Eating Alabama and the White Farm Imaginary

 

Last night, I finally had the privilege of viewing Eating Alabama, a documentary by University of Alabama professor Andy Grace (shown above right: image via al.com). Since seeing the trailer, I have been anticipating screening it for months. It struck me as a sort of anthem for one section of the Alabama's alternative agriculture movement, and I was curious to see if Grace departed from well-traveled terrain and promoted any new views of alternative food.

Eating Alabama Trailer from Moon Winx Films on Vimeo.

In the film, Grace (a filmmaking professor) and his wife Rashmi (now an urban farm educator) eat the way their grandparents did for a whole year, consuming only locally grown, non-GMO and seasonal foods. While trying to support small farmers with their project, they find that many are struggling to survive.

Though I thought the film was artistically sound, quite stylish and funny, and included a very important critique of industrial agriculture, Grace fails to depart significantly from what Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen call the "white farm imaginary" in a 2011 Antipode article. To make the meaning of this term clear, I quote from their article at length:

"For many customers in farmer's markets we study, the markets are more than just a place to procure food.  Customers are motivated to shop at farmer's markets by ethical imperatives to 'support your local farmer' or 'buy directly from the people who grow food.'  Such phrases are common not only in the everyday conversations of market shoppers, but in the work of food writers and celebrity chefs that has made alternative agriculture so increasingly popular.  In this section, we argue that these common slogans produce what we call a white farm imaginary.  This imagery romanticizes and universalizes an agrarian narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles of people of color in food production (see also Sackman 2005).

"The white farm imaginary holds that small-scale, yeoman farmer as an American agricultural icon.  Only whites, however, were historically able to farm this way.  This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California's first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today (Allen 2004: Guthman 2008b).  Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America's agricultural past and present."

Eating Alabama reproduces this white farm imaginary quite clearly.  To begin with, there are very few blacks in the film, and the ones that do appear, appear incidentally. This alone should strike us in a state that is over one quarter black and also has a significant population of black farmers (compared to non-Southeastern states). There are also no Hispanic or Latino people shown in the film - again, striking in a state where local food depends on migrant workers and the agricultural landscape was rocked by the sudden shortage of Hispanic and Latino laborers after HB56 passed last year.

To further bolster this white imaginary, Grace romanticizes our rural agrarian past by repeatedly calling our grandparents' way of living a "simpler way of life." Certainly, in highly segregated rural areas, often policed by the Ku Klux Klan and controlled by politicians determined to institutionalize white supremacy, Alabama's agrarian past was not a "simpler way of life" for blacks, but was rather oppressive and exploitative. Sharecropping, in which both black and white farm laborers received a share of the crop for working the land for planters, can only be seen as a marginal improvement from slavery, and almost as oppressive. The film makes no mention of segregation or Jim Crow, even though many of those battles were fought in rural areas.

Grace does acknowledge that our agrarian past is associated with slavery, but then disassociates his idealized family history from it because, he says, his ancestors were too poor to own slaves. This is a trick of rhetoric used by many whites to distance themselves from the institution of slavery. Grace's ancestors may not have owned slaves, but we can be fairly sure that they supported the institution of slavery. At the time almost all poor whites did, and it directly benefitted them by placing them higher in the racial and class hierarchy.

Eating Alabama therefore has the unfortunate quality of erasing history in order to promote a romantic, whitened notion of how the food movement should organize based on a mythical past.

"An unsustainable model for sustainability"

Grace knows all this, or at least, has reservations about the romanticization of rural culture and yeoman farming. Throughout the film, he constantly asks himself "am I being naive?" and "why am I romanticizing?"

While Grace's film depicts his year of pursuing this white farming ideal, he remains ambivalent about its viability as an alternative to the current industrial food system, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether he is, indeed, romanticizing. At one point he asks whether his lifestyle experiment is "an unsustainable model for sustainability."

Unfortunately, Grace fails to pursue his doubts to what could have been a different conclusion - that while his year of "living sustainably" may not be viable for most people, it is also not the only alternative to industrial food out there. Grace and many other local food advocates fail to see that many of the people who have always been systematically excluded from industrial agriculture have already evolved alternative institutions to aid and promote the well-being and economic security of small farms.

Viable alternatives

Blacks have never been included in industrial agriculture.  The recently concluded Pigford v. Glickman settlement says as much.  As I mentioned in a previous post, black farmers have therefore developed alternative institutions to bolster small farms. Tuskegee University, founded in 1881, has been aiding small farmers for over a century.  Alabama A&M, a historically-black land grant university and one of the so-called 1890 schools, has also been at the service of the small farm for many years and is the host of the Small Farms Research Center.  And finally, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) has been fighting for small farmers since 1967.

A cooperative is a method of organizing farmers which allows them to build economies of scale to ensure economic security and sustainability.  Basically, in a cooperative, groups of farmers come together to market collectively, all sharing equal ownership in the business.  Instead of just serving local markets, they can access regional, national, and even international markets, all while preserving the viability of the small farm.  This is a more practical, real-world alternative to industrialized agriculture than the white farm imaginary, and should serve, at the least, as an organizing principle for the alternative food and agriculture movement.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the FSC's 45th anniversary celebration. What was clear to me throughout the evening was that the members of the Federation have a deep and abiding sense of social and economic justice. They serve limited resource and minority farmers to keep them as viable business entities.

The white faction of the alternative food and agriculture movement can learn a lot from this practical, pragmatic, and serious dedication to the oppressed and exploited. The FSC grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they see themselves as carrying on that tradition. Isn't that a better story to tell about food and agriculture?

I am a White Male

I believe that it is time that I say a little about myself, who I am, and why I do what I do.  First and foremost, I am a radical scholar-activist.  I am currently in school at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing my PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.  I am also a Southern white male, which places me in a very particular position to comment on social phenomena in the South from an insider's perspective.  As a Southern white male, my first education was that of a white supremacist.

A point of order; while this is my personal story, I am not saying anything that people of color haven't been saying for centuries.  100 years ago, W.E.B. Dubois talked about the "psychological wage" of whiteness, which is essentially white privilege.

I learned early in life about white privilege, the structural characteristic of whiteness that causes whites to have an entitled approach to living and interacting with others.  An example of white privilege is that whites believe that if one works hard and follows the rules, the system will provide benefits, a life, and a living to them.  Of course, people who aren't white men recognize instantly that all manners of glass ceilings exist that impede this upward mobility, but this belief in upward mobility is a hallmark characteristic of whiteness and white privilege.

Back to my life.  My earliest memories were from Fairfield, Alabama, an older industrial suburb of Birmingham.  At 5, this area was transitioning from a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood, owing to white flight.  My family was poor by any measure of income, but my parents put me in an all white private school because the black public schools were "bad."  While the purported quality of schools may or may not have been true, what is undoubtedly true is that being put in private school was the first inculcation of my white privilege.  Other instances from my life, further conditioned me to accept white privilege as both natural and the normal mode of living.

I began to defend that privilege vigorously at about 10 or 12 when I started to listen to conservative talk radio.  I held Rush and Hannity to be among the most important prophets of the time, and even won caller of the day on Hannity's talk show when it was in  Huntsville.  The specific reason that I won caller of the day was because I railed agains the Black Coaches Association for defending athletic scholarships.  I made some ridiculous comment that basically amounted to "whites are smarter than blacks," though it was highly coded, showing how at a young age I understood how to use racially coded language.

My racist racial theory began to fall apart when I entered the blue collar world, where for the first time I was really exposed to black people.  Most of this transformation was non-conscious as I started to assimilate new information.  I entered the blue collar world because I refused to go to college, much to my parents dismay.  There I saw blacks in much the same position as myself, struggling to survive on meager incomes.  The work was long, brutal, and oppressive.

My new anti-racist perspective arose out of my engagement with anthropology after abandoning my blue collar career for an opportunity in higher education.  Through anthropology I learned the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that one's culture must be judged by its own criteria.  I began to try to understand others around me from their own perspective and even looked back to my experiences as an auto mechanic and warehouse worker with new-found clarity.  The anti-racist perspective began to crystallize in graduate school when I was introduced to different aspects of critical race theory.

My rudimentary understanding of the anti-racist perspective basically entailed the mainstream liberal solution to racial animosity - that everything can be solved by constructing a diverse community.  While this is a start, it still entails one of the hallmarks of whiteness - universalism.  When whites talk about community, they do so from a perspective that entails adoption of their colorblind values.  However, colorblindness is in itself a racist ideology in that it denies the real differences in history and experiences between whites and people of color.  As I learned to recognize those differences, I saw that constructing a community isn't enough, it must be the construction of a community underpinned by anti-racism, the belief that our society, and even global society, is organized unequally on the basis of race, and to actively work in one's everyday life against that inequality.  This entails as much fighting our own individual racist demons as it does reaching out to try to change the world around you.  The two are mutually determined.

I've learned that I still have white privilege in spite of my desire for that to disappear.  I've learned that I'm still a racist in spite of the fact I don't want to be.  And I've learned that this is all a result of white supremacy, the name of this organizing system.  To change this system, we must first fight white supremacy within ourselves and then reach out to the world to share that fight with others.  This is how change happens.