On Farming & Food Justice

THIS IS PART OF AUGUST’S “OUR PUBLIC MEMORY” newsletter. IF YOU MISSED it, READ IT HERE.

In high school I almost flunked a biology project because I couldn’t grow the plants needed to complete the experiment.

My gardening and plant-growing failures have continued throughout my life. They have included growing herb gardens that ultimately died, because I couldn’t figure out when I was supposed to harvest the herbs. Flower seeds that never germinated. Plants that inexplicably turned to gelatinous mush within the same day of looking perfectly healthy (overwatering, I now know).

And recently, I salvaged several newly-germinated plants from a harsh rain storm. I found them floating in water in my planter, fragile but whole, from delicate leaf to root tendril. I replanted them in dirt and, as they grew taller, I triumphantly realized that they were climbing plants that needed something to grow upward upon. So I built a mini trellis out of popsicle sticks and colored painters tape (please feel free to LOL about that one). Unfortunately, it became clearer over the intervening days that these salvaged plants were actually invasive vines that grow so abundantly and prolifically, they crowd out the root systems of other plants.

Needless to say, I feel like a failure at gardening. And I’ve always thought that it was a personal problem – an incompatibility between me and the natural world. But a recent conversation with a colleague revealed a widely-held myth that hadn’t occurred to me before. The myth that Black people don’t know anything about growing plants or are averse to gardening and farming because of the legacy of enslavement and being forced to farm on land that we did not own. This is one hundred percent untrue. But I could see how it was a narrative that has shaped my personal relationship to land and working with plants. It’s a myth perpetuated by the history of land theft and the land displacement of Black people, particularly in the South.

Having to migrate to northern, urban centers to find jobs, or to seek liberation from Jim Crow (or both), being required to live in rented apartments, stacked upon one another, with limited access to a yard or other green spaces, yet still be under the firm grips of poverty and food insecurity. This is the historic cultural trauma that I, as a 3rd generation northerner, have internalized. Growing up in Erie, PA. and living most of my adult life in Chicago Illinois, where the fight for “green space” and community gardens felt largely centered on white, middle class/educated leadership has reinforced this narrative for me.

But the truth is Black people are land bearers and masterful at growing life. The reason why the enslavement of Africans was so successful in the Americas is because Africans understand how to work the land much better than the European aristocracy that colonized these continents.

I did not fully inherit an ability to work the land, as was so widely known and understood among my ancestors – here and on the African continent – because I was colonized to rely upon racial capitalism to survive. I was conditioned to rely upon grocery stores and supermarkets for food and to view gardening as a hobby of people with a lot of time on their hands.

That has never really settled well with me, which is why I keep attempting to grow things. I have wanted to fully participate in the growing Black and brown farming movement, but to do so, I have to heal the myth of land disconnection. And oddly that means recognizing, now that I live in the South, that Black and brown farming is NOT a new movement. It has been an ongoing reality that has gotten erased in order to support a monolithic narrative about the Black experience that in itself is meant to erase exploited labor, land theft and land displacement.

For example, in the 1920s 14% of farmers in the U.S. were black, owning 15 million acres of land. One hundred years later and that number is now at 1%. Land theft involves a complex web of systems that operate in concert with one another. This is what we know as racial capitalism and in this particular web, it includes redistricting, ambiguous property tax laws, and lien systems that give more rights to the individual purchasing a lien on a home or property than the current owners, to name a few.

One of the things I’ve learned through trial and error – and A LOT of meditation – is that gardening/farming is not only an access point to food agency, but also an access point to spiritual grounding. Successful gardening and farming are profound acts of faith. You put a seed into the earth and then water it and nurture it as it grows, blooms and bears fruit. You manage its chemistry and nurture its relationship to the ecosystem around it. You bear hard-to-predict factors like weather and bug infestations.

My inability to grow things points to a crisis of my own faith and a need to be on a healing journey. That journey is about representing my legacy of black farming. My family originates from Hattiesburg and Laurel, Mississippi. They were bricklayers and sharecroppers and knew A LOT about working the land. But it’s also a journey of faith and reclamation.

In the spirit of my ancestors, we must rise up now to support our Black and brown farmers and demand the land reclamation and reparations they deserve. Not only are their livelihoods at stake but their legacy as keepers of this land.

In love and solidarity,

Mich Lovegood