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Confronting Racism, Capitalism, and Ecological Degradation: Urban Farming and the Struggle for Social Justice in Black Los Angeles

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10999949.2011.574574

1548-3843

Edna Bonacich, Jake Alimahomed‐Wilson,

Urban Agriculture and Sustainability

Abstract This article examines the role of capitalism in the ecological crisis and the jobs crisis facing the Los Angeles African American community. We argue that sectors of Black Americans, like many people in the Global South, are being pushed out of the formal system of capitalist employment. To address this, we look to delinking and the development of economic experiments rooted in community economic self-determination based on anti-capitalist values. We report on a small urban farming project that we are starting. Keywords: African Americanscommunity controlcommunity economic developmentjobs crisissustainabilityurban farming Notes Sylvia Allegretto, Ary Amerikaner, and Steven Pitts, Data Brief: Black Unemployment in November 2010 (Berkeley: Center for Labor Research and Education, UC Berkeley, 2010). Steven C. Pitts, Job Quality and Black Workers: An Examination of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: Center for Labor Research and Education, UC Berkeley, 2008). See also João H. Costa Vargas, Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness in South Central Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press 2010). David Schweickart, "Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?" Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 8 (2009): 557–578. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 23. Ibid., 199. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Philip McMichael, ed., Contesting Development: Critical Struggles for Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2010), 1. Philip McMichael, "Banking on Agriculture: A Review of the World Development Report 2008," Journal of Agrarian Change 9 (2009): 235–246. Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration (Washington, D.C.: The Sentencing Project, 2007), 3. Roger Waldinger and Michael I. Lichter, How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 2003); Walden Bello, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2004). Jessica Gordon Nembhard, "Cooperative Ownership in the Struggle for African American Empowerment," Humanity and Society 28 (2004): 298–391. Robert Bullard and Glenn Johnson, eds., Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility (Vancouver: New Society Publishers, 1997). James DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital (New York: Routledge, 2004); David J. Hess, Localist Movements in a Global Economy: Sustainability, Justice, and Urban Development in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 7, 1997. Report of the Los Angeles Food Policy Task Force, The Good Food For All Agenda: Creating a New Regional Food System for Los Angeles (July 2010); Amanda Shaffer, The Persistence of L.A.'s Grocery Gap: The Need for a New Food Policy and Approach to Market Development (Los Angeles: Center for Food and Justice, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College, 2002). Fred Magdoff, John Bellamy Foster, and Frederick Buttel, eds., Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Farmers, Food, and the Environment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, Food Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 13. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma (New York: Penguin, 2006), 183. Ibid. Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel, Hungry for Profit. DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath, 12–13. The well-known South Central Farm was located in a black neighborhood, but it was overwhelmingly Latino. Racial politics played a role in its demise, since a black city representative who might have been able to influence the outcome was unsympathetic to a project that she believed excluded African Americans. Jessica Harris, High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).