Race dynamic seen as obstacle in Detroit urban farming
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0Efforts by black, white farmers largely separate in city
By MINEHAHA FORMAN
October 30, 2009
The Michigan Messenger
DETROIT — The Motor City has been most famous for its past industrial endeavors. That’s why it’s still a bit surprising to some that within the city limits, there are more than 700 urban farms that yield more than 120 tons of produce each year. When harvest season comes around, the social aspect of urban farming shines through, with farmers coming together to celebrate the season at parties brimming with locally grown food and drink.
But to those paying attention, harvest time also highlights a less attractive facet of Detroit’s agricultural social scene: social divisions between black and white urban farming groups.
That’s not surprising, according to Monica White, a sociology professor at Wayne State University who studies African-American involvement in Detroit agriculture. “Given the historical context of race relations in Detroit, any kind of movement is racially segregated,” White told Michigan Messenger in an interview. White said one of the ways Detroit’s history of racial tension manifests itself is in activism because grassroots movements like urban farming are “driven deeply by community.” According to White, the overall racial divide can be seen more clearly in smaller, focused groups where the general population is not involved. “Urban farming is not mainstream,” she said.
Perception v. intention
A recent influx of predominantly white residents into the city to start agricultural projects has hit a sore spot for some lifelong Detroiters. Tumultuous race relations from years past — which came to a head with the 1967 riots and white flight to the suburbs — left many native Detroiters wary of outsiders. That broad distrust of incoming people, especially as it relates to race, leaves the intentions of who come in and start gardens in the city misinterpreted. Additionally, farming is often associated with white culture while more than 80 percent of the city’s current population is black.
“Urban farming is often represented or seen as a mostly white phenomena,” White said. “The primary agent for any social network is group dynamics — if it’s a white group then white people are attracted. It’s racially contextual.” Language and perception are two major barriers that keep the movement from being more integrated, White said. “It has to do with race and class.”
Many black Detroiters have a negative perception of white people who come into the city and start projects in neighborhoods regardless of these groups’ good intentions. “What matters is how do their intentions come across?” White asked. “A common perception is that this is a pet project to make them look and feel socially responsible,” she said of how some native Detroiters look at incoming whites who jump into the urban farming movement.
White emphasized that the judgments some Detroiters make about outsiders joining the movement can stunt the overall effort to have a greener, sustainable food source in Detroit. And the productive efforts of those coming in to help forward the urban agriculture movement are thwarted by a social disconnect rooted in race and culture. That’s why White suggests that more attention be paid to communication across racial and socio-economic barriers in order to fuel the movement. “We have to find a way to articulate these issues to broader audiences,” White said.
Separate by default
One obvious example of the urban farming movement’s racial dynamics can be seen at Eastern Market on Saturdays at the Grown in Detroit farm stand. There, youngsters who are mostly black and Latino, work for a stipend under the supervision of community educators and farmers and sell produce that is grown organically on city land. The youth who work the Saturday market are part of the Garden Resource Program’s Youth Farm Stand Initiative, a collaborative effort between Wayne State University’s extension program, The Greening of Detroit and Earthworks Urban Farm. The initiative aims to educate youth to understand the work and benefits tied to urban agriculture.
While the city’s population is mostly black, the majority of adults who lead the Greening of Detroit — the non-profit that houses the Garden Resource Program — are white, which lends to the fact that there are usually white mentors and supervisors who work at the Grown in Detroit stand to help youth involvement in the program’s initiative.
One educator and urban farmer heavily involved with the Garden Resource Program’s Grown in Detroit efforts at Eastern Market is Greg Willerer.
Willerer, who is white, has noticed the racial divide between the program’s leadership and youth in involved but said in an interview that it’s not intentional. “It’s not like we make an effort to include Latino and black kids, but they have to be from Detroit,” Willerer said. He noted that the program requires youth involved to live in city limits, but the same requirements are not made of those leading the program. “Teachers interested in this usually are white,” he said.
Aside from the majority white-lead greening of Detroit, there is a lesser known black-lead group in the city that is growing each year. The Detroit Black Food Security Network, a non-profit, grassroots, community organization, seeks to educate and sustain black communities in Detroit where fresh healthy produce is scarce. While the DBFSN, which runs a two-acre urban farm, welcomes anyone to get involved in the network, the group mainly attracts black volunteers and activists.
The DBFSN, like the Greening of Detroit, also has a youth outreach program that targets predominantly black schools that focus on Africa and African heritage. White calls the DBFSN’s Food Warriors youth initiative a “gallant effort” that assists in developing school farms and educates young students on food security.
Urban Farming in Detroit and Big Cities Back to Small Towns and Agriculture
By Mark Dowie
Nov 3rd, 2009
Whiskey and Gunpowder
Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate demand for decent food. And there is plenty of community will behind the idea of turning the capital of American industry into an agrarian paradise. In fact, of all the cities in the world, Detroit may be best positioned to become the world’s first one hundred percent food self-sufficient city.
Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert, not just another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized food deserts scattered about, but nearly a full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert is defined by those who study them as a locality from which healthy food is more than twice as far away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.
Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.
Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying grocery chains—Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, and Meijer—competing vigorously for the Detroit food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty grocer Trader Joe’s just turned down an attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly declining population of chronically poor consumers is not what any retailer is after. High employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of security are also cited by chains as reasons to leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers will ever return, despite the tireless flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week market, the largest of its kind in the country, on the east side that offers a wide array of fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most people I saw there on an early April Saturday arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters are still left with the challenge of finding new ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.
One obvious solution is to grow their own, and the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping the nation has caught hold in Detroit, particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot community plots and a handful of three- to ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit groups, and during its four-month growing season, Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of its food supply inside city limits—more than most American cities, but nowhere near enough to allay the food desert problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan farms between thirty and one hundred miles from the city and truck it into the market.
