Pathways to reparations: land and healing through food justice

Abstract

While mainstream efforts for reparations center financial compensation via legislation and litigation, social movements expand this conceptualization in order to address critical and yet often overlooked components of reparations. Equitable access to land and opportunities to heal from intergenerational trauma are two of these reparations demands that social movements prioritize. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature exploring the role and impact of social movements on reparations. Therefore, we seek to develop this important conversation. In doing so, we elucidate the ways in which these two foci of reparations overlap with those of other social movements; food justice initiatives, in particular, also emphasize the connections between racial justice, land justice, and healing. We thus synthesize social movement, food justice, and reparations literatures to examine the overlaps between the goals of food justice initiatives and social movements for reparations. Using two case studies, Tierra Negra and Soul Fire Farm, we demonstrate the ways in which food justice initiatives support social movements for reparations. Contextualizing our analysis within reflections on personal experiences, we argue that through their efforts to transform systems of oppression, food justice initiatives provide an alternative pathway to achieving reparations.

Racial Capital, Abolition, and a Geographic Argument for Reparations

“…Beginning from the starting point that "freedom is a place" (Gilmore 2017:227), we argue geography is central to projects related to reparations for the enslaved and their descendants. Focusing on geography, we argue, opens up space for a more sustained and potentially transformative practice around reparation debates (Gilbert and Williams 2020). Moving beyond the view that transatlantic slavery is confined to the past, or that reparations must solely focus on monetary remuneration, we outline an understanding that locates reparations within a Black Radical Tradition.…”

“…The work of abolition democracy to remake the South in the aftermath of the Civil War is central to Geography and Geography's role in furthering the call for reparations (Gilbert and Williams 2020). Arguably, it is the focus on land and property that constitutes the most radical and liberatory efforts of abolition democracy to remake a property relation forged through slavery (Harris 1993;Heynen 2018).…”

Black intimacies with food sovereignty and land in the midst of gentrification in Saint Paul’s historic Rondo

“…Gilbert and Williams (2020) also makes this conceptual and political connection between food justice collective work in urban and rural spaces and reparations. Their argument that food justice initiatives provide a constellation of alternative food pathways to achieving reparations for Black communities resonates with the work that UFGA is trying to do in Saint Paul.…”

Toward a radical food geography praxis: integrating theory, action, and geographic analysis in pursuit of more equitable and sustainable food systems

“…mapping) and in qualitative ways that engage with (differential) relationships between people and their surroundings (an essential contribution of Black-, Latinx-, and Indigenous geographies as discussed above). Through a geographical lens, a radical food geography praxis calls attention to the role of place and place-based networks in both constructing food systems and relationships with food, but also in resisting injustices in those systems (Gilbert and William, 2020 2020; Reese, 2020 2020; Smith, 2019). It considers the production of space and place as well as different meanings and discursive constructions of such concepts.…”