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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! joins a chorus of recent books that critique the food system through a lens of racialized oppression, arguing that neoliberal narratives that valorize individualism and markets often ignore the inequities that such positions emerge from. Though in agreement with many of its predecessors that the alternative food movement has largely ignored racial justice as a key component of food justice, one of the distinct contributions of Sbicca’s work is its conceptual expansion of food justice to include interrogating the carceral state, labor practices and inequities, immigration and increasingly policed borders. Early in the book, Sbicca argues that “witnessing many organizational strategies and hearing people’s creative analyses left me with the distinct impression that our imagination of food politics is too narrow” (3). In doing so, Food Justice Now! lays bare that what is at stake in our food system is deeper than caloric intake and elusive definitions of health and healthiness. Primarily theorized through a social movements lens, Sbicca demonstrates that we cannot afford to consider the food system as separate from other inequities. And by “we” I generally mean us all, but more specifically, the racialized people who do farm labor and who live in heavily policed and under-resourced neighborhoods. To get at the root, we must examine their intersections.
To illustrate this, Sbicca takes a case study approach using knowledge gained from deep ethnographic inquiry. And, he does not sacrifice theoretical rigor for the sake of telling a good story. Instead, he situates the ethnographic vignettes within larger sociopolitical frames, relying on secondary data and history to ground his interlocutors’ experiences. There is one particular instance of this that stands out. One of his interlocutors, a white woman who was interning at Wild Willow Farm states, “I like to work happy jobs…from what I see working on this farm, sustainability comes into it. It is not work that drains on you or damages your body” (121). In a move that can be read as compassionate towards the intern for whom whiteness (and perhaps class) acts as a shield from the experience of being drained or damaged by farm work, Sbicca deftly offers this after describing the perils associated with crossing the Mexico border into San Diego and the atrocious conditions many farmworkers lived in while working in mandatory evacuation zones. If anything, Sbicca may be too generous when describing some of his interlocutors’ lack of awareness of the perils of immigrants who are, sometimes quite literally, running through their backyards to find spaces something akin to freedom. But in this particular moment, I read what I consider to be one of the strengths of Sbicca’s work: a scholar using his own whiteness to speak to and critique the whiteness inherent in the privileges held by this intern and others. In doing so, Sbicca follows a trajectory of other critical food studies scholars like Julie Guthman who point out the “unbearable whiteness” of some food movements (Guthman 2008b). I cringed when reading moments like these, perhaps because they so perfectly illustrate the dissonance and dialectics that Sbicca argues are inherent and necessary in food politics. Sbicca’s ability to capture these in such poignant ways is a particular strength of the book.
I offer two questions to consider that pertain to the book itself but are, more generally, questions I believe are important for us who are interested in food justice. In Chapter 4, Sbicca offers “racial capitalism” as a frame for understanding immigration, borders, and segregation. As I read, I wondered: what would have shifted for this book (or relatedly, what shifts for our work) if we understand racial capitalism to be a totalizing frame through which to understand the food system? A second question was about intersections: how do we build and see intersections in and beyond food movements? One of the arguments Sbicca makes is that organizations are often treading lines of sameness and difference when trying to fight for their particular social justice cause, sometimes resulting in exclusionary practices (157). While I am in no way naive enough to suggest that this isn’t true, it did make me question about how (if at all) we researchers can see organizations that are working hard to align themselves with sister organizations. Arguably, one of the reason food movements, and those of us who study them, have not seen strategic alliances and intersections clearly may be because we haven’t looked for them.
Overall, Food Justice Now! is a theoretically and ethnographically engaged text that, for me, raises urgent questions and makes plain what is at stake beyond our plates and palates.
