Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C by Ashanté M. Reese (review)

There is a presumption embedded in scholarly and public debates around the black freedom struggle that black people who fled the South during the Great Migration left behind their agrarian roots for urban jobs in the North. Yet in Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., Ashanté M. Reese effectively argues that many black people who fled north, to places like the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Deanwood, used their agrarian roots as a way to build community and self-reliance, meet their food needs, and navigate antiblackness across time and space. Although southern agrarianism perpetuated the subjugation of black people, northern black people transposed farming skills used in southern agriculture, Reese argues, “to cultivate a multifaceted foodscape [T]he same skills that were associated with subjugation were used as liberation tools” (p. 25).

Deanwood’s multifaceted foodscape (community gardens, small farms, corner grocery outlets, community food markets) is the space where Reese maps and narrates how residents created alternative food systems steeped in a history of black food provision. Reese traces this history to the Reconstruction era when black people began purchasing land in what is now Deanwood and relates how it continues today. To recover this history, Reese eloquently weaves together spatial, historical, and structural analyses along with ethnographic methods to show how urban black people navigated racial and economic segregation against a backdrop of the rise and decline of supermarkets. She uses urban grocery store phenomena as an entry point to understand and document “the nuances of food consumption, production, and access in everyday life” in Deanwood, while simultaneously speaking to other black urban neighborhoods across the United States (p. 112).

Throughout the pages of Black Food Geographies, Reese incorporates local Washington newspapers, maps, and oral histories of Deanwood residents that are in the papers of local historian Ruth Ann Overbeck and housed at the George Washington University library. Reese triangulates these sources with data generated from participant observation, interviews, and surveys to seamlessly move between macro- and micro-level analyses. Her macro analyses interrogate the production of unequal food conditions, and her micro analyses examine how residents navigate such racialized conditions. Even though these investigations do not interrogate the role of the state in unequal food systems, Reese illustrates how state-sanctioned conditions impact the everyday lives of black people.

Black Food Geographies illuminates the role of black people as agents in history rather than as passive participants at the whim of sociopolitical and economic forces that sustain racial hierarchies. It reveals their past and present agency in the production of food in everyday life, an often-overlooked area in scholarship on southern agricultural history and the black freedom struggle. Even in scholarly and public conversations on urban agriculture today, this history is virtually nonexistent. Reese demonstrates that there is more to study in the history of black people, and she shows that food in everyday life is a key component of this history. She also speaks to how scholars can bridge the gap between the past and the present to understand the future of black lives.