“My grandma left the South to get away from this.”

My neighbors and I have started attending a series of workshops hosted by Openlands to help Chicago residents to start a new garden. Our instructor, Julie Samuels, is a long-time community organizer, and it was valuable for me to hear her assertion that people are the most important part of a community garden. During the first class, we heard stories about the challenges and successes of other community garden projects. In some neighborhoods, residents are vehemently opposed to edible food gardens, which inhibits those who are interested from getting them going.

For many people of color, there is a stigma around traditions connected to food and farming. It’s  important to understand why. Organizing people around food justice issues means education about the difference between the work of share-croppers and slaves and the labor of contemporary community gardeners who are directly engaged in the livelihood of their neighborhood. With that in mind, it’s also important to acknowledge that many white folks have taken advantage of the growing food and environmental justice movement in ways that replicate the inequities of the past. That’s why community gardens, organized and maintained by neighbors for non-commercial food production, are so exciting. I prefer a cucumber I grew on my own to anything that I could get from someone else, including local farmer’s markets or CSAs. My interest in community gardens are the latest iteration of my long-standing commitment to DIY: they are one of the simplest ways to work towards autonomy.

Pancho MacFarland is a Chicago State University sociologist and member of the Roseland Community Peace Garden. He has written a few posts about this on an environmental & food justice blog. He describes the problem in this post, which I quote from below: http://ejfood.blogspot.com/2011/09/food-justice-in-city.html

Often, middle-class and aspiring middle class Black students run from the culinary and other traditions of their recent ancestors. They connect these foods and labor activities with the hard life in the South.

Another oft-heard remark in the community garden and food justice classroom is a variant of the following: “My grandma left the South to get away from this.”

He goes on to write:

A chorus of students chimed in telling stories that elders in their family had told them about the South.  What became evident during this conversation was that none of the complaints about the South during the early 20th century had anything to do directly with agriculture and rural life itself but with the racist apartheid system that controlled Black people’s right to move and degraded or dismissed their skilled artisan or farm labors.

This is a distinction I want to be very mindful about as we proceed with Garlic & Greens. What is the relationship between the stories we are gathering and the movement towards food justice? How can we celebrate soul food history while also acknowledging the lasting legacy of oppression?

Pancho MacFarland will give a free public talk about these issues on 4pm October 20th, at Columbia College Chicago as part of the Cultural Studies Colloquium Series: 624 S Michigan Ave., Collins Hall, Room 602.

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