I’m Robin Becker, a poet and retired professor, spending month #5 of the international covid-19 epidemic in a rustic cabin in New Hampshire. I’m working on a series of poems called “Underlying Conditions.” My most recent collection of poems, THE BLACK BEAR INSIDE ME, came out in 2018 with the University of Pittsburgh Press. For twenty-five years, I taught creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University.
Painted Symbol of the Power Fist, 2007, photograph courtesy of Keith Tyler.
Positionality
As a white cisgender queer woman who has worked in the food industry for 20 years, I have experienced first-hand inequities at the intersection of gender and class and witnessed and been complicit to systemic racism. My complicity in white supremacy stems from whiteness and without being constantly challenged will further systemic racism. I encourage other white folks in the restaurant industry and beyond to learn how their whiteness makes them complicit in a system that is killing people.
Restaurant Industry and COVID-19
The restaurant industry has been hit hard by COVID-19 and the people who have been impacted the most severely are the workers. Across the US, restaurants have been forced to close their doors, lay off workers, and pivot their operations to abide by rules and regulations to limit the spread of COVID-19, yet fast-food restaurants have remained steadily open.
Systemic Racism and Fast-Food
The current Black Lives Matter uprising that is sweeping across the country and around the world is not only a call to abolish the police, but is also a call to address the systemic racism that has forever plagued America. Systemic racism is why so many people of color work in fast food with the lowest of the low wages, little job mobility, and little to no benefits. Systemic racism and COVID-19 are plaguing workers of color in an industry that is already known for its egregious labor violations.
Women of Color Fast-Food Workers
The fast-food sector of the restaurant industry is the lowest paying and even before COVID-19 had a low standard of safety protection for its workers. Women of color are disproportionately represented in low-wage work like fast-food and are often segregated into the lowest paying positions. This leaves women of color that work in fast-food no choice but to risk their lives to feed their own families. This is systemic racism at play and leaves me to wonder what, if anything at all, fast food corporations are doing about it?
Fast-Food Corporations
Burgerville Allies for Change Sign, 2020, photograph courtesy of Whitney Shervey.
Following the days after George Floyd’s death, fast food corporations like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and the Pacific Northwest Burgerville fast-food chain made statements on how they are committed to addressing racism. All of these corporations have been challenged by their workers to address the inequities of systemic racism by worker-led direct action in the past and for the most part, have failed.
Holding Corporations Accountable
Fast-food workers know their struggle and have been fighting to challenge fast-food corporations through worker-led movements like Fight for $15 and attempts to unionize for years. Knowing their anti-worker history, fast-food corporations announcing their support for the current uprising is concerning. If fast food corporations do not support those who are leading movements within their own companies to address the inequities they are experiencing, how can we trust that their commitments to addressing inequity will be met? Who will hold them accountable?
Building and Supporting Worker Power
In response to corporations making these claims but not responding to the needs of essential fast-food workers, fast-food work stoppages across the nation are taking place in support for the Strike For Black Lives. Since the historical unionizing of fast-food workers at Burgerville in my hometown of Portland, Oregon in 2018, other food workers have been organizing and unionizing. This precedent has given restaurant workers actionable ways to address inequities in the workplace by using their worker power. During the pandemic, workers are using their power to challenge inadequate responses to address COVID-19 by their employers. Unionized fast-food workers have the leverage to challenge workplace safety during COVID-19, yet their ability to hold their employers accountable when they are making sweeping claims to address systemic racism needs the support of their customer base.
Black Lives Matter
Chicago McDonald’s Workers on Strike, 2020, photograph courtesy of Joe Brusky via Fight For $15
While recently attending a Black Lives Matter protest that was being held outside of a McDonald’s in the neighborhood that I grew up in, I reflected on the importance of customer input when viewing the never-ending line in the drive-through. In the wake of COVID-19, more than ever convenience has become a priority for American eaters. This convenience is made possible by systemic racism that disproportionately impacts women of color. Whether you are relying on fast-food workers to keep you fed or are protesting in their parking lots I urge to look beyond the statements coming from the top and find solidarity in worker-led movements
Who do you Support?
Fast-food chains already have a platform and do not need their voices amplified. So, the next time you see them making claims on their social media platforms think twice before pressing the like. My task is to ask all of you to take it upon yourself to know what workers are already doing to address inequity in their workplace. I ask you to trust the experiences of the workers and hold corporations accountable when they are making sweeping claims of how they plan to address racism.
What is Solidarity?
I also ask you to reflect on what solidarity means to you. To me, solidarity means showing up knowing that the struggle of the folks you are showing up for is your struggle. It is the role of white people to figure out how your struggle intersects with Black Lives Matter and to show up. It is the role of fast-food eaters to figure out how your struggle intersects with fast-food workers and show up.
Whitney Shervey is a professional cook from Portland, OR where she has worked in food work for 20 years. She is a recent graduate of the M.S. in Food Systems and Society program at OHSU where she focused her research on the role unions and worker centers play in restaurant industry equality. After years of working in the restaurant industry, she is committed to using labor organizing to transform the food industry to be more equitable.
A recent Brookings Institute article concisely articulated what I often spend an entire semester trying to communicate to my students:
We’re all susceptible to this white supremacist myth that claims the conditions in Black communities are mainly the result of Black people’s collective choices and moral failings. Rather, it is historic and systemic housing devaluation, economic injustice, and discrimination in health care that have created the conditions that increase rates of morbidity and mortality, especially during this unprecedented pandemic.
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of both a global pandemic and the eruption of protests and riots as a response to longstanding, historically embedded and state-sanctioned racial violence, oppression, and hatred in the United States. The murder of George Floyd follows a long line of black and brown people of all genders in America who have been killed or brutalized in the name of “law and order.” Perhaps the experience of vast racialized inequities of the coronavirus pandemic, together with the apparent powerlessness within communities to change those dynamics, has helped to instigate and sustain the widespread response to this latest example of ongoing police brutality. If we are to contest the “white supremacist myth” rooted in neoliberal individualism that insistently ignores the extent to which societal structures, systems, and institutions have failed men and women of color, we must recognize that no individual, institution, organization, university, or government is exempt from the moral duty to engage authentically in anti-racist and equity-based work.
In light of a global pandemic that has had a particularly intense impact on the service sector and the agri-food system, Extension can and should position itself as a resource, responding to community needs as they emerge. That said, Extension was institutionalized as a service to predominantly rural, white, male, and agrarian communities, and is often still positioned primarily in those spaces. Despite expanding well beyond agriculture to also integrate agricultural and life sciences, Extension is often still seen (and sees itself) as a service to commodity-based and production agriculture. Notwithstanding, the roots of Extension date back to decades before the signing of the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, and include innovations in both agricultural and community development, with a heavy emphasis on direct engagement of communities as a means of needs assessment. The pioneering work of Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and W.E.B. DuBois are detailed in Monica White‘s 2018 book, Freedom Farmers, which offers an important and oft-forgotten history of southern black agrarianism and extension practices. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, helped hundreds if not thousands of farmers to buy their own land, leading to the massive expansion of black-owned agricultural land in the early 1900s. Carver, in particular, focused on self-determination of farmers, and encouraged farmers to not only produce cash crops, but to grow food staples like sweet potatoes for which there was consistent market demand. DuBois, arguably the father of rural sociology, wrote about the liberatory potential of agriculture and cooperative economic structures within the black community, providing important theoretical foundations for the work that both Carver and Washington did to extend agricultural knowledge to black growers, and influenced many black growers in the establishment of alternative economic spaces as a part of their agrarian praxis.
In 1966, the former chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, J. Martin Klotsche, argued that agricultural colleges have the unique opportunity through urban extension to “do for the urbanized areas what the land grant colleges have done for the nation’s farm population” (Klotsche 1966). Klotsche described urban problems as complex (and at times controversial) but argued that these factors should not be deterrents. Rather, “new techniques and approaches” should be developed, because “(c)reative innovation rather than the performance of routine urban services is the special role of the university in urban extension” (Klotsche 1966).
Implementing a passive stormwater management design
As a response to nationwide social distancing and stay at home orders, Extension institutions across the country have been forced to quickly pivot services to an almost exclusively online platform to continue to “extend” the knowledge, expertise, and research of universities to the people across the states that they serve. This shift comes at a time when many (if not all) Extension institutions are already transferring much of their content online, offering digital courses, webinars, and written content to complement the in-person educational material that has traditionally been the backbone of Extension.
For many, technological transitions constitute a “creative innovation,” in the way that Klotsche referenced. At the same time, this mode of engaging communities is both inherently inequitable (the digital divide is alive and well in Pennsylvania and nationwide) and an ineffectual and inauthentic way of truly engaging people. These caveats are true in urban as well as rural settings. The complexities of the urban landscape are also embedded in urban Extension work and require modes of engaging within community that do not translate easily – if at all – to online platforms.
The inequities of digital content delivery and lack of effective community engagement through Zoom only perpetuate the deprioritization of urban Extension in land-grant universities across the country (particularly among the 1862 LGUs, and with exceptions, of course). In many states, Pennsylvania included, the lack of robust engagement in cities means that Extension is also not serving a large majority of the racially diverse populations of the state. While the persistent violence and oppression of people of color in the United States may not seem germane to the purview of Extension, if we are to engage communities in cities around community development and vitality, we must understand that racial trauma, violence, and oppression are central to those issues. This is true in white communities as much as it is in communities of color, meaning that an anti-racist and equity lens should be deployed regardless of the racial identities of the people and communities with whom we work. Neglecting these crucially important urban struggles either mirrors and amplifies or buries longstanding histories of marginalization – both epistemic and spatial – of people of color within Extension, the USDA and partnering institutions or agencies, especially those dealing directly with access to agri-food system resources.
A recent Penn State Extension talk
During a year-long study of Extension work in Philadelphia, faculty, educators, and undergraduate students collaborated on a narrative-based inquiry focusing on the experiences, competencies, and unique knowledge that educators bring to their work. This work highlighted the need to “recognize the multifaceted, complex, and unique lives of others” through authentic engagement, which can be described using six key competencies within Extension work. These include the critical necessity to “co-create with community,” “collaborate internally,” and “collaborate externally as city conveners.” Tommy McCann, former horticulture educator in Philadelphia noted that the convening role of Penn State Extension in the city is to “brin(g) the right people, including researchers and practitioners, together to support the work that’s already going on here. Much more than saying, ‘We think you need this,’ we need to come back and ask, ‘What is it that you need? What are you struggling with? What is it that Penn State can do to support that?'” While cultivating these competencies would have a positive impact on all Extension engagements, the complexities of the city, with its socio-economic, political, and racial diversity, high levels of inequality, and deeply engrained power dynamics, requires particular modes of engagement that emphasize continuous learning, collaboration, and co-creation.
The covid-19 pandemic has laid bare many of the inequities embedded not only within the agri-food system, but also in community and economic development endeavors writ large. That is, there are historically and geographically embedded reasons why black Americans are dying from covid-19 at two times – or more – the rate of other racial groups in the US. Extension has a unique opportunity to authentically engage within communities that have been disproportionately impacted by food insecurity, marginalization, disenfranchisement, and communities who have been targeted as victims of racial hatred.
Urban gardeners and farmers, like many others in this moment, are seeking greater self-determination and resilience in the food system. For black urban growers, a significant proportion of whom are women, this is not only a response to proximal shocks to the food supply chain, but a persistent pursuit to establish greater sovereignty over the food they eat, the land they work, and the health of their families and communities. Within urban Extension, we have the tools not only to partner with agricultural organizations across cities, but to deploy the expertise from within the College of Agricultural Sciences to help push these pursuits forward.
Fresh Fest Beer Fest in Pittsburgh, PA
To meet our mission of providing access to education “when (people) want it, where they want it, and how they want it,” Extension’s innovations must expand beyond technological adaptation. In the past, Penn State Extension associates have been involved with urban agriculture policy development and innovative institutional collaborations in cities like Pittsburgh with the formation of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council and Hilltop Urban Farms. These sorts of collaborative engagements with urban residents foster greater food system resilience while simultaneously offering technical skills in areas such as horticulture, community economic development, soil science, climate change adaptation, and nutrition. However, Extension must also engage in disruptive innovations that challenge systems, institutions, and people to evolve with the dynamism of the time. The extension of university knowledge to residents should be mirrored by the continuous learning of Extension associates about the needs, experiences, and expertise of the diversity of people we serve.
Co-creating with community and collaborating internally means disrupting disciplinary and programmatic boundaries and embracing epistemic pluralism: wicked problems such as climate change, food insecurity, and racial inequities (among many others) do not fit nicely into scholarly boxes, demand a variety of knowledges and experiences to tackle them, and only uneasily align with the tools offered through online engagement and education.
Photo credits: Penn State Extension, John Byrnes, Molly Berntsen, and Maria Graziani
Justine Lindemann is an Assistant Professor of Community Development and Resilience in the department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Penn State University. Her work and research centers racial equity and social justice, with a particular focus on urban food systems, food sovereignty, and black agrarianism.
The COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented in its rapid transition from a localized public health emergency to a global calamity. This pandemic is shaping up to be an economic, political, and social watershed, accompanied by increased poverty and a potential food and nutrition crisis.
Existent gendered social dynamics and inequalities mean that while mortality rates from the virus are higher for men, women’s lives and livelihoods are affected by COVID-19 more deeply and in different ways. The pandemic and potential responses to it may exacerbate multi-faceted gender disparities, with women from marginalized groups hardest hit. These effects will reverberate through agriculture and span nutrition, health, safety, income, education, and governance.
“The pandemic is exacerbating and deepening pre-existing inequalities, exposing vulnerabilities in social, political, economic, and biodiversity systems, which are in turn amplifying the impacts of the pandemic. The most pervasive of these inequalities is gender inequality.” (UN, 2020:3)
What does this mean for the research for development research community? How can researchers ensure that studies inform inclusive COVID-19 responses and that data collection during the pandemic avoids further marginalization?
This story was first published as part of theEnGendering Data blog which serves as a forum for researchers, policymakers, and development practitioners to pose questions, engage in discussions, and share resources about promising practices in collecting and analyzing sex-disaggregated data on agriculture and food security. If you are interested in writing for EnGendering Data, please contact the blog editor, Dr. Katrina Kosec.
I’m Robin Becker, a poet and retired professor, spending month #5 of the international covid-19 epidemic in a rustic cabin in New Hampshire. I’m working on a series of poems called “Underlying Conditions.” My most recent collection of poems, THE BLACK BEAR INSIDE ME, came out in 2018 with the University of Pittsburgh Press. For twenty-five years, I taught creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University.
