets, and from redefining democracy and economy.

Access to leadership positions within the food justice movement have been similarly affected, with well educated, white people professionalizing leadership within food justice initiatives and programs intended to serve people of color. Indeed, a 2013 survey of food justice organizations confirms that only 16% of respondents work for organizations that “have policies that ensure representation of community members in paid and/or leadership positions” yet 79% of respondents indicated that issues of racial, ethnic, socio-economic, gender, sexuality, political, and generational inequalities affect their organizations (Hislop 2014:139). And, Porter and Redmond (2014:267) observe a “feminist erasure of women of color” in the context of a national food movement whose public leadership is male dominated. Despite these disparities, leaders of color do emerge but “individual examples do not necessarily reflect a structural whole” (Reynolds 2015:252).

While, there is no lack of integrity or good will on the parts of white people running the movement, the collective impacts of their whiteness in positions of power undermine the principle of food justice. Furthermore, despite exceptions to the norm, these disparities have significant ramifications. Kristin Reynolds (2015) found that white-led urban agriculture groups in New York City were able to attract more funding than their people of color led counterparts. One prominent leader, Malik Yakini (2013), has described this phenomenon on his blog in this way: These [African American, Latino/Latina, Native American and Asian American] organizations are often under resourced and thus have significant capacity issues. This lack of capacity contributes to a self-perpetuating cycle that sees the lion’s share of food movement funding go to larger, well-established, usually white-led non-profits. Of course, this is not the only factor in funding inequities. Non-profit funding is based, in

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part, on relationships. Funders, who are overwhelmingly white, often feel more comfortable with people who look and speak like them, know people that they know and live lives similar to their own.

Yaikini’s and others’ success in defying the odds of white leadership does not mark the end of white supremacy or the challenges that stem from it.

Scholarly Colonialism

These two conceptions of food justice are mirrored in academic work on the topic.

In the vein of original food justice, scholars of alternative food movements call attention to racial processes. They have described whiteness as including (though not limited to) the romanticization of agriculture (Alkon and McCullen 2010); racial exclusion in alternative food spaces (Guthman 2011a); assuming the right to speak for others or with authority (Pulido 2002); exotification of food cultures of people of color (Harper 2011); and widespread belief in meritocracy resulting from: a set of structural advantages including higher wages, reduced chances of being impoverished, longer life, better access to health care, better treatment by the legal system and so on … a set of cultural practices, often not named as “white” by white folks, but looked upon instead as “American” or “normal” (Frankenberg 1993, cited in Kobayashi and Peake 2000:394).

The cumulative effect of these manifestations of whiteness is structural racism and an unstated article of faith and nearly absolute certainty that the white way is the right way. Although these assessments are accurate, when they are used to generalize and essentialize food justice work, they are marginalizing the practice of original food justice work.

Some scholars respond to this outcome by describing the complexity of racism in the food system and focusing on racialized experiences of eaters, cooks, food service workers, and farm workers (Abarca 2006; Harper 2011; Holmes 2013; Williams-Forson 2006) or highlighting food justice work carried out by people of color (Bradley and Galt 2014; Herrera et al. 2009; McCutcheon 2011; White 2010, 2011a, 2011b). These scholars and activists highlight colonizing forces within food justice and the strategies women and activists of color use to control their food and agriculture systems.

When the strengths of academic critiques of moralist food justice lie in the author’s arguments more than in her research methods, she is shielded from having to examine how her own work reproduces white supremacy and knowledge hierarchies and scholarship mirrors colonizing aspects of moralist food justice.

One element of colonization is especially evident in the case above involving the ODC. The researcher’s assumption about the value of independent research is more in line with “individualistic careerism” than collaboration. Gilmore describes individualistic careerism as “the competition to know the most about some aspect of the politically and oppositionally ‘new’” (1993:71). Critique and comment on the “oppositionally new” undermined the self-determination of ODC members.

Although, in this example, activists contested her scholarship, this is not always possible. © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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For example, a different scholar discussed her work with Katie, explaining that the former’s article critiquing moralist elements of the work of a food justice organization led to changes in that organization’s priorities. However, allies and colleagues more intimately connected to the organization told Katie that the changes were in the works prior to the scholarship in question and independent of it. While academic work can and does contribute directly to social justice activism (Pulido 2008), many activists never hear of specious claims or contest them because they are made in “cloistered” academic settings (Gilmore 1993:72). Thus, scholarship critiquing moralist food justice does not necessarily constitute the original notion of food justice.

These examples highlight two shortcomings of conventional research practices— the lack of adequate means for research subjects to shape or respond to how they are represented and very limited transparency about research methods and the nature of researcher–subject relationships. This facilitates colonizing tendencies.

And, it undermines the value of the research and academic publications for research subjects. These scholarly practices bear much in common with other colonial forces that emerge from the dominant culture with roots in western European Enlightenment rationality, science, and patriarchy. They persist because it poses no threat to the power of highly educated, mostly white people who direct and do research on food justice work nor to powerful economic interests that create conditions of food injustice. In the next section, we align and integrate a decolonizing framework with the original conception of food justice.

Decolonizing Food Justice Research From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism (Smith 2012:1).

With these words, Linda Tuhiwai Smith begins a powerful, incisive and comprehensive analysis of the social, cultural, spiritual, and physical violence perpetrated by Northern European colonialists and imperialists over the past five centuries. The purpose of her analysis is to identify and name as much of the damage as possible. Doing so is to decolonize, that is, to begin the painful, agonizing process of at least mitigating if not healing the historical trauma caused by this violence (Brave Heart 2004).

Decolonizing food justice and food justice research must emphasize praxis because of the ways theory and practical action can be used iteratively in social change. Frameworks of explanation and on-the-ground strategies inform each other. Indeed, as Smith observes, research has been “inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” (2012:1). Over five centuries colonizing forces have included many forms of destruction, for example, through disease; economic exploitation; subjugation and enslavement of indigenous people; enlightenment notions of rationality, science, dominion, and civilization; the positional superiority of European knowledge; the dismissal of indigenous spirituality; and imposition of what is “human” and what is “Other”. © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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Colonizing forces go deeply into the research enterprise and have been normalized within definitions of the constitution of legitimate research, theory, and written documentation, for example, “… systematic note taking, checking and rechecking of sources, interviews with informants and, eventually, publication of results” (Smith 2012:87). An all too common consequence of colonial nature of much research is the dismissal of all other forms of knowing as primitive, inferior, and illegitimate. Of course, these forces and power dynamics are racialized in the most fundamental way: the white way is the right way.

In contrast to colonized forms of research, decolonization research is about understanding the world “… from our own perspectives and for our own purposes” (Smith 2012:41). Decolonizing food justice, we argue, also must take shape and develop from our own perspectives and for our own purposes, and based on our own stories and the theories used to explain them. We use the phrase “our own” to refer to indigenous peoples, people of color, allies, and all marginalized and oppressed peoples.

Indigenous people must struggle “… to make sense of our own world … Part of the exercise is about recovering our own stories … inextricably bound to a recovery of our language and epistemological foundations” (Smith 2012:40–41). Over the past six or seven decades, decolonization has involved the development of radical social movements, for example, the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement in the US and others globally. Indigenous peoples have struggled to regain land, language, culture, human rights, and civil rights. Decolonization has involved the formation of an indigenous research agenda, based on mobilization, healing, transformation, and decolonization—all with political, social, spiritual and psychological dimensions—and moving in waves from survival to recovery, development and ultimately self-determination (Smith 2012). Ethical research is an essential element of the decolonizing research agenda and involves respect; face-to-face engagement; looking and listening before speaking; generosity; cautiousness; respect for the people’s knowledge; and humility (Smith 2012:9).

The indigenous research agenda brings to the center and privileges indigenous values, attitudes and practices rather than “… disguising them within Westernized labels such as ‘collaborative research’” (Smith 2012:128). It is grounded in indigenous constructions of community and group identity, interests, and needs.

Decolonizing methodology and radical social movements teach that theory and methodology are intimately connected. Retelling a story, or in this case, multiple stories about the CFSC and academic work is part of a healing process that reframes the history of the CFSC as a process in which activists of color were deeply invested and disappointed. This perspective serves as a reminder that a critique of moralist and colonizing practices must also honor the efforts of the oppressed to resist colonization. This demands a new theoretical explanation.

We contend that the original and moralist conceptions of food justice offer this.

Furthermore, the perversion of the original notion of food justice and the emergence of a hegemonic moral imperative in the guise of food justice are not merely structural phenomena. Individuals operating in universities, governments, and non-profits internalize values and recreate stories like those told in the introduction.

After all, Smith argues that we are “all inheritors of imperialism” (2012:9). © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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Given how historically entrenched this set of problems is, we are also interested in the power of decolonizing methodologies to transform research about food justice. We contend that by honoring experiences of the oppressed, research can embody decolonizing values and support the original notion of food justice rather than merely capitalizing on the moralist notion of it.

This section touches on a limited number of essential elements of the decolonizing process, which is complex, nuanced, multi-faceted and specific to oppressed people in their communities. Nevertheless, the implications for food justice and food justice research are many. The definitions, the practice, and the study of food justice must center and privilege indigenous knowledge, values, beliefs, interests, needs, hopes, and dreams. The food justice movement and food justice research require leadership from indigenous communities. When a formal research endeavor ignores the original notion of food justice, it is complicit in a colonizing process. Therefore, we look to other processes of social change for new definitions of research.

Feminist critiques of western science have contributed important frameworks for promoting social change through research. According to Smith, feminism has opened up significant spaces “within the academy and some disciplines to talk more creatively about research with particular groups—women, the economically oppressed, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples” (2012:9–10). A major way space “opened up” was through the coincidence, in the sixties, of activists and academics asking questions about power and research. Feminism took on the considerable task of “undoing or deconstructing dominant paradigms by which most scientific research was bounded” (2012:168).

Feminist leadership, according to Batliwala (2010), provides a complementary frame with the potential to correct the flaws and distortions of power and privilege resulting from colonial forces acting within food justice research and activism.

Based on an extensive review of leadership literature, Batliwala offers several elements of feminist leadership that, we contend, are highly relevant to the formation of a decolonized research agenda for food justice. They include making “the practice of power visible, democratic, legitimate and accountable, at all levels, in both public and private realms” (2010:18); “an active participatory attitude, and inclusion, at all levels of the organization”, particularly of people from marginalized groups (2010:26); an intervention “in structures of power that keep the world unjust” and a challenge to multiple, intersecting oppressions (2010:26); creating a “more gender and socially equitable architecture” (2010:27); and, ultimately, it must connect practices of power, politics and values.

Batliwala usefully identifies leadership practices and experiences that feminist leaders use to uphold a socially just research agenda. Whereas some are useful in terms of strategizing, others serve as comforting reminders about the normative and problematic nature of undertaking a feminist or decolonized research agenda.

For example, operating within these frameworks requires agility and resilience, since the mainstream often penalizes efforts to upheave the status quo. Batliwala reminds us that introspection and critical appraisals of our own leadership efforts must be ongoing and integrated into every undertaking. Often activists undertaking these charges do not see themselves as leaders, but rather as part of a group, © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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and they are uncomfortable with power. Relatedly, they see the creation of new and equitable research paradigms and social institutions as fundamentally about relationship building (Batliwala 2010:34–35).

While the academy can offer resources and training for the practice of food justice and food justice research, it rarely encourages many of these characteristics. Smith argues that struggling to integrate indigenous and feminist values and epistemologies into a research agenda is an alienating “occupational hazard” that can have a negative impact on the “perceived expertise and intellectual authority of the researchers” (2012:206). The academy must learn to subordinate its interests, control and ownership to the indigenous communities striving for their own selfdetermination and emancipation. While we aspire to change these institutions, we have begun by applying these principles in our own collaboration on food justice activism and research. We offer the following stories in an effort to personalize decolonizing methodologies and to make visible this struggle for power.

Personalizing Decolonizing Methodologies

Theorizing the decolonization of food justice research and decolonizing ourselves as we collaborate in food justice activism and research are very different types of challenges to us as individuals and as two colleagues working in solidarity. While theory is often applied to case studies, it is far less common to read in peer-reviewed work how scholars make meaning of theory in personal ways. Although we fundamentally want to see structural changes in food systems and food systems governance, we believe individuals play crucial roles in pushing this agenda.

Furthermore, the tendency of academics to call out racism and oppression in the food system without also reflecting on the ways scholarship and scholars re-inscribe oppression merely buttresses the academy’s power. Therefore, we also turn a critical gaze upon our collaboration in an effort to be the change we want to see in the world and to foster a community of praxis with others activists and academics struggling to decolonize food justice.

Collaboration requires that we accept each other’s faults, are willing to acknowledge when we are wrong, and trust each other’s commitment to justice. This is sometimes frustrating and challenging because, despite shared commitments, we are also entrenched in, and have internalized aspects of the cultures of movements and institutions that have colonized food justice. Within this context, we question the limits of what we each contribute and value the unique perspectives each of our backgrounds affords. Thus, we are well positioned to study how racism permeates food justice activism and scholarship and to propose strategies for combating racism in these fields. In doing so, we hope to deepen this body of scholarship that gives voice to groups who are too often silenced by or erased from food justice scholarship.

Several examples, ranging from quotidian interactions to epistemological questions, provided opportunities for us to reflect on, dispute, and create resolutions about how we personalize theories of decolonization and feminist leadership. The first story is of how we came to work together. Following up on Katie’s invitation to Hank to be a guest lecturer at UC Davis, we met for coffee. At the time, Katie © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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was a first-year graduate student with no experience as an activist and almost no credentials as an academic; however wanting to be more involved in food justice activism, she used her status as a graduate student to initiate a conversation with Hank. She was nervous to meet Hank because of his reputation as a committed activist but told him about parts of her history that led to caring about food justice—learning to cook with her parents and aunts, visiting rich kitchens in poor households around the world, and ultimately overcoming depression by becoming a professional pastry cook. In reflecting on this meeting, Hank observed, “Your heart was right there and I connected with that because to me, that insight into that learning that happens, that emotional experience in the kitchen, is so deep. It puts aside all intellectual considerations.”

In this situation, we both lowered our guards and refrained from using power we each held over the other. Katie did not draw on her connections to academic institutions. Hank did not draw on power derived from his status as an elder, a man, or veteran of the food justice movement. Therefore, with this type of interaction, we forged a connection that can and does bear stress.

And indeed, it has. In our first effort to co-author a story, we struggled to come to a shared understanding. The story was about Dig Deep Farms & Produce (DDF), the above-mentioned urban farm. We planned to tell the story at the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting in 2011. We decided to present because, as Katie wrote in her notes at the time, we wanted to critically examine academic storytelling, the appropriation of knowledge, and to share lessons from DDF on these matters.

To prepare, we reviewed PowerPoint slides Hank and DDF co-founder, Lieutenant Neideffer previously prepared as part of the official story. We agreed to use some of them in our presentation. Reviewing the slides sparked a rich conversation about the social construction of knowledge and the limits of knowledge. Despite some common ideas and values, we also had different loyalties. Having spent months earning the trust of the farmers at DDF, Katie felt compelled to tell a story that they would approve. And, such a version of the story had to, Katie felt, acknowledge the farm crews’ frustration that they were not given adequate training and support to succeed in their new jobs. Meanwhile, Hank was wary of the possibility that any sign of trouble at DDF could attract criticism from academics who would only know what we told them, and that such criticism could make its way to financial and political backers of DDF. He therefore wanted to tell a story that Lieutenant Neideffer, would approve and that would protect DDF in its first year of operation.

Katie developed a first draft outline that incorporated the PowerPoint slides. As she worked, Katie thought that a more provocative presentation would explore tensions between farmers’ experiences and DDF’s overall objectives. In part, she was inspired by a recent keynote talk at the Dimensions of Political Ecology conference in which Paul Robbins emphasized the importance of tensions and contradictions in political ecological analyses.

Upon reviewing the first draft, Hank was disturbed by Katie’s portrayal of conflict within DDF and by the way she deviated from the official storyline. Katie was disturbed by Hank’s insistence that only one version of DDF’s story could be told © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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publicly. But, as we explained to each other why we wanted to tell the stories we did, Katie began to acknowledge that her search for tension instantiated a neocolonial and objectifying tendency of academic inquiry. Emphasizing conflict between values, objectives, and social relationships might have made for rich analysis of race and class dynamics in urban agriculture; but it would have wrenched control from members of DDF and subjected the organization to outside critique and possibly even loss of funding before farmers and founders could address the issues internally, which they subsequently began doing. This conflict demonstrates that academic endeavors can lead to appropriating stories, removing them from context in such a way that they do not serve the communities in which they originate. Over time, it became our practice to resolve any conflicts privately before subjecting them to public scrutiny through presentations or publications. This has the effect of promoting inclusiveness in shaping a living story. Batliwala encourages making “the practice of power visible”, however we also believe making difficult or messy situations visible prematurely can undercut the efforts of activists (2010:18).

Dealing with such issues using a decolonizing framework requires honesty, humility, and patience. We have yet to deal with irreconcilable versions of a story, but we have agreed that if this happens, we will share neither or both versions.

This paper is another product of our collaboration that demonstrates the importance of using decolonizing and feminist principles in food justice scholarship. We began writing this paper by discussing what arguments and stories we wanted to share and then taking turns writing and building on the other’s work. Katie used this strategy successfully in an article co-written with her advisor. It requires trust that errors will be forgiven and, even more than that, trust that one author will protect the other author’s ideas. After several revisions, it was Katie’s turn to write.

She read some of Hank’s work, did not understand an argument, and deleted parts of it. She thought, if it did not make sense to her, it would not make sense to readers. She made other additions and edits as well and sent the revisions to Hank.

Hank did not respond except to say that he was busy and he’d get to it.

A month later, we met to discuss the next steps. Here, Katie learned that Hank had not worked on the paper. Initially, Katie felt disrespected by Hank not working on the paper in the month since she sent him the draft. Gradually, Hank shared that he was so troubled by what Katie wrote, or more specifically, the absence of his words from our argument, that amidst his many obligations, he could not find the energy to address this silencing. Hank felt betrayed by Katie. And, it was a very frustrating and saddening experience for both of us.

Over 90 minutes of what seemed (to Katie) a very unproductive meeting and (to both of us) a very frustrating meeting, the seed was planted for a very important lesson. To maintain the trust that inspired us to collaborate, and for collaboration to be a meaningful tool of decolonization, Katie had to take all of Hank’s ideas seriously, especially the ideas that did not obviously make sense. After leaving the coffee shop where this frustrating and saddening meeting took place, Katie went back to work. She restored the paper to the draft that preceded the problematic one. Focusing on what did not initially make sense to her, Katie spent time considering why Hank would choose the arguments and examples he chose. She considered these confusing ideas in the context of Hank’s history, to the extent she was familiar with © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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it, and in doing so, realized the shortcomings of her frameworks for thinking and writing about food justice and academic scholarship. It was embarrassing, as being wrong often is. Yet, it was this act of contemplation that helped Katie achieve greater understanding. And, it was the confluence of our ideas, on top of the trust we share, that enabled us to share these ideas with you, our reader.

If the process of writing a paper about decolonizing food justice has taught us anything, it is that the process of decolonization requires us to embrace what we don’t already know or understand. The academy encourages particular ways of presenting ideas. From discouraging the use of the first person, assigning jargonladen readings in courses, and feedback on student work, to pressure to publish as a sole author, these expectations help define knowledge and success in academia. To decolonize food justice scholarship, we must welcome, humbly, and perhaps even embarrassingly, age-old yet alternative methods of sharing knowledge. From a scholar’s perspective, trust can ease the discomfort of humility and embarrassment. From an activist’s perspective, to decolonize food justice scholarship, fortitude and patience can be invaluable tools. But that is not all. Next, we discuss several strategies Hank uses to ensure that his lessons fall upon open, humble minds and loving hearts.

In the course of our collaboration, Hank began learning about his Ohlone heritage. This was part of his family’s history that was rarely discussed but of great significance and interest to him. One afternoon, we met to discuss DDF and the Food Dignity Project, a collaborative research project. We began reflecting about Native American history in the Bay Area and quickly realized we knew very little.

Hank suggested we do some internet research together on the spot. As we sat over our laptops, sending each other URLs, looking out the window to a busy Oakland street, what we learned horrified us. Bounties were placed on the heads of Native Californians in what amounted to both physical and cultural genocides. As we read detailed accounts of this history, Hank imagined his forefathers hiding these stories inside themselves. He began to understand the weight of the burden his father carried his entire life and began to cry. He cried in empathy with their suffering.

And, he cried because he knew then that it prevented him from knowing his ancestry and his father’s struggles better.

In the months that followed, we realized that being open about pain and trauma is very important to our collaboration. Hank’s willingness to share his feelings modeled the type of honesty he expects of his academic collaborators. This situation demonstrated the importance of acknowledging the overwhelming, present-day impacts of historical trauma and of chronic stress. It takes confidence, patience, and generosity to be as open as Hank was in this situation, and these are both privileges and burdens he possesses.

We are not calling on people who have suffered from racism, historical trauma, and other forms of oppression to bear the burden of educating people with more privilege. And, Hank takes important precautions before sharing his wisdom and welcoming scholars into his activism. Hank is a well known activist and as such students and scholars often request that he participate in research about food justice.

In his time as general manager of Dig Deep Farms & Produce, Hank required any potential researcher to share a research protocol, work on the farm, and earn the © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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approval of the farmers before beginning research. These requirements “make the practice of power visible” (Batliwala 2010:18), challenging the power of academics and helping activists to claim power in a relationship in which they often lack it.

Such structure goes a long way in creating a space in which Hank is safe to teach and share in personal, vulnerable, and emotional ways, as described above.

Hank is not always the teacher in our collaboration. Although our working relationship began in a very unbalanced way, the power dynamic slowly shifted. Initially, the power and privilege of male teacher accrued to Hank, and Katie was in the vulnerable position of student and female. The power dynamic became more balanced through our intention to learn from each other. Initially Hank was driven to learn from Katie about her life experiences, cooking with her family, her international travels, and her academic work. He learned about her heart in the kitchen—an insight that went historically, intellectually, and emotionally deeper than his previous association with kitchen and cooking as merely a congenial and convivial experience and which helped him to identify parts of his heritage and upbringing that influence his activism. Through this process, we began articulating the importance of a reflective and personal agenda for food justice research, which this article represents.

Gradually, Hank learned about Katie’s struggle to gain acceptance from the farm team at Dig Deep Farms & Produce. He witnessed the attachment between the farmers and Katie becoming powerful as trust grew. As hard as it sometimes was for him to hear, he learned about thoughts and feelings of the farmers—thoughts and feelings that they would never express directly to him as “the boss”. In this way, Katie’s lack of power allowed her to become an authority on matters that Hank’s power precluded him from fully understanding without her input.

We have worked hard, with a fair degree of success, to pull away the accouterments of patriarchy and privilege that ensnare us all if we allow them to do so. Most importantly, we did not learn from each other in contemplative isolation. We talk to each other frequently, honestly, and fearlessly. Our collaboration has thrived on each of us acknowledging our ignorance, appreciating the other’s ability to constructively question each other’s assumptions and attitudes, and aspiring to collective and emergent insights.

Conclusion

We offer this window into our collaboration to highlight ways we have tried to decolonize research about food justice and to invite other scholars and activists to do the same. Hank’s generosity and vulnerability strengthened already existing trust.

Furthermore, making time to research and discuss the history of Native Californians, as well as the history of CFSC’s ODC, provided a broader perspective about the history of oppression that Hank brings to his activism and with which he makes sense of food injustice. These are processes Smith highlights as critical to decolonization. Yet, Hank’s honesty and vulnerability, which fomented the situation, are not attributes that are promoted in academics broadly, or food justice scholarship specifically.

Integrating the qualities of feminist leadership, the imperative of decolonization, and original and moralist conceptions of food justice provides us with critically important markers for countering the injustice imposed by colonialism and white © 2015 The Author. Antipode © 2015 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

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patriarchy, while building food justice within sustainable community food systems, and doing so with the support of academic research. These frameworks point to the pervasiveness of patriarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism in institutions of governance, including the academy, and thus the need to remake these institutions.

These frameworks also point to the critical role individuals play in remaking these institutions, and thus to the need to make these frameworks personal. We hesitate to suggest a prescriptive course for collaboration, except to say that multiple social, cultural, and political positions and unique personalities that academics and activists alike possess and the unique settings and contexts in which we work matter greatly. Our collaboration has worked well because we give weight to specific aspects of our own and each other’s backgrounds and the circumstances that define our work. We grapple with how these factors impact and colonize our own thinking, within and outside of the bounds of traditional academic discourse.

We attempt to step outside of—and indeed explicitly reject—those boundaries we find unrealistic and detrimental to just scholarship.

Understanding and decolonizing research about food justice will require considerable reflection, primarily on the part of academics, but also with support from activists. Collaborative reflection has enabled us to understand and begin to decolonize our own research. Therefore, we call on other academics to engage in similar reflection, and eventually to make these reflections public. We also encourage honesty about what shapes the research, especially personal connections and networks, emotional and interpersonal challenges, and skill sets. This, we contend, constitutes meaningful resistance to the academic and educational privilege, racism, and moralism. In our efforts to decolonize our research, we have often had to leave our comfort zones. We hope the above stories of frustration, collaboration, humility, and compassion will serve as reminders that this can be a fruitful endeavor.

Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge and express our gratitude for the support of this work by Food Dignity Project, funding by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant No. 2011-68004-30074 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. This paper was originally presented at the Yale Food Systems Symposium in 2013, and we are grateful for the opportunity to share our early ideas for this paper with a thoughtful audience. Thank you also to members of the Galt Lab at UC Davis as well as to Alison Alkon, Daniel Bowman Simon, Erin Beasley, and to our anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on early versions of this paper.

Endnote

1 There are important similarities. For instance, alternative food and food justice movements share an interest in re-embedding local economies within local food systems.

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The Radical Potential of the Food Justice Movement

By Nancy Romer

FARMERSâ€&#x; MARKET PHOTO BY NANCY ROMER

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he two main threats to our people and planet are climate change and corporate control of our economy 1

and polity. These intertwined issues will take a mass movement of epic proportions to shift. Time is of the essence as climate, economic, and political disasters keep occurring, gaining in intensity, impoverishing people while enriching the transnational and national corporations.

Agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership could further strip national governments of their rights to protect labor and the environment in favor of protecting corporate profits. The need to build dynamic and effective movements that embody our needs is an imperative for those who believe that only democratic struggles, led by the most oppressed and joined by allies, can create a new world. The Food Justice Movement (FJM) offers an entry into the complicated labyrinth of issues, analyses, and strategies of movements that exist and need to expand and form coalitions.

If you talk to people about these issues, particularly people who are not “in the movement,” they back away, overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems. How can we engage people to be moved into consciousness and action? How can we learn from each other and understand what is happening to our planet? How can we build the kind of organizations with staying power that we need to sustain us emotionally and socially as we build new understandings, new alliances, new movements, and a new world?

Many North Americans and Europeans think of the “food movement” as “foodies” and gardeners: people who want to make sure they have their organic arugula.

Smaller problems, more manageable in scope, that still reflect the larger problems at hand can be entry points for learning; for building skills, confidence, and relationships; for creating a culture of participation and community; for generating the courage to participate in analysis, strategy, and change. That is what the FJM has to offer: it addresses our most critical problems and offers concrete projects that can be transformative for people who begin to engage politically, often for the first time in their lives. This is a global movement that has been growing over the last 20 years with institutions, organizations, and alliances of which most people in the U.S. have been unaware.

We‟ve seen, quite recently, what happens when a mass movement such as Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square can be derailed without long-term strategies and organizations. These movements have contributed crucial popular concepts, such as “the 99%,” class solidarity, mass uprising from dictatorships, and are likely to have far-reaching influence; right now they seem dormant. The more we build grassroots organizations of trust and shared experience, communities of learning and analysis, experiments in structure and action, develop

leadership of those most oppressed by the system, and, most importantly, create alliances and broad strategic approaches, the more our movements will sustain us in the future. The FJM has the potential to tackle cross-cutting issues of equality, environment, democracy, resilience, health , and power. It also has the potential to bring in crucial leadership of youth, people of color, women, the poor and working class -- the people most marginalized by the present food system -- and unite across class, race, gender, language, and nation.

Many North Americans and Europeans think of the “food movement” as “foodies” and gardeners: people who want to make sure they have their organic arugula and those who enjoy growing their own. The image the corporate media project is people, young and old, having a good time eating and enjoying their privilege or, in other words, recipes without politics.

The Food Justice Movement is different: FJM wants everyone to have organic arugula and knows that the food system must radically change to achieve that goal. It sees race, class, and gender as central to food oppression and leadership. It sees the food crisis as a result of corporate control over our land, water, agriculture, food processing and distribution with heavy assistance from neoliberal governments and the corporate media. It sees the necessity of sustainable food systems (agriculture, distribution, processing) to mitigate climate change: that means an end to factory farms. It sees feeding the world‟s people as dependent upon decentralization of the food system so people can build resilient, culturally-appropriate systems that meet their own needs. It sees renewable energy as critical, and food workers and small family farmers as central to the fight to create a healthy, resilient, and just food system. It sees solidarity across the globe, in particular within the Global South, where the struggle for democratic control of the food system or food sovereignty has been developing exponentially.

The FJM is one of the largest cross-cutting movements today and, therefore, has the potential to create alliances, to understand how the present corporate-controlled world functions, and to create strategies for building a multi3

sector movement. The FJM has many parts, potentially creating a multifaceted and powerful movement for change. The parts, demands, and strategies, however, do not always fit neatly together, and there is sometimes conflict. The challenge of making these parts work provides creative organizational work for those who see its potential. For activists and students, it provides insight, hope, and endless opportunities for direct participation. In the next sections I will briefly describe and analyze the major parts of the Food Justice Movement and present directions for its future.

Sectors of the Food Justice Movement Farmers in the U.S. Farmers are the central sector of the food movement, globally more than nationally. In the U.S., farmers working small- and medium-scale farms and connected to progressive farmer organizations are advancing the important idea of food sovereignty or

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maintaining control over farmland, practices, seeds, and distribution of food to feed people. Many of these farmers use agro-ecological methods that are as or more 4

productive than factory farming methods. These farmer activists bemoan the reality that too many of their decisions around seeds, land use, and markets are taken out of their hands by agribusiness that works to control agricultural markets and determine farmers‟ practices.

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In the U.S., the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) represents family farmers struggling to earn a living, maintain the family farm tradition and practices, and provide food for the local food economies in which they are embedded. Too often farmers are caught between being a subcontractor juggling agribusiness‟s demands for use of their seeds, chemicals, and equipment and the finance industry that provides credit with which to buy these 6

“required necessities.” They are outraged by the armtwisting of the multinational agriculture, chemical, fossil fuel, and pharmaceutical corporations and their cronies in government. For the U.S. family farmer, these are the real enemies of food justice and the instigators of climate change, hunger, and poor health.

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Many of these U.S. farmer activists are keenly aware of their place in the class structure. NFFC and Family Farm Defender leader Joel Greeno led a “tractorcade” across the state of Wisconsin to Madison, the state capital, in 2012 to support public service union members who occupied the State Legislature to protest attacks on union members.

Many independent family farmers see their future as connected to the success of an independent and organized, class-conscious movement standing up to corporate domination of our society.

Farmers are the central sector of the food movement, globally more than nationally.

NFFC advocates a return to agricultural supply management which attempts to keep farmers from going out of business, the result of decades of deregulation and “get big or get out” legislation. These policies insure the overproduction of genetically engineered corn, soy, wheat, and rice; these subsidized crops then are used in cheap,

and often hormone and antibiotic-laden, feed used in animal factory farms. The overproduction of corn is processed into high fructose corn syrup that infuses junk food and contibutes to obesity and disease. U.S. small and medium-scale farmers ask for price floors, guaranteeing their capacity to continue to earn modest livings while providing food for their communities and protection against climate change through sustainable farming practices.

In addition, U.S. farmers who have suffered land theft and government discrimination have won lawsuits. The National Black Farmers Association won a $1.25 billion 8

settlement and Native American Farmers and Ranchers won a $680 million settlement plus $80 million in loan forgiveness against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for race discrimination. Latino farmers‟ lawsuits have had similar results. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives are examples of activist grassroots Black farmer organizations that see themselves as food sovereignty organizations similar to organized peasants from the Global South such as La Via Campesina (LVC), the world‟s largest peasant/farmer/fisher organization. This cross-fertilization of ideas and strategies advancing food sovereignty and justice across the globe represents movement building at its best.

When people in cities insist that governmentsubsidized food, including school lunches, be purchased from local farmers, it expands the local food economy, builds decent jobs in the food system, improves the sustainable practices of the local food system (fewer food miles and earth-healthier practices), and produces healthier, fresher food for children. It also builds crucial alliances between family farmers and local consumers and advocates.

Of course, there are conflicts. Small family farmers have trouble staying in business and worry about paying their migrant farm workers better; migrant farm workers live such marginal lives that they need to fight for their pay and rights. Working out contracts between these groups will test the FJM, but these conflicts must be resolved to push back against corporate control of the food system that pushes everyone but the bosses to the bottom of the 9

barrel.

Organizations such as the Agricultural Justice Project, the Domestic Fair Trade Coalition, and the Coalition of Immokolee Workers pursue responsible practices, taking both the small-scale farmer and farm worker into account.

Farmers Across the Globe. The broadest based and most effective movement of farmers is in the Global South, where peasant cultivators make up over 50% of the total population (about 2.5 billion people); the Global South has 85% of the total world‟s population. In contrast, in the U.S., small- and medium-scale farmers make up between 1 and 2 % of the total population. Several UN reports and studies of agro-ecological practices indicate that these small scale farmers can feed the projected 10 billion people expected in 2100 and can do it with good distribution 10

networks and planet cooling practices.

Clearly the importance of Global South farmers, their organizations COURTESY OF NANCY ROMER

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and movements, are essential to our understanding of the FJM. We cannot develop separate strategies; we must work together to achieve results with which we can thrive.

Sitting in a small meeting room in a church basement in Manhattan, I recently had the privilege of hearing a passionate conversation among seven winners of the 2013 11

Food Sovereignty Prize discuss the farmer movements in their respective nations: Haiti, Brazil, Mali, India, and the Basque Country in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. The four women and three men talked about land grabs, and the collusion of the multinational seed, chemical, and agribusiness corporations and their national governments in controlling agriculture and making it difficult for farmers to feed their people. They discussed their respective organizations‟ strategies and tactics to take back agriculture and put it under local control and talked about their use of agro-ecological practices that work with land, soil, water, and people to produce culturally appropriate, resilient food for their local populations. Sheelu Francis, leader of the 100,000+ member Tamil Nadu Women‟s Collective in India, talked about the struggles of poor women farmers in Tamil Nadu planting native millet that will grow resiliently even with drought and resisting the

communities, mostly in rural areas. Land-seizure-based communities are made up of farmers, often called squatters, who have seized land and are farming it. The land is either contested -- farmers believe that historically it is theirs -- or landlords have let the land be unproductibve for years. They are peasant cultivators, who often face violence, as they stand up for their rights to work the land in service of their people. U.S. trade agreements (NAFTA, CAFTA, and the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership) have wreaked havoc with farmers across the globe. These agreements force national governments to elevate the power of corporations to extract profits from the farmers. The super rich are thus highly motivated to buy off governments through elections or overthrow governments so that their allies support these supranational agreements. Because capital is global, our movements to recharge the democratic power of the people must be global.

Food Workers. Between two and three billion people in the world are food workers: agricultural, processing, distribution, retail, and restaurant. Workers along the food chain are paid low wages and have few rights. The Food Chain Workers Alliance is a U.S.-based organization that represents food workers in the food movement and interacts with the FJM. Food Chain Workers are organizing to bring the food justice and labor movements together to support each other and insure that class, race, and gender values are shared. As workers who are particularly oppressed, the food worker sector of the FJM looks to people of color, immigrants, and women for leadership.

Traditional U.S. labor unions, such as the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), have been organizing food workers for decades, mostly in large factories and in wholesale and retail workplaces. The United Farmworkers has a rich history of organizing farm worker contracts with assistance from consumer

FARMWORKER FROM A DEMONSTRATION PROJECT IN JAMKHED PHOTO BY NANCY ROMER

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boycotts.

Farm Laborers Organizing Committee and Comite en Apoyo de Trabajadores Agriculos have organized farmworkers locally.

pressure from corporate seed companies to grow genetically engineered rice instead. Rosadit and Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of the Group of 4 in Haiti told us how, after the 2009 earthquake, Haitian farmers burned Monsanto‟s “gift” of genetically modified seeds so that Haitians could continue to control their own agriculture and keep it out of the hands of the multinational corporations.

All these activists, including the U.S. National Family Farm Coalition, have created chapters of La Via Campesina. Perhaps the largest nonreligious organization on the planet, LVC has over 200 million members from 150 nations, mostly in the Global South. Founded in 1993, the hundreds of chapters work in a variety of ways toward Food Sovereignty or control of their local and national food systems. They are explicitly anti-corporate, work for land redistribution and against land grabs, are conscious stewards of the land and water, and tend to work collectively in small scale co-ops and land-seizure-based

Food workers serve as an important sector for the U.S. labor movement to organize. With a declining percentage of workers in unions, the greatest increase in labor organizing in the last ten years has been in smaller shops and contingent workforces, often in the service sector.

Recent organizing of fast food workers into the Fast Food Forward campaign, calling for a $15 per hour wage for fast food workers, has been a creative arena of organizing for labor developing new tactics and drawing in community support. The FJM supports the fast food workers and sees them as important in fighting poverty and low wages. The mostly young, often female, people of color, and immigrant workforce are the people needed to lead the FJM into a 14

cross-cutting issue movement. Fast food restaurants are also the site of organizing against unhealthy, processed food foisted primarily on young and poor people.

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Community support for food workers has also played an important role in their success. The Coalition of Immokolee Workers (CIW), tomato pickers in Florida, has created highly successful campaigns on college campuses and in communities to leverage support for their demands from the fast food giants and supermarkets. By applying pressure through boycotts, the CIW has wrested concessions for Fair Food Agreements from Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, and Trader Joe; Wendy‟s and Publix supermarkets are its most recent targets. These agreements include increased pay per pound of tomatoes and a range of human rights guarantees against wage theft, sexual harassment, and enslavement. The Mexicaninspired music, chants, street theater, and vibrant visuals make CIW actions invigorating. Food justice advocates, including college students, have played a major role in advancing their cause and have provided popular education on the oppression of farm workers and how to work for change.

Between two and three billion people in the world are food workers: agricultural, processing, distribution, retail, and restaurant.

Workers along the food chain are paid low wages and have few rights.

Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), a national organization with branches in eight cities, has created another paradigm for organizing restaurant workers: popular education, direct actions, and a “High Road” campaign lifting up good restaurant employers and demonstrating against bad ones. ROC also provides professional training for restaurant workers, extensive research and public campaigns on its findings to highlight the problems of restaurant workers, many of whom are people of color and immigrants.

Brandworkers International, another food worker organization, represents food processing and distribution workers, mostly immigrant workers in fancy food plants where the workers face dangerous working conditions. Their success has been due to effective on-the-job organizing, support from progressive lawyers filing suits on their behalf, and FJM support of their tactics. Their members have won millions of dollars from employers due to discrimination, exploitation, and wage theft. United Food and Commercial Workers, an international union that negotiates workeremployer contracts, uses community support to advance good contracts for their workers. UFCW workers at Murray‟s Chicken processing plant in upstate New York were struggling for a contract and dealing with the USDAapproved doubling of the speed of the processing line when the Brooklyn Food Coalition (BFC), a broad-based FJM group, publicized their struggle. They got hold of reports indicating major health and safety violations and coordinated with union organizers to apply pressure to company management. BFC was able to get the support of its sister organization, the 16,500 member Park Slope Food Coop and Murray‟s largest purchaser, and press for a good

contract that would yield healthier and safer conditions for the workers and chickens. Pressure helped to settle a 15

stalled contract within two weeks.

Rural Migrant Ministries, a faith-based farmer-worker organizing project, has been valiantly fighting for a Farm Worker Bill of Rights in the New York State Legislature for several years. In 2013 they organized support from FJM groups across the state.

Hunger and Poverty in the U.S. Antihunger/antipoverty is perhaps the oldest and most instututionalized sector of the Food Justice Movement. With approximately 50 million Americans who are “food insecure” or unable to rely on adequate food on a regular basis, anti-hunger advocates created a web of organizations to address these issues. In the early 1960s, fueled by revelations made public by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and amplified by the civil rights movement, the presence of hunger, particularly in the South and in cities, became a national disgrace. Antihunger organizations formed to lobby for policy change.

These activists brought us food stamps: monthly allotments for individuals and families experiencing hunger

JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION HOUSE KITCHEN STAFF

or food insecurity. In a “grand bargain,” the U.S. Farm Bill joined the omnibus legislation of farm subsidies with food stamps, now known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), which serves over 48 million Americans, 87 percent of whom live in households with children, seniors, or people with disabilities. By the early 1980s, with Reaganomic policies cutting food assistance programs, a second tier of anti-hunger organizations expanded and provided anti-hunger services directly to the poor such as food pantries and soup kitchens, mostly funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and administered by a wide range of charities, in particular, faith-based organizations. In Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, Janet Poppendieck explains how these organizations and nonprofits help serve the poor but often do nothing to challenge the reality of the poverty of their clients. Poverty and hunger are structural issues of inequality in our society. There is enough food to feed everyone in the world, let alone in the U.S., but wide income inequality makes millions of people, and about 1/3 of all children in the U.S., food insecure. This is rarely addressed as structural oppression of poor people by a lopsided system of distribution of wealth.

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Some of these food pantry workers, clients, and volunteers, however, have been creative and pro-active in changing this paradigm. More and more pantries like Mother Hubbard‟s Cupboard in Bloomington, IN, provide a multiservice approach, offering food, job training, and placement as well as political education and organizing to create policy change. The Stop in Toronto sees its work as political and community building, not only feeding hungry people but also giving them tools to transform their lives and the policies that affect them. Many locally run food pantries are challenging the food that government surplus and food corporations offer: yellow cheese, processed carbs, old veggies, food which makes people sick. Brooklyn Rescue Mission, Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger, and Food for Thought in Forestville, CA, are beginning to grow their own food for pantry guests, who may also participate in the gardening. They see the power of these pantry gardens to build community and relationships, and to empower people to understand why they are poor and how they can change the system, going beyond receiving or even growing their own food.

While advocating for a sharply graduated tax system based on people‟s income, New York State Hunger Action Network identifies the structural causes of hunger and poverty and works with allies to increase the minimum wage, provide jobs, improve the safety net, and support community control of food pantries. Starting out as a legislative and fund-raising organization to fight poverty, Why Hunger has an anti-hunger hotline and a grassroots network of anti-hunger organizations that are participating in a campaign for living wages.

Health, Anti-Obesity and the School Food Movements. Both anti-obesity efforts and school food activism are increasing. Close to half of the U.S. adult population and 1/3 of our school age population is overweight or obese; this is highest in low-income communities and among people of color who have little access to affordable, healthy, fresh food. The Live Right, Live Light Program serving obese and morbidly obese children from 2-19 years of age in Brooklyn, NY, works with one third grader who weighs over 250 pounds and cannot fit into her desk at school. Obesity is a preventable epidemic that is caused primarily by government food policies and corporate greed.

Though the term “food desert” has been used to describe the lack of healthy food in low-income communities, a more accurate term might be “food swamps” because food is easily available, but it is often filled with fat, sugar,and salt and sold at cheap prices by corner stores and fast food restaurants. The availability of this cheap, disease-causing food is due to the overproduction of corn, soy, and rice, subsidized by tax dollars via the U.S. Farm Bill that is used to produce cheap, processed food that causes obesity and diet-related diseases including diabetes, and heart and joint diseases.

The food is deliberately developed by food corporations to hook their customers and push this addiction though advertising to kids.16 While obesity rates among privileged children are slowly decreasing, this is not true for lowincome children. Health advocates ask people to make better choices and to become active exercisers: Michelle

Obama‟s “Let‟s Move” campaign signals that perspective.

To change the cycle of obesity we must challenge the corporate food system. Michelle Simon‟s excellent blog and Nick Freudenberg‟s Tale of Two ObesCities push for government action that outlaws sales of certain products, for example, NYC Mayor Bloomberg‟s proposed ban on supersized soda or his ban on transfats, and a required listing of calories of foods served in large chain and fast food restaurants. The San Francisco City Council passed a ban on prizes in “Happy Meals” so that children would be less manipulated to request them.

School Food Focus, a national organization that has created change in school food for the largest school districts in the U.S., works parallel to these grassroots groups by promoting improved and, when possible, local food sourcing for schools to help change the market, for example, pushing for chicken that is free of antibiotics and hormones.

In 2013, 134 million children ate school breakfast and 30.6 million ate school lunch at a cost of $15,672,900,000.

Most of the students received food free of charge because their families‟ incomes were at or below the poverty line.

Since its inception in 1938, school food has become less nutritious as a result of decreasing school budgets. Due to public pressure, school lunches have improved slightly.

Although the USDA spends billions of dollars annually on school food, much of it is in the form of surpluses from agribusiness. Little of it is fresh, unprocessed, or local food that improves health. Most of it replicates fast food 17

products.

Parents, teachers, administrators, community residents, and students have played a major role in changing school food. This part of the FJM has combined grassroots activism with professional advocates as well as improved food consciousness to make significant, but nowhere good enough, changes in school food. The class and race of these activists is diverse but their demands are consistent: salad bars, water jets, more fresh fruits and veggies, more whole wheat products, more locally sourced food, more “from scratch” cooking, and more choices that are culturally appropriate. Our experience in the Brooklyn Food Coalition has been that low-income parents are very concerned with what their children eat in school and see school food activism as an effective way to make their voices heard. It is also an important place from which to develop local leadership, especially among women and people of color, central to the future effectiveness of the FJM. School Food Focus, a national organization that has created change in school food for the largest school districts in the U.S., works parallel to these grassroots groups by promoting improved and, when possible, local

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food sourcing for schools to help change the market, for example, pushing for chicken that is free of antibiotics and hormones. The hope is that creating specifications for particular food items to be purchased by schools will change the market, and more farmers and processors will provide the food that schools want. But even when school systems set a goal of the percentage of foods to be locally grown, it may be hard to find the products they desire: the market has to catch up to the demand.

Sometimes hunger and health advocates disagree.

While all parents, health, and anti-hunger advocates agree that we want healthier, fresh food for our children, antihunger advocates worry about reducing the total amount of food available if standards become too high. At present, much of our school food comes from tax-subsidized products that cause obesity and illness and use climatewarming methods. Cheap food, however, is not the answer to health or hunger issues; it empowers the transnational and national corporations that dominate the food system and will continue to dominate our lives unless we change it. We need to empower the local family farmer to produce more healthy food and reduce the control of agribusiness.

and Urban Growers that hold annual conferences on “Growing Food and Justice.”

Farmers' Markets, Community Supported Agriculture, Food Coops, and Local Food Initiatives: Building a Healthy, Sustainable, Local Food Economy.

Farmers' Markets, 18

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSAs), and Food Coops are ways to increase the local food economy on a small scale. They are lifeblood for the small and mediumsized family farmers who grow food specifically for the needs and preferences of local consumers. It is as close to food sovereignty as we can achieve in the present economic and political system. Direct relationships between farmers and consumers develop as each learns about and supports the concerns of the other. Small and mediumscale farmers do not have to share profits with wholesalers or processors and thus can maintain farm practices that will protect their land and the food they sell to others.

Local processors serve a direct link for farmers and often sell at farmers' markets. For many farmers and processors, the farmers' market provides a social and political space to create community and relationships. Many organizations supporting farmers' markets have cooking demonstrations to teach people how to eat healthfully. CSA farmers appreciate their customers who pay upfront each season for produce, thus allowing farmers to avoid loans. Food coops, especially ones that require member labor, often build preferential relationships with local farmers and create an economic base that small and medium-scale farmers can

Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture.

Community and backyard gardens are found everywhere in the world. Millions of urban 19 dwellers are experiencing some count upon.

While these independence from the food relationships are essential in system or the joy of growing creating the basis of a new food food in community gardens. system, they are often devoid Participation in community of political content because gardens is thriving in lowfarmers that may belong to BROOKLYN COOP GARDEN PHOTO BY NANCY ROMER income communities and farmer organizations pushing communities of color in urban areas, especially those with for change may not feel it appropriate to talk politics to blighted housing. D-town Community Farm, a two-acre their customers. farm in Detroit, is part of this phenomenon. Detroit‟s Black But that‟s exactly what we need to happen in our Food Security Network, led by educator and urban farmer farmers' markets, CSAs, and food co-ops. We need to have Malik Yakini, grew out of the large number of community discussions and educational opportunities for people to gardens that were cultivated in the hundreds of vacant lots understand the food system and why their action, left after housing became inhabitable or was demolished. participation, and support are necessary for us to continue Detroit has become a city of urban farmers who are to have healthy food available in the future. building communities who can feed themselves and their neighbors. In addition, they have developed farmers' City and State initiatives that give preference to local markets, a community food coop, and policy around food food for government contracts can help to advance the issues. Proclaiming Black and Green as their mantra, they local food economy and build relationships independent of promote people of African descent as leaders in the major food corporations. The cities of Toronto and Los movement and relate closely to the FJM in the U.S. Angeles use federal, state, and local government money Growing Power, led by MacArthur Genius Award winner Will Allen, is another example of urban agriculture that has expanded to many acres of farmland in Milwaukee and recently in Chicago. Dedicated to engaging community to produce healthy, affordable food and to provide training to low-income communities, Growing Power has existed for 20 years. D-town Community Farm, Growing Power, Black Farmers, and the Black leadership of NYC Community Garden Coalition (NYC CGC) have organized Black Farmers

allocated for school and institutional food to procure food locally when possible. Governments can also require that food vendors who do business with the city or state have good records of labor and environmental practices.

Creating contracts between local and state governments and local food producers can insure healthier food, increase tax revenues, and expand good jobs. The 860,000 school meals produced each school day by the NYC Department of Education‟s Office of School Food could transform the local

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food economy if it used local food. The NYC Food Policy Center at Hunter College has a series of excellent proposals for the mayor of NYC to do this. The niche of local and organic food represents the largest growth sector in the U.S. food economy. It prefigures what might be possible if people were in control of the food system.

Building the market for healthy food will go only so far.

Breaking the stranglehold of the corporate-dominated food system will take concerted political action, not just shifting purchasing patterns. The multi-billion dollar advertising and public relations budgets of the food industry will not go quietly.

Food, Climate agricultural sector processing, selling, accounts for about

Change, and the Environment. The that includes growing, distributing, serving, and managing food waste 1/3 of all greenhouse gases emitted

20

each year. Monocrop farms that use synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, and heavy farm equipment, as well as methaneproducing animal factory farms and gasoline used in extensive transportation distribution routes create greenhouse gases that are warming our planet. Agroecological methods that replenish carbon into the soil and local networks of food production and distribution minimize global warming.

programs and community-based youth programs often include popular food-related programs such as farming and gardening, cooking, healthy food access, and food and fitness projects. Real Food Challenge on hundreds of campuses, though mostly private institutions, insists on local and real food in college cafeterias and is an example of how youth are challenging the corporate food system.

They aim to transform the economy through purchasing power. Many high school youth from diverse communities see the potential of creating a food system that meets their needs. Cooking and gardening in schools K-12, food studies across the curriculum, and Wellness Partnerships in schools have brought attention to food issues in curricular and extracurricular activities. What is often missing from these experiences in schools is a food justice orientation but that is often included in after-school and communitybased projects. High school and college students have been active in supporting the Coalition of Immokolee Workers in their efforts to get fast food corporations to agree to higher pay for tomato pickers. They have been the backbone for boycotts and created solidarity with farm workers while 22

learning about their struggles.

The independence and creativity of these youth give great hope to their future leadership in defining and building the FJM.

Whether using organic certification schemes or ecologically sound growing methods, family farmers may be the best stewards of the land. They are often embattled with agricultural giants that control the markets and methods of farmers with which they have contracts. An example of this is chicken processing, in which Tyson and Purdue compel small-scale farmers to function as serfs whose work and lives are under their regulation.

On a 2008 trip to North Carolina for a Politics of Food Conference, I drove with a group of food justice activists

by Smithfield Farms facilities. We were overwhelmed by the stench of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and their enormous elevated pools of urine and feces, overflowing onto the land when it rained, but Smithfield did not allow us to see the CAFOs of turkeys and hogs up close. Laws that have made recording of these farming operations illegal have been passed in a number of states by means of heavy lobbying by corporate owners of CAFOs. The few whistleblowers who have recorded the treatment of animals and the despoiling of the environment have received death threats, and some have been hauled 21

into court and served jail time. These poisonous methods of producing food are being addressed and monitored by organizations such as Food and Water Watch and the Humane Society. Our overreliance on products made from animals, often inhumanely and poisonously raised, must be challenged as well. Strengthening the local food economy can also make citizens more aware of the environmental conditions in which their food is grown. Local food advocates are teaming up with anti-fracking and anti-oil and gas pipeline forces in the environmental movement. If the land is poisoned, we cannot grow healthy food for our people.

Youth: Education and Activism. Youth are vital participants in the FJM. School-based and after-school

SCHOOL FOOD

Organizations representing young and/or immigrant farmers such as Greenhorns, National Young Farmers Coalition (representing more than 40,000 new farmers), and the New Farmers Project provide support and technical assistance for people who have never farmed before or who have only farmed in their home nations. These organizations provide help in finding land to lease or buy and loans to get their farms moving forward. During the last five years the most popular internship among college students has been World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). Few of these students will become farmers but the knowledge they gain will help them become aware of the issues inherent in our present food system. And some of them have become farmers. We need farmers with food sovereignty or food justice orientations.

The hope is that direct experiences struggling within the present food system will move them to join with other farmers and activists to change the system.

Democracy in the Global Food System: Organizations and Action. The U.S. equivalent to global

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farmers struggling against multinational corporations in peasant cooperatives, can seem anemic.

In Toronto, Oakland, San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York State, Food Policy Councils have been created to enable people to participate in food decisions made by local governments. Of course, how useful they are depends on who is at the table, who is excluded, how much power the Food Policy Council has, and how that power is derived.

How do ordinary people get to be heard by the Food Policy Council? What matters is that people are thinking about the importance of influencing public policy around food.

What is worrisome is that once a Food Policy Council is in place, it may ignore people lower down on the political food chain. The only way to avoid this is to build local democratically-controlled organizations of strength and 23

awareness that won‟t put up with being ignored.

Too many decisions are made from the top of the decision-making pyramid, with scant input, let alone control, from the people. In the U.S. that has translated into a kind of hopelessness and turning away from political action and attention.

Building the Food Justice Movement. The FJM has great potential. The parts of the movement are in place, but it needs a coherent political vision and analysis to achieve a food system that serves the needs of the people.

It must challenge the hegemony of what Latin Americans call “savage capitalism” or corporate profits at any cost.

We need alliances of farmers, labor, environmentalists, anti-racists, feminists, LGBT activists, parents, the poor and working class, fast food workers, immigrants, and students. Community gardens can encourage members to come to educational events, participate in creating food policies, and press for needed change. Schools can provide a systemic critique of the food system and prepare their students with knowledge and critical thinking. Food worker organizations can place class politics at the center of the FJM, and environmentalists can make the connection between dependence on the inter-linked fossil fuel and food industries and how their plans exclude people‟s welfare. The broader and more varied the political education of FJM participants, the more prepared activists will be to decide for themselves the ways the movement should move forward.

These analyses and strategies need to become a range of campaigns in which grassroots groups participate, putting community, cultural, and local demands into effect.

Campaigns with specific demands or ideas for change give us a framework with which to educate and agitate. For example, a campaign for labeling genetically engineered foods both educates people about these crops and seeds and organizes against state and federal government targets for such food. Campaigns advancing a national Farm Workers Bill of Rights place excluded farm workers 24

into labor law. Changes in U.S. Department of Agriculture rules and expenditures around school food could be another campaign linking many parts of the FJM. Campaigns to eliminate fast food and junk food commercials from children‟s TV programming could be another national campaign, much like the anti-tobacco and alcohol campaigns of the past.

Local campaigns can provide specific targets around which alliances and relationships may be built. Living Wage and Sick Days campaigns have been successful in uniting and mobilizing the labor and the food movements in many U.S. cities. FJM in Los Angeles mobilized to improve school food by requiring more locally sourced products. NYC Food Forum, an alliance of FJM groups, created a primer of food policy for Bill DiBlasio, the new mayor of NYC. While the efforts are far from revolutionary, a more activated food movement could take these policy recommendations and move them forward. Without demands there cannot be mobilization, and mobilization for these demands requires popular education. Since most people learn best and become most committed within the context of action, these campaigns can help people to become more familiar with the ideas and goals advanced by the FJM. Finally, a national organization to unite the FJM with a clear analysis, strategy, and process for change is 25

needed, one that would respect the various sectors, including the grassroots projects and needs and participation of activists. It would have to lift up and support the leadership of those most affected. It would have to be non-sectarian and open to a range of views, approaches, and tactics. It would have to understand that different communities want to participate in different ways, but all communities want to be represented and have their voices heard. It would have to understand the importance of advancing the FJM in the U.S. but also need to see its place among the movements internationally and not try to replicate our nation‟s unfortunate history of attempting to dominate others. US Food Sovereignty Alliance and the Food Chain Workers Alliance are allied national organizations that may unite the Food Justice Movement.

The FJM and Educators in the Academy and Outside. Rich opportunities await educators, students, and activists within FJM, whether in schools, in the academy, or in communities, as organizers and popular educators.

Because the present maladies and the possible solutions of the food system cross cut so many major issues, it offers opportunities for action and learning. Basic research, organizing, and leadership skills; critical and strategic thinking; building coalitions and movements are all needed. Importantly, small wins and improvements are possible in schools, communities, workplaces, families, and our lives. Small wins create hope and belief in our power and are critical ingredients for an empowered movement.

Efforts that respect the individual but form caring and effective groups create personal, social, and political change. Those collective identities can produce effective organizations and movements for change.

The hard reality is that our planet is changing and there is a growing number of hungry, sick, and unempowered people living on it. The world has never more emphatically needed a change in direction: we all know it and we need to make it happen.

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Notes

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15

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Ryan Hill, “Opportunities Present for „Labor Left‟ in Walmart and Fast Food Fights,” Solidarity, October 9, 2013.

Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, Earth Policy Institute, 2011; Bill McKibben, EAARTH: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, Times Books, 2010; Frances Moore Lappe, Eco-Mind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want, Nation Books, 2011.

Mark Bittman, the “Flexitarian” columnist for the New York Times, defies this static concept. Bittman serves progressive food politics along with his recipes. See Mark Bittman, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating, Simon & Schuster, 2009.

Michael Moss, Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Random House, 2013.

17

Janet Poppendieck, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, University of California Press, 2011, includes insightful material on how fast food inspired school meals came to be and how food workers have become increasingly de-skilled and often are reduced to heating up foods that were produced in factories.

18

Several other sources provide a much fuller account of the FJM: Eric Holt-Gimenez, ed., Food Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems, Food First Books, 2011; Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds., Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal, Monthly Review Press, 2010.

Jules Pretty, “Can Ecological Agriculture Feed Nine Billion People?” in Agriculture and Food in Crisis. See Mark Bittman‟s succinct “How to Feed the World,” NY Times, Oct 14, 2013; Rodale Institute‟s Farming Systems Trial; IAASTD report, Nourish a Billion.org. http://whyhunger.org/, http://www.grassrootsonline.org/, http://www.foodfirst.org/, http://smallplanet.org/ Samir Amin, “Food Sovereignty: A Struggle for Convergence in Diversity,” in Food Movements Unite!

Wenonah Hauter, Foodopology: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America, The New Press, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/pigford-settlement, http://www.indianfarmclass.com, http://www.farmerclaims.gov/

Community Supported Agriculture is a subscription agreement between a group of consumers who agree to pay a set price up front for a given season to a farmer who agrees to provide whatever is grown on a regular basis to the consumer. It gives farmers cash before the growing season to buy seeds and not rely on bank loans for capital.

19

The Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC), with 16,500 members, requires each member to work 2 hours and 45 minutes every four weeks, thus cutting down on labor costs and building community.

The PSFC is the largest member/worker coop in the U.S., with prices about 30-35% cheaper than those of a regular supermarket. Monthly democratic governing meetings and a biweekly newspaper make political conversation and action common practice.

20

Anna Moore Lappe, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, Bloomsbury, 2010.

21

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-05/features/chifood-policy-cafo-protection-bill-gets-hearing-in-illinois20120305_1_cafos-animal-welfare-animals

22 9

Linewaiters' Gazette, Park Slope Food Coop newspaper.

16

Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Portobello Books, 2007.

10

Raj Patel, “Can the World Feed 10 Billion People?" Foreign Policy, May 4, 2011.

11

The Food Sovereignty Prize is awarded to farmer activists across the globe fighting to control their own food system. It is in contrast to the World Food Prize, which goes to scientists and managers from such corporations as Monsanto and Syngenta, http://foodsovereigntyprize.org/

12

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, NY: Penguin, 2004.

13

Frank Bardacke, Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, Verso Press, 2012.

http://sfalliance.org/ Student-Farmworker Alliance.

23

Many FJM organizations are run democratically, controlled by their members. Unfortunately, many are nonprofits, often controlled by tighly controlled appointed boards. NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) may function as brakes to movement building and democratic participation. Often these organizations invite participation in activities but not in decision making.

24

Groups such as Rural and Migrant Ministries are working on such legislation. http://ruralmigrantministry.org/jfw.html

25

Unfortunately, in 2011, Community Food Systems Coalition, an organization that attempted to unite the U.S. food movement, collapsed due to organizational, fiscal, and personnel problems.

The hope is that a successor organization will emerge with stronger support and organizational strategies.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Emma Watson: Gender equality is your issue too Date: 20 September 2014 Speech by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson at a special event for the HeForShe campaign, United Nations Headquarters, New York, 20 September 2014 [Check against delivery.]

Today we are launching a campaign called “HeForShe.” I am reaching out to you because I need your help. We want to end gender inequality—and to do that we need everyone to be involved.

This is the first campaign of its kind at the UN: we want to try and galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for gender equality. And we don’t just want to talk about it, but make sure it is tangible.

I was appointed six months ago and the more I have spoken about feminism the more I have realized that fighting for women’s rights has too often become synonymous with man-hating. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that this has to stop.

For the record, feminism by definition is: “The belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”

I started questioning gender-based assumptions when at eight I was confused at being called “bossy,” because I wanted to direct the plays we would put on for our parents—but the boys were not.

When at 14 I started being sexualized by certain elements of the press.

When at 15 my girlfriends started dropping out of their sports teams because they didn’t want to appear “muscly.”

When at 18 my male friends were unable to express their feelings.

I decided I was a feminist and this seemed uncomplicated to me. But my recent research has shown me that feminism has become an unpopular word.

Apparently I am among the ranks of women whose expressions are seen as too strong, too aggressive, isolating, anti-men and, unattractive.

Why is the word such an uncomfortable one?

I am from Britain and think it is right that as a woman I am paid the same as my male counterparts. I think it is right that I should be able to make decisions about my own body. I think it is right that women be involved on my behalf in the policies and decision-making of my country. I think it is right that socially I am afforded the same respect as men. But sadly I can say that there is no one country in the world where all women can expect to receive these rights.

No country in the world can yet say they have achieved gender equality.

These rights I consider to be human rights but I am one of the lucky ones. My life is a sheer privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too

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Emma Watson Gender equality is your issue too | UN Women – Headquarters

4/2/16, 1:14 PM

privilege because my parents didn’t love me less because I was born a daughter. My school did not limit me because I was a girl. My mentors didn’t assume I would go less far because I might give birth to a child one day. These influencers were the gender equality ambassadors that made me who I am today. They may not know it, but they are the inadvertent feminists who are changing the world today. And we need more of those.

And if you still hate the word—it is not the word that is important but the idea and the ambition behind it. Because not all women have been afforded the same rights that I have. In fact, statistically, very few have been.

In 1995, Hilary Clinton made a famous speech in Beijing about women’s rights. Sadly many of the things she wanted to change are still a reality today.

But what stood out for me the most was that only 30 per cent of her audience were male. How can we affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?

Men—I would like to take this opportunity to extend your formal invitation. Gender equality is your issue too.

Because to date, I’ve seen my father’s role as a parent being valued less by society despite my needing his presence as a child as much as my mother’s.

I’ve seen young men suffering from mental illness unable to ask for help for fear it would make them look less “macho”—in fact in the UK suicide is the biggest killer of men between 20-49 years of age; eclipsing road accidents, cancer and coronary heart disease. I’ve seen men made fragile and insecure by a distorted sense of what constitutes male success. Men don’t have the benefits of equality either.

We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are and that when they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence.

If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled.

Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong… It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideals.

If we stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are— we can all be freer and this is what HeForShe is about. It’s about freedom.

I want men to take up this mantle. So their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too—reclaim those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so be a more true and complete version of themselves.

You might be thinking who is this Harry Potter girl? And what is she doing up on stage at the UN. It’s a good question and trust me, I have been asking myself the same thing. I don’t know if I am qualified to be here. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better.

And having seen what I’ve seen—and given the chance—I feel it is my duty to say something.

English Statesman Edmund Burke said: “All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men and women to do nothing.”

In my nervousness for this speech and in my moments of doubt I’ve told myself firmly—if not me, who, if not now, when. If you have similar doubts when opportunities are presented to you I hope those words might be helpful.

Because the reality is that if we do nothing it will take 75 years, or for me to be nearly a hundred before women can expect to be paid the same as men for the same work. 15.5 million girls will be married in the next 16 years as children. And at current rates it won’t be until 2086 before all rural African girls will be able to receive a secondary education.

If you believe in equality, you might be one of those inadvertent feminists I spoke of earlier.

And for this I applaud you.

We are struggling for a uniting word but the good news is we have a uniting movement. It is http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too

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Emma Watson Gender equality is your issue too | UN Women – Headquarters

4/2/16, 1:14 PM

We are struggling for a uniting word but the good news is we have a uniting movement. It is called HeForShe. I am inviting you to step forward, to be seen to speak up, to be the "he" for "she". And to ask yourself if not me, who? If not now, when?

Thank you.

Also available in: French; Spanish; Portuguese To see a video of Emma delivering her speech, visit HeForShe.org

http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2014/9/emma-watson-gender-equality-is-your-issue-too

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Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally | MSNBC

4/2/16, 1:11 PM

Society

People march to TCF Bank Stadium to protest against the mascot for the Washington Redskins before the game against the Minnesota Vikings on Nov. 2, 2014 in Minneapolis, Minn. Hannah Foslien/Getty

Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally 1 1/02/1 4 02:0 5 PM

By Anna Brand Thousands of protesters – including political leaders – gathered Sunday morning at the Minneapolis football stadium where the Minnesota Vikings are facing the Washington Redskins to rally against the controversial team name. #NotYourMascot, a coalition of grassroots organizations against injustices of native identity in sports, called for the march and rally for Nov. 2, hoping to become the largest-ever protest against the Washington team name. Marchers were told to meet at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop Plaza for Indian prayers. They then headed to the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium at 10 a.m. for a rally and to hear several speakers, including a http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/political-leaders-notyourmascot-rally-washington-redskins-name

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Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally | MSNBC

4/2/16, 1:11 PM

Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium at 10 a.m. for a rally and to hear several speakers, including a leading Anishinaabe Environmental Activist and a representative from the International Indian Treaty Council.

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, who tweeted in the thick of the protest to #changethename, declared that ”There is no excuse to not know the damage your racist name does to people.”

Betsy Hodges ​@MayorHodges

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#changethename 10:23 AM - 2 Nov 2014 21

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Congresswoman Betty McCollum, of Minnesota’s Fourth District, was also present, calling for “respect and dignity” for all people. A congressman from Minnesota’s Fifth District, Rep. Keith Ellison chimed from the rally as well, posting a photo with civil rights activist Dick Gregory.

In a series of tweets, McCollum said “We are here to tell @nfl there is no honor in a racial slur.

It is time to change the mascot!”

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/political-leaders-notyourmascot-rally-washington-redskins-name

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Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally | MSNBC

Betty McCollum ​@BettyMcCollum04

4/2/16, 1:11 PM

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We have brought this movement to a new level. But the journey continues. There is more work to do. #changethename 11:51 AM - 2 Nov 2014 12

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By mid-morning, protesters were seen chanting with signs and holding up megaphones, according to the Star Tribune. Photos and comments using the hashtags #NotYourMascot, #ChangeTheName, and #nohonorinracism began flooding Twitter.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/political-leaders-notyourmascot-rally-washington-redskins-name

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Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally | MSNBC

Mike Wise ​@MikeWiseguy

4/2/16, 1:11 PM

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This is the scene of the largest ever physical gathering against the Wash. NFL team. #ChangetheMascot #changethename 10:24 AM - 2 Nov 2014 1,713

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Ryan JB Cooley ​@rycooley

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Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally | MSNBC

4/2/16, 1:11 PM

Protest signs like "PUNT YOUR LOGO" flying today at #NoHonorInRacism rally. #changethemascot #changethename 12:20 PM - 2 Nov 2014 7

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The location for the rally is significant in that Minnesota has a large Indian population – and has been the place for other protests against how Native Americans are represented in sports. The first major protest was during the 1991 World Series when the Twins played the Atlanta Braves – a team whose logo previously featured a “screaming Indian.” And when Minnesota hosted the Super Bowl in 1992 – where the Buffalo Bills faced off against Washington – thousands gathered to protest the name.

In a YouTube video of the rally Sunday, protesters are seen chanting in unison: “Hey hey, ho ho. The racist name has got to go.” // “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now!” // “Change the name. Change the name!”

The Washington team name has been blasted by President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain. Still, the controversy hasn’t dwindled – if anything, it’s only gotten more heated.

Last summer, nearly 50 Democratic U.S. senators called on the NFL to change the team name, marking the largest congressional effort to replace the term the senators called a racial slur. On Friday, a federal judge decided the NFL franchise could continue suing five Native Americans who take offense to the name, according to the Associated Press. The franchise claims that the name wasn’t deemed offensive when the trademarks were registered between 1967 and 1990. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), however, said they may ban the team name from broadcasts.

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