Relational Life: Lessons from Black Feminism on Whiteness and Engaging New Food Activism

Abstract

Critical food scholarship and BIPOC‐led food activism are demanding government responsibility for developing equitable food systems, while contending with the failure of government to affirm Black and Brown lives. Heeding Black feminist calls for complex geographies, I trace the racial entanglements of food apartheid in daily life in Dubuque, Iowa, USA as they intersect with Growing Together, a community donation gardening program developed through federal nutrition education and state Cooperative Extension programs. Analysing interview data, I examine Growing Together’s lack of accountability for food apartheid in Dubuque, and I focus on radical strategies to disrupt racialised, taken for granted notions of city neighbourhoods as “with” and “without” food, knowledge, skills, or community character. Complex geographies reveal paths to reconfigure Growing Together around mutual interdependency and support of Black‐ and Brown‐led collective struggles against a racist state, paths that ultimately demand the deep governmental transformations called for within racial justice movements.

Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Black Feminist Geographies

“…Black Feminist Geographies have a long history, particularly when understood as sometimes unmarked but very often interdisciplinary and expansive (Barriteau, 2003;Bryan et al, 2018;Fanon, 1968;Mama, 2020;McKittrick, 2006;Mohammed, 2003). This report focuses on the most recent iterations of Black Feminist Geographies which, particularly as more of us live more of our lives online (Oyosoro et al, 2022;Richard and Gray, 2018), often feature flexible, sometimes transient, translocal collectivities, whilst they also highlight and connect very small-scale, localised protests and practices.…”

“…My own work (Noxolo, 2019) might suggest the in/security of intersectionality as one way of conceiving this analytic sensibility. The relative security of dialogic solidarity between identities that we know are shared, or of opposition to those that face us across fixed lines of privilege or exclusion (see, for example, Chennault, 2022), can be both seductive and useful. After all, structures of inequality really do exist.…”

“…Despite what this ordering might seem to imply, Black Feminist Geographies should not be considered a subsection of Black Geographies; just as Black Geographies are rooted in and routed through a wider interdisciplinary anticolonial Black politics (Hawthorne, 2019), so Black Feminist Geographies is a geographical expression of the interdisciplinary field of Black Feminist Studies (see, for example, McKittrick, 2006 deeply influenced by Sylvia Wynter and other transdisciplinary Black Feminist work, this book has itself become deeply influential in Black Feminist work across disciplines). Indeed, Black Geographies has in common with many anti-oppressive movements (Bryan et al, 2018) that Black women, most with considerable feminist heft (see, for example, Eaves, 2023;Hawthorne and Meché, 2016), contributed significant amounts of the labour on which its institutionalisation and intellectual profile was established (Noxolo, 2022). So my starting point here is to contend that, rather than Black Feminist Geographies being a subsection of Black Geographies, the formation and growing importance of Black Geographies can only be fully understood in the context of Black Feminist Geographies.…”