Honoring Black History Month
A letter from GTC’s Board Chair, Liz Wills-O’Gilvie
It's Black History month, American heart month and for those who celebrate Valentine's Day the month of love!
By now, you may have attended a Black History month celebration or started a book written by a black person or about a black person. Maybe you watched a documentary or made some other effort to learn something other than a new use for the peanut, as is often presented when talking about agricultural hero, George Washington Carver. But knowing many of you, I understand that some of these efforts are already a part of the way that you live your life. I write to you and talk with you about race regularly so I didn't feel the need to send you a list of activities to do this month.
Instead, I decided to end the month with a challenge to make Black History month last all year. I also want to ask a couple of questions about what what you might do for the rest of the year. Maybe you will ask and suggest questions that we might ask ourselves and use to govern the rest of our lives as we work to advance racial justice for any/all BIPOC (black indigenous people of color) communities. We began using the term BIPOC a few years ago when we felt it important to illuminate that the experiences of black and indigenous people are unique amongst people of color. For black people that includes the anti-blackness that we experience even from other people of color.
The seeds of systemic racism are sown on this land from which indigenous people were removed through genocide and violence. The roots grew long and deep with the kidnapping and enslavement of black people. They continue to spread wildly in the soil so that now too many other people and communities of color are entangled as well. Sadly, the marginalization experienced by BIPOC communities has, like an unhealed wound, continued to bleed through the band-aids placed on it, and, while differently, also impacts poor white communities.
Instead of facing and naming the truth, we are still placing band-aids: bigger, perhaps stronger, but temporary fixes at best. Those fixes look like the the impassioned statements written after the murders of black people in 2020 by leaders of predominantly white organizations, the increased funding opportunities for BIPOC organizations in 2020 and to some degree in 2021, and the increased flurry of interest to volunteer at black-led organizations.
GTC and the Springfield Food Policy Council benefited from all of the above. Yet as with all things, the urgency to address root cause seems to have passed. I still participate in too many meetings where the right words are written in the invitation around racial equity, but the folks planning the meetings are still all or mostly white. There are still meetings where BIPOC leaders are not invited to participate because our questions are too many, too hard, and call leaders in to show up in deeper and more inclusive ways. And there are too many mothers who look like me who still go to bed and wake up with prayers on our lips for the safety of sons, partners, fathers, and all the black and brown boys and men who I know and don't know in my city, across the Commonwealth and in our country. A country that, in general, still doesn't recognize that all that we have is built on the foundation of a land that was stewarded by indigenous people who continue to be the most marginalized in our country, and built upon the enslavement of those from whom I descend. The wound keeps bleeding...
So what will we do? Maybe instead of writing about "what white people need to do," we might all begin our month, week, day, or even just a moment asking, "What will I do?" I wonder if we could do that within the context of the other two themes of this month, our hearts and love.
Are we doing everything that we can to help communities to be heart-healthy by making sure that people have access to food that is good for their hearts? I can imagine how many black and brown people might have survived Covid but for the underlying food-related diseases that plague our community like hypertension, cardiac disease, and diabetes. Instead of debating "critical race theory," can we just talk about expanding the the broader story of history, even the painful parts, like the fact that when "the Mayflower landed" in this Commonwealth was the beginning of the end of the way of life for people who had been here for thousands and thousands of years. Let us consider the value of land acknowledgements. What’s accomplished, if they are not followed by efforts to restore some of that land to the stewardship of indigenous people?
It seems to be just as hard to say and to hear, but we need to acknowledge that Massachusetts was the first of the original 13 colonies to make slavery legal, even before the southern states of Georgia, North Carolina or South Carolina. Slavery, Jim Crow sharecropping, and land removal were not just the sins of the South, they were the laws of this land. To undo the ongoing, unrelenting, and insidious nature of systemic racism and the continuum of the accompanying personally mediated racial bias, we need progressive legislation. We need policies and laws all framed within the context of equity. We need northern insurance companies and banks to tell the truth about who insured and financed the slave trade. We need the elite universities within this Commonwealth to tell the full truth about the wealth of the founders of those institutions and the acquisition of the land upon which they sit. How much grass do we really need to see in Western Massachusetts? Could not some of that be turned into farmland and that land made accessible to indigenous, black and other farmers of color?
Because I understand that we can't legislate behaviors, I'll close reminding us that this is also "the month of love." Because of Valentine's Day, we often think of love in romantic terms, something that we fall into. What if instead we considered love as a choice, and let that choice frame whichever of these suggestions or any other ideas that you might have govern our efforts. I have come to understand that I won't change as much by fighting what I hate. I choose instead to focus on what I love. Y'all better watch out!
In a few days we will put up a poll on the GTC and the SFPC websites. Please visit them during the month of March and tell us what you plan to do. Consider the framework that I learned from my public health mentor, Dr. Frank Robinson. He told me some years ago that, "Our work, our lives require each part of us: our head, our heart and our hands." If it feels like too much to engage them all, pick one? I promise the others will follow.
Black history is American history.
Love,
liz
