When we talk about the term “food justice,” I think there are lots of ways that people exclusively associate it with poverty and humans that have been forced to live in poverty, even though we have found ways to thrive. Black people have a long history of feeding each other, finding creative ways to nourish each other, using whatever privileges we have to move resources around and redistribute information to get more folks aware of our agency. Because of the multiple communities I live in and where I stand within the spectrum of those communities, I have seen white folks with power and money who are only looking at the work that needs to be done, in comparison to the Black and Indigenous folks who are actually doing the work. Not in a fancy, social justice way, but because they have been caring for their community for a very long time.

Society at large has capitalized on the human desire for convenience and this fast pace has really pushed us into letting other folks care for us and feed us. In many ways, Black people haven’t received the same kinds of information as other communities. If you look at the ways we are advertised to, marketed to and told what we can and cannot eat — those are justice issues as well.

As much as I love language, I feel there are too many ways we use it to erase the real meaning behind things. In my work, I frequently use the term “historically and socially marginalized,” but I use it in order to be able to make sure people are not using the term “minority” to address the fact that Black and brown people have been moved into these inequitable spaces by design. The ways I want people to understand historical marginalization is due to the habits that all of our privileges allow that have then pushed folks further and further away from the resources they need to live.

Read the full article about food justice by Carrie Kholi-Murchison at HuffPost.