Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement
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Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina/The United States, 2018, 189 pp, ISBN [978-1-4696-4369-4] Fiona C. Doherty1 Accepted: 29 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and a time of growing civil unrest throughout the United States, Monica White’s Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement provides an inspiring narrative of a lesser-known method of nonviolent action known as “liberatory agriculture” [‘(p. 143)’]. White gives voice to an agricultural history that has been erased from all levels of traditional education and popular media. By doing so, she restores the powerful legacy of people of color in agriculture and provides a historical context to inform contemporary resistance strategies against white supremacy. White contributes to the burgeoning pool of literature, including work from food and farm activists Bowens (2015) and Penniman (2018), which breaks through the single-story of exploitation and oppression of Black farmers often portrayed by White voices in epistemological power. With her distinct perspective as an environmental justice scholar, White reclaims the history of Black farmers in the United States who leveraged their land and skills to organize towards social justice. White highlights non-traditional forms of resistance that can be enacted by any person using collective agency and community resilience (CACR) as a theoretical framework. For example, people facing oppression can adopt “commons as praxis” [‘(p. 8)’] as a way to challenge individualism and embrace shared resources and cooperative behaviors. Similarly, groups who have been ostracized from political processes may create alternative political systems, which White defines as “prefigurative politics” [‘(p. 9)’]. Furthermore, in response to economic exploitation, individuals can pursue * Fiona C. Doherty [email protected] 1
College of Social Work, The Ohio State University, 1947 N. College Rd, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
“economic autonomy” [‘(p. 10)’] by creating independent economic systems outside of federal currency. White makes a clear distinction between these “everyday strategies of resistance” [‘(p. 6)’] and the more organized social movements which, she states, tend to overshadow them. Everyday strategies of resistance are less disruptive and involve fewer people but can be equally as constructive by bolstering autonomy and self-reliance. The first part of Freedom Farmers provides the historical context of Black intellectual knowledge in American agriculture. The work of Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and W. E. B. Du Bois laid the bedrock for self-sufficiency and collective agency among the Black farming community in the post-Civil War South. With the visionary founding of the Tuskegee Institute in 1881, Washington catalyzed the dissemination of knowledge for Black farm families in Alabama’s Black Belt region. S
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