The End is Nigh...

On the Subject of My Behavior
I admit that my behavior during the debates of the past year has not been at the level of a seasoned public intellectual.  I have personally insulted people.  I have not listened to arguments.  I have been unwilling to compromise.  For some of these, I apologize.  But, let me say this; I have not been the only one with bad behavior during these debates.  As an example, DB Irwin read the first chapter of my dissertation and called it, "poorly-cited, jargon-filled, piece of self-hating crap."  My education has be insulted numerous times by numerous different people.  Imagine the cognitive dissonance when a city that purports to be for home-grown people, innovation, and new ideas, turns those into an insult.  Nonetheless, the debate was acrimonious and unfair to both sides.  I accept my responsibility for my part in that.  I do not apologize for criticizing people who gave interviews to newspapers or wrote public articles.  You put yourself in public, and you opened yourself to criticism.  Don't take yourself so seriously.

On the Subject of My Topic
My agitation for the past year plus has been simple - to educate the public about the existence of hierarchies, particularly white supremacy and capitalism.  To do this, I used the tools of white privilege and gentrification.  The gentrification debate has more or less been universally accepted by even the most recalcitrant people.  However, whites refuse to accept even on the most basic level that the world is hierarchically organized based on race, in spite of the fact that numerous examples of peer-reviewed evidence exists.  This, unfortunately, confirms what most people of color say - that whites are unable to change.  Again, this is not a complex concept.  The world is hierarchically organized based on race.  This is clearly delineated by numerous anecdotal and scientific facts.  It is not even radical or revolutionary in even the most minor ways.  It is simply clearly observable reality.

On the Subject of Saviors
The clear motivation for much of the animosity is that a significant group of Birmingham white people have positioned themselves as saviors of Birmingham.  Let me say this clearly and for all to hear; there is nothing to save.  Birmingham is not special in any way.  It is not worse than any other city.  It is not better.  There is no more potential here.  The politicians are not more corrupt.  The whites are not more racist.  There is not any more racial animosity in this city than in any other city.  There is nothing at all distinct about Birmingham.  It is a city like any other city, and its primary purpose is to make money for the bourgeoisie.  If you want a city that is different than every other city, then you have to become a revolutionary who doesn't accept hierarchies in any way.

On the Subject of Revolution
We live in revolutionary times.  The environment is destroyed.  Inequality in this country is greater than it has been in a long time.  Democracy is significantly curtailed at all levels of government by the influence of money.  Trendy, cool restaurants and parks don't do a damn thing to address these things.  The only thing that can address these things is a complete transformation in the way society works.  Before we can actually address the root cause, which is economic, we must address the other hierarchies of race, gender, and others.  This facilitates solidarity to address the capitalist system which is destroying the planet and impoverishing its people.  The situation is dire.  Let me say that again, the situation is dire and it requires a radical answer.

The revolution is here.  The revolutionaries are here.  I am the loudest, but there are more than me, and I meet more on a daily basis.  Stop taking yourself so seriously, and fight for a new world.

Peace,
Zac

Response to the Gentrification Series

Over the last six months, Weld for Birmingham has produced a series on gentrification from an oral history standpoint.  Overall, the series is good and puts a human face on the changes we are undergoing in Birmingham.  No fewer than three of the articles have focused on the Avondale/Crestwood area, which, due to the completeness of downtown gentrification, is ground zero for neighborhood change in Birmingham.

This post looks at Weld's approach to gentrification, points out some blind spots, critiques the response by those promoting gentrification, and provides some data that highlight the downside of neighborhood change.

First, there seems to be little in terms of displacement in census tract 24, home to Avondale and parts of Crestwood.  There has been only a 5% change in terms of the demographics in the census tract.  However, property values have risen dramatically, to the tune of 61% over the past ten years.  This is more than the increase in property values of Homewood and Mountain Brook, but less than the increases in downtown Birmingham.  If this trend continues, widespread displacement will be inevitable, particularly of low-income residents.  One of the Weld series' largest blind spot is the lack of voices representing low-income renters.  They have almost exclusively interviewed privileged white residents.  Are low-income residents' rents increasing, are they contemplating moving to a cheaper zip code, and are landlords attempting to push them out?  

(In fairness, I'm not under any illusion about how difficult it may be to develop the connections necessary to get an interview with renters who may not want to get caught up in a political fight.)

As an artifact of this blind spot, the response to the most recent gentrification series post "Leaving Crestwood" displayed an incredible amount of privilege and entitlement.  Posters wrung their hands and navel-gazed about a privileged white resident leaving the community- all of these lamentations coming from other privileged whites.  

In an earlier article by Nick Patterson, "New Students, New Parents, New Reality, and Change," the author documented how white residents make decisions about school choice.  Tellingly, the residents highlighted in the article consulted other whites when deciding about which schools their children should attend. (The Bigas stated that they changed their mind after consulting with Reverend Brandon Harris, a white man.)  

Does this really look like integration, a situation in which white residents' community looks not unlike the community that s/he would have in Homewood or Mountain Brook?  Maybe this is untrue, but the articles, with a dramatic lack of black protagonists, portray a lily-white community within a larger black neighborhood.  The articles give the distinct impression that gentrification and neighborhood change are driven by a small cadre of privileged, white advocates of a type of economic development that can best be termed municipal trickle-down economics.

I'm quite pleased with the gentrification series from Weld, and this critique is just an attempt to make it better.  The series has spurred conversation in Birmingham that otherwise never would have happened. However, there are blind spots that need to be addressed in future articles in the series, and the number one blind spot is "are there people experiencing displacement pressures?"

John Archibald and Colorblind Ideology

Probably the most prominent columnist in the Birmingham region if not the state is John Archibald.  He is well known for his folksy, but critical take on Birmingham politics.  Archibald can be described as the mouthpiece of Birmingham progressives; he certainly speaks their language and style and covers topics in ways beloved by these white progressives.  However, as will be shown, Archibald's work displays a profound thread of colorblind ideology.

The beacon of radicalness, Psychology Today, describes colorblind ideology as a form of racism stating that "colorblindness creates a society that denies (people of color's) negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives."  Archibald promotes just such racism in three recent articles in the Birmingham News.

In an April 2013 article, Archibald argues that City Councilor Steven Hoyt's push for diversity at Barber Motorsports Park is not about "inclusion," but about being divisive.  Archibald seems to miss a very pertinent point about Birmingham - the fact that it is divided.  It is the most segregated city in the Southeast, it has a downtown plan directed almost wholly at affluent whites, and there are two separate institutional structures, one black and one white, that exist completely apart from one another.  The latter is documented in my dissertation which is available from UC Berkeley or from me upon request.  Not talking about those divisions, as Archibald suggests, will not make them go away, and in fact, the only way that they can begin to be addressed is with courageous, critical talk and action much like Hoyt's critique of Barber Motorsports Park.  Pointing out that a group is not diverse is not divisive, it's the truth.  Refusing to fund them on those grounds is consistent with an anti-racist ethic.

Last week, Archibald took aim at Birmingham's neighborhood associations.  The neighborhood associations are one of the few reservoirs of working-class black power in the city.  They provide a voice  at levels very close to the people and initiatives by neighborhood presidents to get residents involved in politics should be lauded not denigrated.  Is it political?  Yes, but so are the board rooms at Regions, Harbert, BBVA, and every other corporation getting tons of subsidies and consisting of mostly white people.  Furthermore, the $2000 dollars a year that go to each neighborhood is paltry considering the price tag of Regions Field ($58 million) and the entertainment district ($57 million), both of which cater to a white audience.  Archibald criticized the entertainment district only to suggest that the money be moved to another location downtown and seems to be gung-ho about Regions Field.

Speaking of Regions Field, Archibald furthered his colorblind rhetoric by casting the council's fight for a Negro Leagues Museum as "divisive."  (On a side note, I know that Archibald doesn't write the headlines, but to think that he's the teacher when it comes to black history is beyond the pale.  The Birmingham News should probably put a little more thought into their headlines.)  Archibald is right in to say that Larry Langford wanted a Southern League and Negro League Museum at the park, but the council passed the park plan with the assumption that it would be Negro League Museum.  Reworking the museum to include the Southern League is a capitulation by Mayor Bell to white Birmingham and probably more than a number of consultants.  Still, the argument that celebrating black history at Regions Park is divisive belies the belief that "objective" history has to include white people and white exploits.  It is white history month 365 days a year, and celebrating black history and only black history is a push back against Eurocentric readings of history.  And why is it the assumption that black history is not for everybody - that somehow the history of black baseball players is not also the history of us all.  Plus, white people got their park, why can't black people have their museum.

Archibald's colorblindness argues that if we just don't talk about our divisions, they will go away.  Race-consciousness, anti-racism are being promoted by the Cultural Alliance and my organization Magic City Agriculture Project.  There are people with ideas and plans for finally healing the racial wounds of Birmingham and achieving real, meaningful integration.  None of them are colorblind.

Driving While Bipolar

Kentuckian Hunter S. Thompson characterized the South as "closed and ignorant" in his article "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."  He went on to say this, "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught."  I've spent the last five years away from the Deep South, whether it be in Berkeley or in the relatively progressive Birmingham, but this past week I got a resounding welcome home from the Tupelo Police Department on my way back from filing paperwork for my new job with the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi.  The encounter reminded me of my 'perp' encounter with the brilliant Auburn Police Department about eleven years ago.

What one must always understand when dealing with police officers is that to the police brain, everybody's guilty.  They are merely looking for evidence as to what constitutes guilt.  For the Auburn Police Department, my guilt was predicated on my clothes - some baggy raver pants the most notable signal of my perp hood.  The description of the actual perp was quite exact - about six feet tall and wearing "dark clothes."  After public humiliation in front of my Camp War Eagle colleagues and counselors (of whom I was older by a good two years), the genius APD let me go, but not before making it clearly known that I was on the outside of their closed society.  I never wore those raver pants again.

Flash forward 11 years, I've graduated from Auburn, and received my PhD (which stands for piled up higher and deeper) from the University of California, Berkeley.  I've also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  I take lithium carbonate and risperidone to manage my moods, of which I have done well since my diagnosis.  But, the lithium makes my hands shake; in fact, it is the first side effect on WebMD.  Apparently, it is also a sign of being a perp, or as the Tupelo Police Officer noted "the last time I had someone's hand shake like that, he was on meth.  Are you on meth?"  First, sign that I'm a perp. (Full disclosure: I was pulled over for flicking a cigarette out the window, which I fully admit that I did.)  Second sign, I stated rather forcefully that no, in fact, I take medication that makes my hand shake and I'm not particularly fond of confessing that to perfect strangers, particularly cops.  I even showed them my medications.  Not showing enough deference to the high office of police officer is another sign that you're a perp.  What is misunderstood here is that there is no "book" that determines who is and isn't a perp.  It is based on years and years of hard won experience protecting innocents from evil-doers like myself.  So, here's this guy with a California driver's license, an out-of-state tag, has shaking hands, and doesn't show enough deference.  Gotta be a perp.  He's just not normal.  The third cop car arrives and that officer gives me a field sobriety test in the KFC parking lot, which I of course pass.  By this time, I'm shaking with rage.  I'm being accused of a crime because I have bipolar disorder.  

As a parting shot, the arresting officer asked if anyone had "smoked weed" in my car in the past couple of weeks.

I would like to genuinely thank the three officers involved in this incident.  One was a white woman, one was a black man, and one was a white man, no doubt owing to the TPD's robust affirmative action program. (Note: I am not against affirmative action.  I am absolutely for it.  But without work on institutions and culture, it is quite piecemeal as evidenced by this experience.)  I would like to thank them for reminding me that I'm not normal, that I take six pills a day just to function in everyday society.  I would like to thank all police officers for being the enforcers of Thompson's closed society.  And I would like to thank them for welcoming me back to the Deep South; it's great to know my place.

For those of us that love the South, why do we stand for stuff like this?  Why don't we write letters, march in the streets, scream at the top of our lungs, and refuse to participate?  Why do we allow blacks, Latinos, women, feminists, communists, the mentally ill, LGBTQ people, and a million other non-mainstream people to be treated as second class citizens?  Why do we stand by and watch?  Trust me, it doesn't have to be this way.

Gentrification and the White Savior Industrial Complex

This post is written in response to the post Gentrify Me on the blog Life and Law on 23rd Street.  Gentrify Me was written in response to my piece in Weld for Birmingham called My View: Gentrification.  In a nutshell, the author of Gentrify Me agreed with all of my conclusions, but insisted that gentrification was, in fact, good.

In response, I want to delve deeper into the underlying causes of such a view of gentrification - namely: the white savior industrial complex. Teju Cole coined this term in response to Kony 2012, a widely maligned video that thought to represent white people as saviors of Africans.  I believe that this impulse is vividly shown in Birmingham, in which white gentrifiers characterize themselves as the saviors of Birmingham, and by extension the black people in it.

Using Cole's seven points about the white savior industrial complex and excerpts from Birmingham blogs and journalists, I will show that the white savior industrial complex is alive and well in the Birmingham area.

1. "From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex."  Clearly, gentrification is the fastest growth industry in the Birmingham region.  The city just constructed a 58 million dollar baseball stadium and a 20 million dollar park.  Home values are rising dramatically downtown to the tune of 90% over the past 10 years.

2.  "The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening."  Clearly, white saviors are promoting policies of gentrification.   REV Birmingham, a new joint venture combining Operation New Birmingham (a tireless promoter of gentrification) and Main Street Birmingham (also a promoter of gentrification; see work in Avondale) is a charity dedicated to revitalizing Birmingham.  Main Street Birmingham won the Birmingham Business Alliance's nonprofit of the year award in 2012.

3.  "The banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality.  The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm."  For evidence of this I turn to a recent blog post on Magic City Made by Avondale resident L.K. Whitney.  In it, she shows how her concerns for Birmingham are rooted in sentimentality for a "community" experience of difference.  She states that she is emotionally shaken when someone undermines the liberal utopia of different people all thinking alike.  Rooted in this is the inability to understand how or why someone could have a difference of opinion, and how those differences are rooted in culture, race, and history.  She believes, instead, that all the deep seated and profound issues of the region can be solved through enthusiasm for this liberal utopia.  This sentiment also rings heavily in Gentrify Me, though less overtly.

4.  "The world exist simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah."  Same evidence as above.  Furthermore, Dan Carsen's article on "reverse integration," whatever that is, and a recent article by Mandy Shunnarah in the Magic City Post, speak to the complicity of and promotion by the media of white saviors.  Shunnarah's article seems to take the position that the conversation about Ensley needs to be shifted, and shifted by white people.  Shifted to what?  A nice place to experience sentimental diversity?

5.  "The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice.  It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."  REV Birmingham, Magic City Made, and almost every charity in Birmingham never mention, much less fight for justice.  These charities exist to appease the needs of mostly white donors, funders and gentrifiers, to make them feel like they are participating in something good, no matter the effects.  To claim to fight for justice would undermine the monetary basis of most charities in Birmingham.  It is structurally prohibited.

6. "Feverish worry over that awful African warlord.  But, close to 1.5 million Iraqis died in an American war of choice."  Naturally, part of this is irrelevant to Birmingham, but the feverish worry over that awful African warlord, ignoring other factors is quite prevalent.  For instance, there was much journalistic concern over the corruption of Larry Langford - and no doubt, he deserved it.  But at the same time, white journalists privileged this narrative over the much more important one, that banks screwed Jefferson County.  It took Rolling Stone journalist, Matt Taibbi, to finally put the pieces together.

7.  "I deeply respect American sentimentality the way one respects a wounded hippo.  You must keep an eye on it because you know it is deadly."  While I don't think that the white savior industrial complex in Birmingham is at a deadly level yet, if the pattern of white saviorism and gentrification continue, it could lead to widespread displacement of poor, mostly black populations.

Let me be clear - my critique of the blogs and work of others in this article is absolutely not a personal attack.  The aim is to point out blind spots and unchallenged assumptions about the nature of Birmingham and the world at large.  Whites are not automatically owed the privilege of determining the direction of the city.  Whites should seek out neighborhood residents and leaders and try to understand how they can help and what those leaders want, not plow forward with critically-unassessed ideas founded chimeric utopias.  Justice - real, practical justice - should be the goal, not sentimental, feel-good experiences.

Review of Black, White, and Green by Alison Hope Alkon

It is an exciting day for me when I finally get to read a new book from one of my favorite thinkers on the alternative food and agriculture movement, Alison Hope Alkon. The book, Black, White, and Green: Farmer's Markets, Race, and the Green Economy, is a tour de force on the most important institution in the movement: farmer's markets.

Alkon covers a vast territory in her ethnography, looking at race, class, gender, and economics in the context of two markets in East Bay.  Those two markets, North Berkeley Farmer's Market and West Oakland Farmer's Market, represent two starkly different ways of approaching the green economy, though they share a common belief in producing social change through markets.  Both markets are about the performance of black and white identities in an effort to build community around buying and selling fresh produce.

In West Oakland, the market is commonly referred to as a "black farmer's market."  Many of the events revolve around the celebration of black holidays like Juneteenth or Black History Month.  The purpose of the market is to give an outlet to marginalized black farmers and to provide healthy produce in an area that lacks grocery stores, called supermarket redlining, a process specifically linked to institutional racism.  Alkon quotes Food First! in defining supermarket redlining:

"Redlining usually evokes images of insurance companies, realtors, and banks refusing to grant fair insurance policies, mortgages, or loans to residents of certain neighborhoods.  Now these images include the decaying shells of inner city supermarkets.  The supermarket industry has drawn boundaries defining where fresh, nutritious, and competitively-priced food is and is not provided for communities throughout the country."

The West Oakland market is, therefore, perceived by vendors, managers, and customers alike as a response to institutional racism within the food system.  Alkon states that the roots of this market lie in the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast for School Children program, further placing the market squarely within the realm of resistance to white supremacy.

In contrast, the North Berkeley Farmer's Market is rooted in countercultural notions of what Alkon and McCullen have called elsewhere the white farm imaginary.  Drawing from authors such as Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, the performance of white identity is central to the community that is formed through the market.  The market itself grew out of anarchist and socialist attempts to create a different kind of economy in Berkeley, including Chez Panisse and gardening in People's Park in Berkeley.  Today's iteration of the market focuses heavily on environmental and economic concerns, though there are secondary concerns about equity.  The market has also become more focused on elite Northern California gourmet food and the resistance to the industrial food system through the creation of alternative, high-end markets for farmers.

One of the most important points that Alkon makes is that though both markets are rooted in radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s, all of which was specifically anti-capitalist, today's version of both markets focuses heavily on the use of capitalism to promote social and environmental change.  While Alkon stops short of criticizing this development directly, she does note that policy change and the role of the state (local or national) have effectively disappeared from the agenda of the alternative food and agriculture movement.  In fact, many are completely opposed to participation in the government.  In my opinion, whiteness and the lack of critique of the state are the two most important issues within the movement today and must be addressed going forward.

I have two critiques for Alkon, designed to be constructive.  First, the reader is left to wonder how Alkon's positionality as a white, female academic colored the analysis she produces.  She does include an epilogue that documents some of her struggles in the field, but fails to integrate this into her work.  I'm particularly concerned about a few statements that she makes in particular.  First, she argues

"At first glance, North Berkeley Farmer's Market participants seem to have a more inclusive, cosmopolitan notion of community that the multiple and contradictory definitions evidenced in West Oakland."

She then states in the epilogue that

"In North Berkeley, on the other hand, I could both literally and figuratively let my hair down."

It seems that Alkon's first impressions of the North Berkeley Farmer's Market had more to do with her own position and a white woman, and less to do with the market itself.  To borrow from my field work, a black food activist in Birmingham stated that Pepper Place is "for certain people."  It is reasonable to assume that had Alkon been black, she would have perceived the exclusionary nature of North Berkeley Farmer's Market immediately.  Now, there is nothing wrong with feeling more comfortable with people more like you, but those feelings should have been part of the analysis.

My second critique is that the West Oakland Farmer's Market failed, ultimately, while the North Berkeley Farmer's Market succeeded.  The reader needs to know more about the institutional and community reasons as to why one organization succeeded and the other failed.  Alkon makes an initial argument that conflicts about the direction of the organization led to the failure, but it also seems that there could be community reasons.  For instance, although West Oakland Farmer's Market is in a low income black neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying, very few black community members participated, and most of the customers were relatively affluent.  About 50 percent of the customers were white.  It could be that there may have been little real community buy-in, a problem that markets face on low income communities throughout the nation.  Why is this?  What would work better?

Secondly, we know almost nothing about the institutional landscapes in which the farmer's market operate.  Who funds the Ecology Center, the organization that backs the North Berkeley Farmer's Market?  Why can they maintain funding for the market when the organizations backing West Oakland cannot?  Can an argument be made that institutional racism also played a role in the demise of West Oakland Farmer's Market?  What kinds of food movement programs would work in low income neighborhoods of color?  Why?  I feel like these are pertinent, unanswered questions that I as both a practitioner, activist, and academic would like to know.

Overall, though, this book is really incredible.  Comparative studies are really hard to do, and Alkon pulls this one off nicely.  She communicates with a critical voice that doesn't get in anyone's face.  She communicates in a language that people involved in the research can understand.  Spend some time with this book.

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?