JUN’ 20
27
I have been baking cookies, hand-decorating pastry boxes, and packing everything up this morning for pick-up later today. This is the fourth week of my bake sale. A month of educating myself on the subject of policing and mass incarceration. (I did have a leg up though because I read The New Jim Crow last year for my book club.) I am learning more than I can even process but I feel a great need to catch up to the brilliant Black folks out there doing incredible work. And I mean that at every level, yes, the academics, but also the activists, farmers, teenagers, wellness coaches, artists etc. Confronting my own complicity in a racist society has opened up a whole new world of learning and possibilities. It has also opened up new avenues for action. I feel as though my feet are stumbling to keep up with my head, only it's my actions that are trying to keep apace with my intentions.
The black-led organization that I will be supporting through my bake sale in the month of July is Mo Betta Green in Denver. In 2011, Beverly Grant started a pop-up Farmer's Market in Five Points- the neighborhood that she grew up in- which had become a food desert. Using the platform of a farmer's market, she is educating her community about nutrient-dense foods, food sovereignty, and the importance of movement for health. She has since established pop-up Farmer's Market locations in 4 other Denver-area neighborhoods and is also at work designing and installing edible, medicinal landscapes and promoting yard farming. To educate myself on how food and racial justice intersect in America, I have started to read Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights and plan to read Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. My ignorance of still more dark episodes in American history is, quite frankly, embarrassing. It is little wonder that the legacies of slavery have persisted after abolition, given how little we know of our country’s history. Slavery and racism have merely mutated into politically-correct forms (e.g. unpaid prison labor and "color-blind" laws and policies). I blame a whole lot of people and institutions for this but I am an adult now and the responsibility lies with me to close this knowledge gap.
Davis has taken up the gauntlet with as much fervor as I have and it is a boon to our relationship. I have always appreciate his more analytical and detail-oriented brain. He's going to read White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide (which I also read for book club last year) as soon as it arrives in the mail. I want to say something here as an aside: Friends, it is so so so important as you begin to read anti-racist literature that you be sure to prioritize Black authors. Read about the issues from people for whom this is literally "life and death." Realize that, if the status quo has more or less worked for you, you will have blindspots when it comes to identifying the problems of our racist society. And, you will be limited in your ability to ideate solutions. When I took the time to understand, for example, the calls to “defund/abolish” the police, I discovered a radical message of hope. Yes, the anger and rage are there but only because of a deep optimism about the political possibilities within our grasp. The calls to defund or abolish the police and with it our carceral system suggests a world where we meet the needs of our most vulnerable populations e.g. children, poor people, refugees, the mentally ill, etc. with respect, compassion, and resources instead of doubling-down on violence and the threat thereof to erect invisible boundaries between ourselves and the least of these. It speaks to the faith and love they have in and for their fellow humans. Conversely, what does it say about those members of our society who cannot imagine a world without police?