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cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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Food Justice Now! offers many important points—from crucial content to earnest analysis. Regarding the former, it documents pivotal grassroots analysis and action: the Black Panther Party’s Ten Points Program; the FBI’s COINTELPRO assaults; Maurice of Planting Justice’s 2016 Prison Strike Demands – “NO MORE!” (77); Grace Lee Bogg’s magisterial quotes on organizing; Marcelo Montalvo on white saviorism and while blindness (154). Sbicca also documents injustices that are rampant and entrenched: the scale of the military/police/prison industrial complex; corporate abuses; Oakland’s exorbitant expenditures on policing and incarceration; Nine of ten Oakland police officers are not from Oakland; San Quentin was built for 3,000 prisoners and now houses over 5,000. These details do the work of contextualizing food injustices in California and more broadly in the United States. Perhaps the most admirable aspect of Sbicca’s book is the deep heartfelt attention to labor organizing rooted within his own experience. He was there, doing the work of advocating for the dignity of work – from Proposition 187 protests to the case against Walmart. Again, let the youth (and all of us) read and learn.
In general, the book does such useful work deepening the roots of food justice and social struggle, that its omission of farm justice is all the more troubling. Farmers appear as the neoliberal foil at best, and social-political antagonist at worst. Where does this leave us, the readers, the scholars, and the movement? The book follows and cares for eaters and workers, but do either of these categories encompass farmers, ranchers, or fishers? As Rudy Arredondo, president of National Latino Farmer/Rancher Trade Association, repeats: “farmworkers are just farmers without land”. Chapter One begins with the point of consumption and living wages/health care of farmworkers. What does it mean to elide farmers who also eat and work? Is eliding the whole category of farmer in our list of antagonists further exacerbating the racialized/racist, gendered, and classist assumptions of who is worth rooting for?
Food Justice Now! aims to expand dominant understandings of food justice, to widen the remit (long lists abound on pages 26, 46, 162, 164). But these just sharpens the absence of farmer viability. And when farmers are finally mentioned, it is under the auspices of neoliberal foodie heroes, conflated with those problematically voting with their forks, while those in the progressive wings “start nonprofits to politicize food” (27). But, is that the goal? To what degree are “family farms” necessarily neoliberal or regressive (168), and to what effect, analytically and politically? Those still farming are largely white, Anglo, male, and richer—because of the colonial settler, white supremacist, and patriarchal appropriations at work in and through agriculture and farm policy. There is however, an analytic and political risk to conflating the current demographics of farmers with an essentialized category of elitist landowners. Working toward fair farmgate prices would encourage and allow farmers of color, urban growers, immigrant producers to enter and hopefully thrive in a livelihood of farming. After all, as Linda the farmworker says: “people want a job they are proud of” (61). What would it mean to apply the principle of farmworker justice to farming itself: “Taking back the economy in this context means workers capture more of the value produced by their labor” (109).
Opening space in food justice scholarship for farm justice would allow the histories and geographies of farm justice movements to emerge. Nationwide coalitions such as the National Family Farm Coalition, Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, and Rural Coalition draw on generations of rural organizing and on international affiliations with La Via Campesina as well as on their counterparts in ranching (National Latino Farmer Rancher Trade Association) and fishing (North American Marine Alliance). Sbicca’s book includes the 1996 Farm Bill’s destructive end to supply management (170) and mentions parity in passing in the conclusion (185), but should food justice analysis not also address agrarian justice struggles and mobilizations? And wouldn’t price supports or price floors also be needed for grains and legumes (and dairy and meat) as well as fruits and vegetables? More scholarship and advocacy are needed to think through how to update farm justice calls for parity to racial and gender justice considerations.
