Session 7 – White Supremacy, Racism + Food

Overview

  • In this session, we will focus on issues of race and ethnicity as they relate to and shape issues of inequity in the food system.
  • In the first hour we will have a lecture on issues of race and ethnicity as they relate to and shape food insecurity and inequity in the food system. In the following 30 minutes, we will adopt a critical race perspective to collectively examine values, beliefs and assumptions in a food insecurity case study
  • In tutorial, your TA will guide you through the process of mapping Moments of Significance in your project work this term in order to recognize the multiple pathways and experiences in the group and articulate your vision for successful project completion (i.e. approaching a Graceful Dismount)

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

  • Articulate the ways in which individual, institutional, and structural racism relate to and shape issues of inequity in the food system and intersect with other forms of systemic inequity.

Key Terms + Concepts

  • Race, ethnicity and food justice

Required Readings + Resources

The food system is a racial project that produces racialized subjectivities and hierarchies, consolidates white privilege and oppresses communities of color (Sbicca & Myers, 2017, p. 32)

In this session, we will discuss ways in which race intersects with issues of power and privilege in the food system. In the video below, Malik Yankini, explores the connections between race, food and health.

References

  • Sbicca, J., & Myers, J. S. (2017). Food justice racial projects: fighting racial neoliberalism from the Bay to the Big Apple. Environmental Sociology, 3(1), 30-41.

Tutorial Session

Moments of Significant Change

  • Your TA will facilitate an individual and collaborative process of identifying and discussing significant moments that have occurred in your project so far.

The most significant change (MSC) technique (we are referring to it in LFS 350 as Moments of Significant Change) is a form of participatory monitoring and evaluation. It is participatory because all group members are involved both in deciding the sorts of change to be recorded and in analyzing the data. It is a form of monitoring because it occurs throughout the project cycle and provides information to help people manage the project. It contributes to evaluation because it provides data on impact and outcomes that can be used to help assess the performance of a group, or team as a whole. This methodology uses a ‘storied approach’ to collecting and analyzing data. It takes responses to the central question that sounds like ‘During the last month/project so far, in your opinion, what were the most significant changes that took place for you?’, which are often in the form of stories of who did what, when and why – and the reasons why the event was important.

We will begin the process by having your group articulate your "Story of Us" through the lens of your project in LFS 350. This is an extension of the Public Narrative process which each student started at the beginning of the term when they submitted the Story of Self assignment. Story of Self overlaps with Story of Us. There are many "us's" - family, community, organization, profession, movement, nation. A Story of Us tells the values of some community, long formed or now forming. It helps define a community, comparing and contrasting with other communities. It is about collective identity. Stories of Us that have depth have founding moments, key choices made, challenges faced, defining experiences, outcomes, and lessons learned.

Overall, the Moments of Significant Change methodology provide groups an opportunity to reflect on initial goals and expectations about a program/project, share those with other members of the group to draw connections and/or comparisons and then begin to map out a collective story that is comprised of each individual’s story. Facilitating this process at multiple points throughout a program/project provides an opportunity for individual group members, as well as the collective group to check-in and potentially revise goals and expectations.

Additional Material

  • Holt-Giménez, E. & Harper, B. (2016). Dismantling Racism in the Food System. Food First:https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DR1Final.pdf
    • This Backgrounder is the first in a multi-authored series on “Dismantling Racism in the Food System.” In this series we seek to uncover the structural foundations of racism in the food system and highlight the ways people, communities, organizations and social movements are dismantling the attitudes, institutions and structures that hold racism in place.
  • Duke Sanford World Food Policy Center Research Brief: Identifying and Countering White Supremacy Culture in Food Systems
    • This research centered on the question: How does white supremacy culture play out in the food insecurity and food access space in the United States? To become anti-racist, food system actors must understand how white supremacy culture narratives function to center whiteness across the food system, effectively reinforcing systemic racial inequality and by extension disadvantaging BIPOC people. We discuss how whiteness holds white ideals as universal, how whiteness fuels power in decision-making, and how whiteness defines foods as either good or bad.
  • ARTICLE: Castro & Collins, 2020. Asian American women in STEM in the lab with “White Men Named John”.
    • ABSTRACT: Asian American women occupy a paradoxical space within the context of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, simultaneously overrepresented as Asian Americans and underrepresented as women. For Asian American female doctoral students, the complex layering and weaving of these intersections involves the constant negotiation of science, racial, and gendered identities. This study explored how the intersections of science, race, and gender shaped their student experiences. We positioned these frameworks not only as mutually constitutive systems but also emphasize science as an epistemology, which informs conceptions of knowledge, the practice of inquiry, and who has epistemic authority. As a qualitative study, we utilized intersectionality theory to explore identity development in the context of STEM environments and grounded theory methods in our analysis. We interviewed 23 women who self-identified as Asian Americans and were either currently in a doctoral program or were within 5 years of earning their degrees in STEM fields. Examining the intersections of science, race, and gender for Asian American female doctoral students in STEM allows a richer, more nuanced exploration of science as it is currently defined and understood and permits the conceptual critique of science to remake STEM environments into more inclusive spaces.
  • VIDEO: Resmaa Menakem Breaks Down Deep Rooted Trauma Linked To Racism, Healing Practices

source: https://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:LFS350/race_MSC