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NO APPETITE FOR RACIST STEREOTYPES
8/17/22

By Karen Shih ’09

For Black Americans, the simple act of eating can be fraught. Gathering for a barbecue in a public park can lead to run-ins with the police. Dining on traditional dishes, developed through ingenuity and necessity out of generations of slavery and poverty, can lead to racist ridicule. In her latest book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” which is available in print this week, American studies Professor Psyche Williams-Forson breaks down how unfair scrutiny of what Black Americans eat keeps society from addressing systemic inequities.

Why did you want to write this book?
Shaming Black people for what and where they eat is not new. It began during enslavement; the ways farms and plantations were set up were about surveilling Black bodies. And it’s moved straight into the contemporary moment, such as the (2018) arrest of the young Black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. People feel they’ve been given permission to overcorrect Black people’s lives, from music to clothing to language to food, because these things go against the grain of whiteness and “correctness.”

We all need to eat, so it’s easy to dismiss the unseen power dynamics around food. But if we are going to have conversations about people’s freedoms, we need to talk about food.

What’s an example of how Black Americans are food shamed?
My book opens with the D.C. Metro worker who was eating on the train in uniform, when a woman took her picture and blasted it on social media. The employee was literally going from one part of her job to the next, trying to fit in a meal. She knew Metro was no longer issuing fines for eating so she did so. Then she has her life exposed.

What are some food misconceptions that you address?
People like to criticize fast-food restaurants, but they are major gathering hubs for the elderly and other people who are alone. Farmers markets aren’t utopias. If you don’t set up in Black neighborhoods, offer food that’s culturally relevant and accept Black vendors, people won’t feel welcome. Also, dollar stores can be important sources of food. If you’re on a fixed income, and you can go in and buy 20 items with $20, that can make a difference in people’s lives.

How can the conversation about Black food culture be harmful?
We hear a lot about Black people and their diets, and how they’re unhealthy and obese because of soul food—but you can’t blame ill health squarely on food. Look at “the stroke belt,” which stretches across the South. These are states with repressive policies and laws. There’s a lot of wage inequality, people who are unhoused, people who are unemployed. Society wants food to do the heavy lifting because it takes our focus away from systemic inequalities that keep people mired in oppression, which contributes to psychological and physical disease.

Three ARHU Faculty awarded Special Purpose Innovation Grants for projects addressing race, equity and justice

  

 

 

 

As part of ARHU's campaign to address race, equity and justice, Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill added a special purpose fund to award projects that directly contribute to antiracism, equity, and/or social justice efforts. The three awardees include: 

Tamanika Ferguson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Communication
Awarded a Special Purpose Innovation Grant for her Voices From the Inside: Incarcerated Women Speak book project.


Anita Atwell Seate, Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Awarded a Special Purpose Innovation Grant for her ‘I Can’t Breathe’ and Police Brutality: Expanding Our Understanding of Group-based Conflict through Methodolical Innovation project.  

Siv Lie, Assistant Professor, School of Music
Awarded a Special Purpose Innovation Grant for her Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France book project

 

ARHU Dean's Colloquium Series on Race, Equity and Justice, Featuring Brandon Donahue-Shipp
Virtual via Zoom
Friday, April 07, 2023 - 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM

Healing, Revival and Transformation

ARHU Dean's Colloquium Series on Race, Equity and Justice, Featuring Paul Landau
Virtual on Zoom
Friday, February 24, 2023 - 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM

ARHU Dean's Colloquium Series on Race, Equity and Justice, Featuring Paul Landau

Help Black Farmers, Who Know Hyperlocal Doesn’t Mean Fancy
11/29/22

By Tressie McMillan Cottom

I have food on my mind. The few weeks between Thanksgiving and the end-of-year holidays are a time when eating becomes something more than a utilitarian need or even a personal pleasure. Now is the time of year when food’s cultural significance takes center stage in our overscheduled lives. We may eat standing at a desk most of the year, but during the holidays we are reconnected to food’s deeper meaning.

My grandmother died 10 years ago. The last Thanksgiving I had with her was also the last time I ate her sweet potato pudding. She made it just for me, once a year. I have no idea where the recipe came from or even if there was one. I have tried versions since she died. Online recipes have different names. Custard. Casserole. None of the recipes are quite right. Some add flour. I am sure that she did not. Others insist on coconut. She would never.

None of the recipes I have tried match the texture or depth of the dish my grandmother made: layers of buttery, grated sweet potato soaked in spices and baked until crispy on the outside and mushy in the center. I started thinking that maybe what didn’t work about these other dishes I tried was not the recipe but the ingredients.

My grandmother usually bought small sweet potatoes from a local grower. She had her favorite sources. A distant cousin, Eugene, grew some of the best sweet potatoes, by her standard. He put aside some for her over the holidays. If he was busy, there were other local suppliers: a roadside pickup truck and stand with fresh vegetables sold by the bucket, for example. In a pinch, she would go to a local “country food store” that sold food not fancy enough to be sold at the local chain grocery stores.

Something about my normal store-bought sweet potatoes does not measure up. They’re too big, too tough, too sweet or not sweet enough. The last time I ate my grandmother’s sweet potato pudding was the last time I tasted the culture that made that pudding possible. I wish I had known it was the last time.

This is how food has roots in culture, place, family and history. I recently talked with Prof. Psyche Williams-Forson about food memories. Williams-Forson is the chair of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a food studies expert who has written several books about race, gender, class, culture and foodways. “Foodways” is a popular academic term for the complex ways that we produce, consume and give food meaning. When a custard is not a pudding and when a sweet potato connects a North Carolina roadside vegetable store to the African diaspora, that’s an example of a complex foodway.

We talked about Williams-Forson’s new book, “Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America,” at a public event in Chapel Hill, N.C. It was moving to discuss her book, which connects ideas about moral value to the food that we cherish. It brings up a lot of feelings about migration, class, poverty and identity.

A member of the audience stood up during the Q. and A. to ask how his rural church could create healthier local foodways for its community. Like a lot of nonprofit organizations these days, his church wants to plant a community garden. But it doesn’t want to reproduce the classism of “clean eating” movements that label some food as clean and other food dirty. The people who eat clean food are good people. The people who eat dirty food — food associated with poor people or immigrants or formerly enslaved people — are bad.

Williams-Forson reminded us that the only difference between a back-porch garden in a low-income community and an organic garden in a high-income urban area is branding. She challenged the audience not just to think about utopian visions but also to figure out how people are supposed to eat “in the meantime.” The meantime is a space between the food systems of the near past and the food systems we will have to build in the near future. How can we support people not just to eat better but also to eat in ways that don’t limit how other people choose to eat and live in the meantime?

For this year’s annual Opinion giving guide, I encourage readers to support the organizations in your area that build capacity for localized food systems. You can always support national efforts like Farm Aid. I attended this year’s annual festival of music, food and agricultural education. The music stage is a big draw. But it is the exposition area, where I learned about how people produce food in this country, that raised my consciousness. I met advocates who educate people on how systemic racism and political polarization make it hard for farmers to pivot to more sustainable practices. In 2019, Vann R. Newkirk II did a great long-form piece on racism and U.S.D.A. policy. It is worth reading and thinking about how racism makes us more vulnerable to the ravages of climate change.

It is also worth supporting the Black Farmers Fund. The fund supports social impact investing in Black farmers, growers and agricultural businesses. Some people worry about losing family recipes. I am one of those. But I also worry about losing the foodways that made those recipes possible.

Some of us are losing them faster than others. I have not lost my grandmother’s recipe as much as I have lost a link to home. It may be too late for my sweet potato pudding. But it is not too late to become the people who caretake foodways that help local food cultures thrive, equitably and without shame.

 

Date of Event: 
11/22/22

Professor of History Discusses the Supreme Court, Stare Decisis and the Inapt Comparisons Between the Dobbs Decision and Brown v. Board of Education

Source: 
College of Arts and Humanities
Date of Publication: 
2022-11-16
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ARHU Dean's Colloquium on Race, Equity and Jusice

Dean Bonnie Thornton Dill kicked off the Colloquium Series in 2020 as part of the Campaign on Race, Equity and Justice, hosting a series of faculty experts from ARHU to discuss their scholarship and creative projects related to anti-racism and social justice.

This year, each session will include a mini-lecture and then a conversation with Dean Stephanie Shonekan, followed by Q and A from participants. Grab a cup of coffee and join the Dean for a conversation with some of ARHU’s leading experts in social justice and anti-racism.

2022-2023 COLLOQIUM SERIES:

September 28: Catherine Knight Steele, associate professor in the Department of Communication will present a talk titled "Toward a Digital Black Feminist Future". VIDEO

October 26: Michael Ross, professor in the Department of History will present a talk titled "The Supreme Court, Stare Decisis, and the Inapt Comparisons between the Dobbs decision and Brown v. Board of Education". VIDEO COMING SOON.

2021-2022 COLLOQIUM SERIES:

October. 27: Christopher Bonner, associate professor in the Department of History, whose talk is titled "Willis Hodges's Shield: The Meanings of Black Voters." VIDEO

November 19: Janelle Wong, professor in the Department of American Studies, whose talk is titled “At the Crossroad: Black and Asian American Relations in U.S. Politics Today.” VIDEO

December 9: Robert Levine, Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, whose talk is titled “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.” VIDEO

February 17: Alexis Lothian, associate professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, whose talk is titled “Fan Fiction, Social Justice and the Politics of Fantasy.” VIDEO

March 16: Sahar Khamis, associate professor in the Department of Communication, whose talk is titled “Insights on Countering Islamophobia through Research, Activism and Media Outreach.” VIDEO

April 15: La Marr Jurelle Bruce, associate professor in the Department of American Studies, whose talk is titled “How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Toward a Mad Methodology.”

April 27: Shay Hazkani, assistant professor in the Department of History and Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Program and Center for Jewish Studies, title forthcoming. VIDEO

2020-2021 COLLOQUIUM SERIES:

Perla Guerrero, Associate Professor of American Studies

Topic: Latinxs on Both Sides of Inequality and Fighting for Justice
September 16, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Marisa Parham, Professor in English and Director of AADHum
Topic: Purpose, Frivolity, Futures: What, really, is inclusion?
October 6, 9-10am
VIDEO

Scot Reese, Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Topic: Racial "Battle Fatigue" in black theatre and culture
October 26, 9-10am
VIDEO

Julius Fleming, Jr., Assistant Professor in English
Topic: His book, “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom”
November 6, 9-10am
VIDEO

Tamanika Ferguson, Presidential Post Doc in the Communication Department
Topic: Incarcerated women and media activism
November 17, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Richard Bell, Professor of History
Topic: African American political culture and his book: "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home"
December 8, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Quincy Mills, Associate Professor of History
Topic: Movement Money: Crises, Relief, and Democratic Practice
February 17, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Mary Corbin Sies, Associate Professor of American Studies; Trevor Munoz, MITH Director; Maxine Gross, President of Lakeland Community Heritage Project; and Lakelands Project team members
Topic: The Lakeland Digital Archive: Toward an Equitable Community/University Collaboration
April 13, 9-10 am
VIDEO

Jessica Gatlin, Assistant Professor of Art
Topic: Interdisciplinary Forms of Resistance
April 29, 9-10 am
VIDEO

GerShun Avilez, Associate Professor in English
Topic: Black radicalism and his book, "Black Queer Freedom: Spaces of Injury and Paths of Desire"
May 6, 9-10 am
VIDEO

BCaT Applies: Writing the Book Manuscript Session
Wednesday, November 09, 2022 - 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM

This BCaT applies session helps attendees think through the process of preparing their first manuscript for publication. This session is geared toward early career scholars whose research focuses on Digital Studies, Communication, Race, and/or Black studies.

Our dynamic panel includes:

Date of Event: 
9/28/22

The talk is part of a series centering ARHU faculty expertise on issues of systemic racism, inequality and social justice.

Source: 
College of Arts and Humanities
Date of Publication: 
2022-10-04
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Expert on Health Inequities Elected to National Academy of Medicine
10/17/22

A University of Maryland researcher whose scholarship has transformed our understanding of how social determinants of health influence outcomes for minority women and population health was elected today to the National Academy of Medicine.

Medical sociologist Ruth Enid Zambrana, a Distinguished University Professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, joins 90 new members and 10 international members elected to the elite organization in recognition of their outstanding achievement and volunteer service related to medicine and health. She is the only person from UMD, which has no medical school, in this academy, and she brings the number of UMD faculty in the national academies to 62, a record high.

“It’s very emotional and very gratifying to receive this distinction,” Zambrana said. “It’s been a hard road to go against the grain of scientific thinking—to break down biases. This acknowledgment affirms a long-standing struggle for justice and equity.”

A leading authority on racial and ethnic disparities in health across the life course, Zambrana has spent decades shining a light on the experiences of minority groups including Hispanics/Latinos and how their social and material conditions impact health outcomes. She has published over 160 peer-reviewed articles, books, book chapters, reports and monographs on women’s, maternal and child health; racial, ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities; and educational pathways among underrepresented and minority students and faculty in higher education. She has also mentored over 100 scholars in public health, medicine and the sociomedical sciences.

“We are so proud to count Dr. Ruth Zambrana among the ranks of University of Maryland faculty and congratulate her on this incredible and well-deserved distinction from the National Academy of Medicine,” said university President Darryll J. Pines. “The growing number of UMD faculty who are recognized as members of national academies is further evidence that our university attracts many of the brightest minds, boldest leaders and most courageous innovators in the world.”

Zambrana, who has a secondary appointment at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Medical School in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, was a 2021–22 Distinguished Research Fellow at the Latino Research Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. She received the 2021 Lyndon Haviland Public Health Mentoring Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Distinguished University Professor at UMD in 2020.

At UMD, where she has served on the faculty since 1999, she is also affiliated with the African American Studies Department, the Department of Sociology, the School of Public Health, the Department of Community and Behavioral Science, the Maryland Population Research Center, the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program and the Latin American Studies Center and is the director of the Consortium on Race, Gender and Ethnicity.

Earlier this year, Zambrana co-authored, with Harvard University Professor of Public Health David Williams, “The Intellectual Roots Of Current Knowledge On Racism And Health” in the journal Health Affairs, which encompassed her decades of research on how racism has affected knowledge production in health disparities and equity policy. Despite ongoing discomfort in many public health and medical circles about research on racism, the authors outline the shifts needed to “recognize that dismantling racism is an indispensable component of policies and interventions to achieve racial equity in health.”

 

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