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Farming While Black: ‘People Are Tired of Armchair Activism’
Mark Bittman catches up with author Leah Penniman to talk about injustice and redistribution of land
In 2011, Leah Penniman co-founded the 72-acre Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. Her mission is to end racism and injustice in the food system and maintain a commitment “to train the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthen the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination.”
Her book, “Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land,” is the culmination of 20 years of work in agriculture and social justice. “To farm while black is an act of defiance against white supremacy, and a means to honor the agricultural ingenuity of our ancestors,” she writes. It’s the book, she tells us, that she “needed someone to write for me when I was a teen who incorrectly believed that choosing a life on land would be a betrayal of my ancestors and my black community.”
This week, Penniman was one of five recipients of the 2019 Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation. Mark Bittman sits down with her, here:
Mark Bittman: You have been all over the country for the “Farming While Black” book tour. What’s the response like?
Leah Penniman: The book is selling out and garnering standing ovations everywhere, from super white Midwest organic farming conferences to artsy Brooklyn spaces and rural southeast black farmer conventions. I don’t say that to be boastful, but to recognize that folks are generally ravenous for authenticity and truth-telling.
As black people, we are yearning for dignified narratives of our relationship to the land that reach across 400 years of enslavement, sharecropping, and dispossession to access thousands of years of belonging, innovation, and leadership in the agrarian space. For white people, there is a yearning to cast aside the ignorance and injustice that comes along with their racial privilege and get into the mess of something real and transformative, albeit uncomfortable. People are tired of abstracted armchair activism and come alive at the prospect of change that is gritty, muddy, practical, and real.
