Black Food Geographies

Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C

Bibliographic Data

ID4923111
AuthorsCatarina Passidomo (University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume107
Issue2
Pages530-530
Publication date2020-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaaa239
OpenAlexW3088520987
LanguageEN
Citations received7

I have just come from my graduate seminar Southern Foodways and Culture at the University of Mississippi, where students discussed Ashanté M. Reese's Black Food Geographies. The first student to speak commented that the book came at just the right time for them: “I was in the middle of a Facebook fight with someone who thinks obesity is a result of laziness.” Reese's book armed this student to fight ignorance on social media, by demonstrating the limitations of “food desert” discourse and showing the complex structural inequities that constrain food access in communities of color. While Reese's four years of ethnographic research focus on the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Deanwood and the various ways black residents cope with lack, we read the Deanwood story as representative of disinvested communities across the United States. Reese deftly eviscerates traditional renderings of the food system to reveal “the everydayness of anti-Blackness” at its core (p. 4). The racism embedded within the food system serves to frame “the broader structures that produce food inequalities”—thus situating otherwise-simplistic assumptions about “food choice” within a complex matrix of factors operating at various scales (ibid

Archaeology · Ethnography · Food security · Food studies · Food systems · Foodways · Ignorance · Laziness · Media studies · Political science · Race (biology · Racism · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · History · Law · Organic Food and Agriculture

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