The year 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown, and its tremendous impact on the world can still be felt today in ongoing international and national conversations surrounding race, police brutality, and state violence in Black communities. Like similar instances of Black people being murdered by the police, however, the social unrest that followed Brown’s murder has been largely unexplored in agricultural and food systems literature.

In a new JAFSCD article, “What does Ferguson mean for the food justice movement?”: Reading Black visions of food justice in times of social unrest,” Bobby J. Smith II, Jamila Walida Simon, Candace Star Gwin, and Desirée Y. McMillion, examine how Black food activists on the front lines of the food justice movement collectively grappled with Michael Brown’s murder in the 2015–2016 special digital series entitled “What Ferguson Means for the Food Justice Movement,” published online in the Food Justice Voices section of the WhyHunger organization website. Research from this article reveals that Black food activists reframed ideas of agriculture and food through the prism of the Ferguson struggle, drafting visions of food justice that clarify how their food justice work speaks to social unrest in Black communities. Such visions illuminate three pathways to food justice: (1) critical Black agrarianism, (2) radical Black mothering, and (3) Black futures. These food justice pathways animates how the visions compel us to reconsider racial equity at the nexus of agriculture, food, and various forms of unrest in Black communities, providing insights for scholars, practitioners, and activists who work on issues of food justice.

Corresponding author Bobby J. Smith II can be contacted at bobbyjs2@illinois.edu

KEY FINDINGS

Through a qualitative critical content analysis of the “What Ferguson Means for the Food Justice Movement” digital series, shaped by the theoretical frame of intersectional agriculture, the authors identified Black visions of food justice through three intersecting pathways: (1) critical Black agrarianism, (2) radical Black mothering, and (3) Black futures. As this research found, a close reading of these pathways:

sheds light on the complexities and challenges faced by Black food activists as they struggle to achieve a context-dependent food justice movement that is sensitive to the particularities of the Black experience;
provides a blueprint for a more inclusive, intersectional expansion of the movement that emphasizes the critical need for racial, gendered, cultural, and community-oriented approaches to food justice; and
strengthens food justice research, uncovering blind spots surrounding the connection between theorizing agriculture and food systems and the everyday experiences of those on the front lines.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH

The findings in this article provide relevant insights from Black visions of food justice that could be helpful to scholars, practitioners, and activists who work on issues of food justice, offering a model of underexplored areas for future research that:

recovers the diverse voices of Black people in the food justice movement;
shifts the focus of food justice research to new sites of analysis and activism that could aid in the process of addressing racial, gendered, social, political, and economic dynamics in the context of agriculture, food systems, and community development; and
studies the three pathways to food justice individually to see and learn from the evolving intersectional landscape of Black food activism that can be used to envision sustainable agriculture and food systems for all.

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As the nation prepares to acknowledge the significance of the 10th anniversary of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which refueled the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, a team of researchers revisits this moment through Black visions of food justice. #Ferguson #foodjustice #Blackfoodactivism Read the @JAFSCD article for free: https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2024.134.004