How Feeding Yourself Is Freeing Yourself
A conversation about the cultural and agricultural power of people of color reclaiming a relationship with the land.
Stephen Henderson speaks with Dr. Monica White, a Detroit native and author of the book “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement.”
Through most of American history, the narrative around land cultivation, or farming, and African Americans is one of exploitation and oppression. White is devoted to changing that by offering up an alternative, which is presented in her book.
She writes that the “post agricultural society of the Jim Crow South left many black southerners homeless, unemployed and hungry in the same way that post industrial societies of the northern United States have left many black factory workers homeless, unemployed and hungry.”
What does that mean for people here in Detroit? And how are African American communities here and around the country reclaiming agriculture as a space and place to practice freedom?
