Black American women have long sustained a complex relationship to food—its production, consumption, and distribution within families, communities, and the nation. Black women, often represented in American culture as “natural” good cooks on the one hand and beset by obesity on the other, straddle an uncomfortable divide that is at the heart of contemporary debate about the nature of our food system. Yet, Black women as authorities in the kitchen and elsewhere in matters of food—culturally, politically, and socially—are largely absent, made invisible by the continued salience of intersecting vectors of disempowerment: race/gender/class/sexuality. In this dialogue, we bring together a variety of agents, approaches, explorations, and examples of the spaces where Black American women have asserted their “food voices” in ways that challenge fundamentally the status quo (both progressive and conservative) and utilize the dominant discourses to create spaces of dissent and strategic acquiescence to the logics of capital ever-present in our food systems.
The author reflects on the experiences of everyday life during the pandemic. Exploring ideas of community, suburban contradictions, and brown people's attachments to the logics of settler colonialism.
Stories of food and place from Oakland's Brown Sugar Kitchen kimberly nettles-barcelón California Soul Oakland, California, has long been a place with an embattled food politic. In 1968 the Black Panther Party (BPP), a militant political organization founded in Oakland, initiated a series of "Survival Programs" designed, in part, to improve the public image of the Party and make more visible their work as practitioners struggling for social change within black communities. These "Survival Programs"-food and clothing giveaways, free breakfast programs, free clinics, and alternative primary schools-were part of the BPP's 10 Point Program. Instituting these programs was central to a growing realization among some party members that the health and wellbeing of the BPP depended on the health and well-being of "the people" and the communities within which they resided. The "Free Breakfast Program" and the "Free Food Giveaways" received a good deal of media attention and, while the legitimacy of the BPP was always contested, this community work drew a lot of support from the Black elite, the white liberal Left, and political leaders within the San Francisco Bay
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