Dickinson College
Dickinson Scholar
Honors Theses By Year
Honors Theses
5-19-2013
Race, Class, and Food Justice in South Allison Hill,
Pa.
Giovania Genevieve Tiarachristie
Dickinson College
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Part of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Commons, Inequality and Stratification
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Race, Class, and Food Justice in South
Allison Hill, PA
A call for cultural competency and racial conflict mediation for low-income and diverse
community revitalization
By
Giovania Tiarachristie
Honors Senior Thesis for the Department of Sociology
Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA
Advisors: Professors Helene Lee, Susan Rose, Michael Beevers
May 13, 2013
ABSTRACT
Urban gardening has been hailed as a tool for community empowerment in the inner city to
relieve food security. But in some low-income communities with predominantly people of
color, the Whiteness of a new wave of urban gardening and the Alternative Food movement
for local, slow, and organic, can be a source of race and class tension, hindering the potential
for collaborative partnerships. This study applies critical perspectives on race and explores
through qualitative analysis the race-class conflicts around food and urban gardening in a very
diverse, low-income neighborhood in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania called South Allison Hill. A
series of seven interviews with some neighborhood leaders and organizations involved with
revitalization and/or urban agriculture reveal some of the claims to social roadblocks in local
food systems development. They give insight into some of the structural limitations, local
history, and experiences that shape group and individual actions. In the process, they suggest
what needs to be done to more effectively and collaboratively harness the potential of urban
agriculture in community empowerment, poverty alleviation, and conflict resolution. Findings
reveal necessity of structural economic justice, centralizing experiences of people of color in
food discourse, building cultural competency, using empathy-based communicative action for
racial reconciliation, and engaging residents in participatory community revitalization.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I.
Introduction………………………………………………………….…1
a. Problem and Research Questions….…………………………….…3
II.
Literature Review
a. Whiteness in the Alternative Food Movement……………………..6
b. Urban Food Security and Gardening Health………………………11
c. The Intersection of Race and Class…………………..……………14
d. Anti-racism at the front lines of Food Movements………..............18
e. Stories and Reflections of Interracial Collaboration……………....22
III.
Research Methods……………………………………………….…….26
IV.
Portrait of SAH……….……………………………………………….32
V.
Research Findings and Analysis……………………………….…..….36
a. “Different Values of Choices for Food”: Urbanism and Poverty’s structural
limitations………………………….………………………….......37
i. Access…………………………………….……………….37
ii. Sovereignty/Knowledge……………………..….…….…..40
iii. Overstretched Resources….………………………………43
b. “Hostile Residents against Outsiders”: Historically based Frustrations on
Race and Class issues………………………………………..……46
i. Spatial inequalities: Community as Geographic and Race-Class
Lines………………………………………….…….….….46
ii. Historical marginalization and manipulation……….….....49
iii. A sense of loss/lack of control of surroundings………......52
c. “Ignorant Outsiders Gentrifying”: lack of cultural competency and
communicative action………………………..……………..…......55
i. Lack of familiarity with local history, issues, or culture.....56
ii. Lack of relationships and trust building…………………..60
iii. Lack of language to talk about race-class...……………….63
VI.
Conclusion and Recommendations……………...…………………….66
VII. Acknowledgements……………………………………………………70
VIII. Bibliography……………………………………….……………...…..71
IX.
Appendix
a. A: Demographic Tables, Graphs, and Charts ………….….............A1
b. B: Chart on Main Findings………………………………….….…A10
I. INTRODUCTION
“They came in from Elizabethtown, in April to start the garden… without
even asking the community that we want the garden. And the day was
Saturday morning, two White guys were out there and I came out and asked,
‘What are you doing?’ And they said, ‘Oh we’re gonna start a garden’… and
I said, ‘You are? …You haven’t asked anybody in this neighborhood?’ And
they said, ‘Oh well it’s some people in the community… I said, ‘Where?’
They said, ‘Second and Emerald,’ and I said ‘Not in our community!’ The
guy told me I was being negative. I said, ‘No you’re being negative by
coming into my community.’ He said, ‘Well we’re just trying to teach you
how to eat,’ and I said, ‘We don’t need you to teach us how to eat! We
choose to eat the way we eat… I think you’re disrespecting our community
by coming up here without first asking anybody if they wanna be involved.’”
(transcribed from Penn Live Video by Hermitt 2012)
Sylvia Rigal, an African American homeowner in uptown Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
recounted her conversation with a Green Urban Initiative representative in a video interview
in The Patriot conducted by Hermitt in 2012 about the garden next to her house. On
September 21, 2012, City Council ordered workers to bulldoze a community garden run by
the new non-profit organization Green Urban Initiative (GUI) that is dedicated to
implementing sustainable practices in Harrisburg. The city claimed that residents
complained it wasn’t maintained and was a hiding spot for “weapons and drugs.” GUI,
comprised of predominantly White members and leaders, rents four garden plots from the
city and offers 10x4 boxed gardens to residents for $10 for the season to maintain and grow
vegetables (GUI 2013). Interpreted by some in the community as a hostile “overreaction,”
Ms. Rigal’s response and territorial definition of “community” reveal the historically based
race and class tensions in the Harrisburg area. She speaks in defense of her “community”
and emphasizes the lines between “you” and “our community,” expressing the anger and
frustration towards the white individuals trying to “teach them how to eat” and their
insufficient engagement with residents.
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Although this incident occurred in uptown, Harrisburg, it reflected city and nationwide sentiments of many long-time community members, predominantly people of color,
and tension experienced by White middle-class individuals coming to start agricultural work
in the inner city. As the potential for urban agriculture becomes more recognized in the
recent rise of an Alternative Food Movement for organic and local food, a growing number
of people are moving into cities to begin gardening initiatives and bring the opportunity to
local and “good food” to low-income communities. Community-based gardening for poverty
alleviation has been something that the Food Security Movement since the early 1990’s has
advocated. Since mid 1990’s Food Justice has become emphasized as explicitly to address
racism in food access. But the efforts led by majority middle class Whites advocating
“Sustainability” in the Alternative Food Movement in ways not relatable to many lowincome residents of color have stirred and revealed historical tensions around race and class
in urban areas across the U.S. In Detroit, for example, tense race relations dating back to the
1943 race riots as well as White flight has left many Detroiters wary of “outsiders” and
broadly distrustful of incoming people, especially as outsiders correlate to Whiteness and
gentrification. “[It] leaves the intensions of those who come in and start gardens in the city
misinterpreted [as manipulative and untrusted],” reports Forman in the Michigan Messenger,
“[F]arming is often associated with White culture [… but] more than 80% of the city’s
current population is Black,” (2009, 4).
About 23.5 million Americans live in food desert areas—neighborhoods that are
more than a mile away from a supermarket or large store that provides fresh fruits,
vegetables, and adequate transportation (USDA 2009). South of uptown and midtown
Harrisburg sits a neighborhood called South Allison Hill (SAH), a very diverse and lowincome community and food desert area, where a food movement through gardening is
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slowly growing. Multiple programs such as the Joshua Farm, SAH Community Ministry,
Ngozi and the Boys and Girls’ Club, the Community Action Commission, and Green Urban
Initiative, are working to revitalize the area and alleviate poverty by addressing food
insecurity through gardening. Organizations such as the Community Action Commission
and Tri-County Regional Planning Commission have attempted to bring together leaders to
the table to organize a large-scale movement around coordinating a localized food system.
The first meeting, however, revealed “neighborhood tensions” that would hinder successful
and effective collaborative full-scale development. In my research, I found that there were
three overarching themes to which both residents and non-residents attributed this
hindrance, as observed but not necessarily explicitly believed by the community leaders
themselves. The first claim was that inner-city residents have different cultures and values
around food; the second attributed the hindrance to residents of color for their hostility and
anger towards outsiders; while the third claim pointed to white “outsiders” for their
gentrification and lack of consideration of the community. In this paper, I argue that these
tensions that are perceived as interpersonal conflicts are better understood as structural
issues around cultural competency and engagement. Tensions are (a) the result of a lack of
understanding and engagement across different race-class experiences, (b) historically-based
sentiments rooted in race-class inequality and socio-spatial segregation, (c) and the absence
of relationship building and conflict resolution language to engage in racial reconciliation
Problem and Research Questions
The primary question I ask is: what are some of the social and structural issues
preventing the collaborative development of a localized food system and access to healthy
and fresh foods? In particular, this study serves to dissect the conflicts in establishing a food
secure community from the point of view of neighborhood leaders on the frontlines of
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revitalization and local food system development. What is the role of urban agriculture,
otherwise known as gardening, as part of community revitalization in Allison Hill? What are
the implications of this predominately White controlled field in one of the most “ethnically
diverse” neighborhood and the second poorest in Harrisburg, living the legacy of postindustrial degradation, years of political corruption, and environmental injustice? What
current initiatives and resources are available for people? What is the relationship among the
various stakeholders working with food, including the roles of community development
organizations, private sector industries, governmental figures, community leaders and
residents? What are the necessary next steps to ensure an inclusive and accessible system for
healhty and fresh food in the community?
This study seeks to explore and incorporate the perspectives and analyses of
community leaders to veer the understanding of sources of conflict away from individuals
and instead towards the structural systems that have caused people to act in certain ways. It
offers insight to better understand various stakeholders’ perspectives to resolve conflicts and
enable a collaborative and inclusive system that would reach the potential of urban
agriculture in food security, food justice, and ultimately, neighborhood revitalization.
Through this paper, seek to speak to the larger national debates around food, especially to
the Alternative Food Movement, which advocates consumption of local and organic foods
for sustainability, and call for awareness of its Whiteness and color-blind discourse. I
compare it to the Food Security Movement, which emphasizes increasing access to healthy
foods to low-income groups, and Food Justice Movement, which is a branch of Food
Security that advocates for antiracism and food sovereignty for people of color. I emphasize
the necessity of exposing racialized experiences and talking about race. Like many critical
perspectives on race theory, I speak about “race” and highlight its socially constructed
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meaning and systemic form of oppression, distinguishing it from the misconceived
biological reference to difference. In the discourse and analysis of race, it is important to
self-reflect on one’s positional relationship to power and privilege, as well as to understand
the dangers of a color-blind, disengaged, discourse that systematically denies the realities of
many people of color in the United States. This study around race, class, and food is not
about determining who is racist or classist, but instead seeks to dig deeper into the
importance of conversations about race and power in revitalization and the implications of
color-blindness and non-recognition of White privilege to the perpetuation of oppression and
inequality experienced by people of color. This study aims to contribute to the
understanding of the need for better communication across racial and socio-economic
groups as well as public and private sectors.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
In order to understand the current situation surrounding food and racial tensions in
SAH, I provide a concise review of key literature on (i) Whiteness in the “Alternative Food”
movement; (ii) Urban Food Security and gardening; (iii) the intersection of race and class
and the historical factors that have shaped racial segregation and inequality; (iv) anti-racism
at the front lines of the Food Justice Movement; and finally (v) stories and reflections on
interracial collaborations. Previous research offers necessary insight into the less mainstream
discourse of some of the ideologies and struggles that form the basis of food movement
narratives across middle and working classes, and white and minority groups.
5
Whiteness in the “Alternative Food”: Racial Formation & Performance through Food
According to Omi and Winant (1994), race is not a natural phenomenon but is
formed and socially constructed throughout history. Racial identities form through a variety
of “sociohistorical processes” by which racial categories, based on essentialized differences
in the body, are “created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” through “historically
situated projects,” (55). For example, certain governmental laws and policies in land use
zoning and housing in the 1950’s to 1970’s privileged Whites but delineated Blacks from
equal distribution of rights and protection on housing and environmental quality, based on
bodily characteristics that indicated race. The legacy of these discriminatory policies have
racialized poverty and have contributed to the formation of a racial identity characterized by
exposure to environmental toxins and lack of access to healthy and fresh foods. Expulsive
zoning and redlining, distancing of agricultural production from the inner city, and
discrimination by the USDA regarding loans to Black farmers, for examples, have limited
people of color’s access to food production and consumption. As these policies enabled
Whites to accumulate wealth and maximize their access to high-end grocery stores and other
luxuries, they have left many low-income minority neighborhoods in “food deserts”—at
least one mile away from a grocery store and dependent on long-distance prepackaged and
processed foods as well as fast food beltways (Gilbert et al 2002; Alkon and Noorgad 2009).
But many of these historical discriminatory factors that enabled racial formation in the
United States remain unsettled on the federal level, and unrecognized by the larger public.
This lack of recognition of racial formation history misleads those who have not experienced
or been exposed to the legacy of these racial projects blame the victims themselves for the
poverty or illnesses in which they are stuck. This segregated access to healthy food for
6
White middle class, and lack of access to healthy food for low-income Blacks, for has
enabled food to become a tool for race-class identity performance and reproduction.
Food thus, culturally becomes a tool of exclusion by upholding morality status with
food choices, as Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman exemplify:
Jews who observe dietary laws cast their less observant as not fully
Jewish. Particular ways of eating come to be associated with cultural
identities; those who eat differently become marked as less worthy of
others. Food movement (organic, local, slow foods) marks a particular set
of floodways as right and proper, and condemns ‘industrial eaters’ as less
worthy. This is why the food movement is interpreted as Elitist. (2011,
12)
In the last half-decade, authors such as Michael Pollan (2008) and Eric Schlosser (2006) that
have popularized a sort of “food enlightenment” by advocating for an Alternative Food
narrative romanticizing the past that has driven the local and organic food movement in the
United States, led by the white middle and upper classes. But Food Security advocates, who
since the early 1990’s have emphasized food access to low-income communities, criticize
the Alternative Food Movement’s exclusivity to class. However, due to the brutal history of
“race” as a social conflict in the U.S. interrelated with class, people of color have
experienced an additional layer of exclusion. This unaddressed layer of race inspired the
birth of Food Justice as a branch of Food Security, led by mostly communities of color to
emphasize antiracism. Food Justice scholars such as Alkon and Agyeman (2011), more
explicitly criticize the Alternative Food Movement’s “monoculture”—its predominantly
upper-class and White character. They describe the movement as “a group of ‘like-minded’
people with similar backgrounds, values, and proclivities, who have come to similar
conclusions about how our food system should change [… who] tend to have the wealth
necessary to participate in its dominant social change strategy—the purchase of local
organic food,” (2-3). Because of the relative homogeneity amongst the group of participants,
7
they fail to see the exclusivities in the narrative that ignores, and sometimes condemns,
groups that do not have the wealth and access to resources necessary to participate. The
homogenous group refuses to refer to racial differences to avoid prejudicing against others
and in fear of being called racist, but as a result ignore the very factor that has historically
delineated healthy food access exclusively to middle and upper class whites—enacting a
Whiteness that Bonilla-Silva in his book Racism without Racists calls “color-blind racism”
(2009). However, in the words of Omi and Winant (1994), “We cannot declare ourselves
‘color-blind’ without perpetuating the same type of differential, racist treatment,” (57).
Many people of color view racism as a system of power, where race has been central to
history and the everyday lived experience (Omi and Winant 1994). Denying the socially
constructed hierarchy of skin colors in a society that systemically and institutionally denies
equal opportunity is denying the advantages and privileges “possessed” by Whites while
refuting the oppression and disadvantages experienced by people of color (Lipsitz 2006).
This discrimination and marginalization of groups through Whiteness, as Kobayashi and
Peake (2000) describe, is “less indicated by explicit racism than by the fact that it ignores, or
even denies, racist implications,” (394). This power and control over the discourse of “good
food” and “healthy eating” and disengagement with the sociohistorical factors that have led
to the current disparities in food consumption between different groups, displaces and
condemns those who do not follow the established trend.
The Alternative Food Movement is not only exclusive because of the dominance of
white bodies that participate, but also because of the homogenously white middle and upper
class narrative promoted in its discourse (Guthman 2011, 366). For example, in Defense of
Food (2008), Michael Pollan writes as his first rule in his Eater’s Manifesto, “Don’t eat
anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” (2008, 148). Cleverly
8
coining a catch-phrase against industrialized agriculture to reclaim “the past,” Pollan,
however, ignores the fact that “our” great-grandmothers in this nation did not share the same
socio-historic and economic contexts that may have impacted their access to and informed
their perceptions of food. Alkon and Agyeman (2011) elaborate on grandmothers’ narratives
that Pollan ignored:
Some were enslaved, transported across the ocean, and forced to subsist
on the overflow from the master’s table. Others were forcibly sent to
state-mandated boarding schools, in which they were taught to despise,
and even forget, any foods they would previously have recognized. And
those who have emigrated from various parts of the global south in the
past few generations may have great-grandmothers who saw the foods
they recognized demeaned, or even forbidden, by those who claimed their
lands. (3)
Due to Pollan’s privileged historical perspective on food and advantaged position to make a
difference in the food movement through wealth, he fails to consider the historical legacy of
race-class relations on food access and the alternative meanings his normative narrative may
hold for people of color in the United States (Alkon and Agyeman 2011).
Alternative Food advocates and their proactive promotion of local-organic and
expectations of spending without regard to its exclusionary discourse, marks the movement
and its spaces as “White.” Julie Guthman, in her article “If They Only Knew” (2011), calls
the Whiteness of the alternative food movement “unbearable.” She argues that there is a
“messianic” approach to food politics that has a “chilling effect” on people of color that
works against the transformative politics that the movement seeks to pursue (264). Many
Whites come to inner cities wanting to “teach” people how to eat, replaying a familiar
paternalistic tone and White blindness to their privilege observed by communities of color.
Lipsitz (2006) describes, “Our history and our fiction contain all too many accounts of
Whites acting with unctuous paternalism to protect ‘helpless’ people of color, but very few
stories about White people opposing White supremacy on their own” (xiv). Members of
9
frustrated racialized groups are perceived more as “threatening strangers” or “servile
sidekicks,” but rarely as agents who are acting on their own behalf or for their communities
(Lipsitz 2006, xiv).
The Alternative Food movements have either failed or been slow to address the
issues of White privilege as many Whites adopt a color-blind language in fear of being
called racist. Tensions around race have stemmed from different understandings of race and
a lack of cultural competency of engaging with multicultural communities. Guthman (2011)
mentions that there are two complications in talking about race: (1) different
understandings/definition of race, and (2) differing fears of where the conversation about
race might result (270). Thus, the difficulty of discourse around race can be attributed to that
of a lack of “cultural competency,” or what can be partially described as the developmental
process of valuing diversity and building capacity for cultural self-assessment (Cross et al
1989). This lack of cultural competency, which encompasses “a set of knowledge and skills
to help individuals engage more effectively in culturally diverse environments […] a range
of awareness, beliefs, knowledge, skills, behaviors, and professional practices,” results in
perpetuated discrimination and exclusion (Sandercock 1998 cited in Agyeman and Erickson
2012, 4). Guthman warns of the necessity of diversifying the rhetoric around food: “My
underlying concern is that because alternative food tends to attract Whites more than others,
Whites continue to define the rhetoric, spaces, and broader projects of agrifood
transformation,” (2011, 277).
The dominant and exclusive White narrative around food enlightenment in the
Alternative Food Movement, along with an attitude of Whiteness that is blind to differences
as well as a limited competence to begin a conversation about race, drown out other
narratives about food and make invisible non-White groups. Nevertheless, many low10
income, minority communities across the nation are promoting other narratives around food,
such as Food Security and Food Justice, linked not only to environmental sustainability and
community health, but emphasizing self-reliance and economic and racial equity.
Urban Food Security and Gardening: the food movement from a low-income
perspective
Although the United States is considered to have the most productive agriculture in
the history of the world, providing food more affordable than any other developed country
(EPA 2012), food insecurity remains a significant issue plaguing predominantly low-income
individuals and families of color in urban and rural areas. The 1995 Community Food
Security Empowerment Act defined community food security as “all persons obtaining at all
times a culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through local non-emergency
sources” (Gottlieb and Fisher 1996, 24). In the U.S., healthy food has become inaccessible
largely as a result of the maximization of agricultural efficiency and productivity, which led
to a distancing between production and consumption (Noorhal 2008). Food production
shifted from the hands of communities and families into corporate agribusiness massproduction, relying on pesticides, preservatives, and long-distance fossil-fuel transport.
Along with this phenomena, discriminatory institutional and market forces have historically
hyper-segregated communities of color into impoverished inner city neighborhoods, far
from food production and lacking an income base to incentivize markets to establish there,
forming food deserts. The inability of residents in these areas to access healthy fresh foods is
due to not only location and transportation, but also the lack of purchasing power as a result
of rising food prices in comparison to subsidized processed foods and decreasing disposable
income (RUAF 2001). These neighborhoods tend to have easier access to high sugar, fats,
and sodium, cheap fast foods, leading to malnutrition and half of Americans in poverty who
11
will develop type 2 Diabetes; many others will develop cardiovascular diseases. Nutrition
inadequacy has been strongly linked not only to serious conditions, but also to daily fatigue,
problems with concentration, anxiety, infectious diseases, and poor school and work
performance—exacerbating issues individuals already face in poverty (North American
Urban Agriculture Committee 2003). Food Security takes a public health aim to try and
address the disparity in access to health and wellbeing.
While agribusiness policies have failed, government and non-profit supplemental
strategies such as food stamps, food banks, gleaning, and other services have intervened, and
a wave of Community Food Security movements, such as the Community Food Security
Coalition (CFSC) or Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN),
emphasize urban gardening and local production. These movements are growing to help
address the needs of low-income people in these food deserts (Allen 1999). Food Security
has become a part of the broadening of the Environmental Justice Movement. Since the
1980’s, leaders such as Robert Bullard and the UCC’s leading research on toxic waste and
race in1987-2007, and also Dana Alston of the National People of Color Environmental
Leadership Summit in 1991, have emphasized unequal distribution of environmental costs
and benefits against low-income minority groups. Unlike the current mainstream “Buy
Fresh, Buy Local” and “Slow Food” Alternative Food movements, which are based on more
rural and suburban, White, middle-class values on community and sustainable agriculture,
Food Security is an urban movement that seeks to address the disparity within the context of
urban accessibility to food and self-sufficiency in food production (Gottlieb and Fisher
1996).
From a food security point of view, localizing the food system through communitybased, grass-roots, and inclusive production and programming is not only resistance against
12
corporate agriculture, but is a means of alleviating poverty and building community
resiliency and sustainability through empowering residents, building health, and addressing
interconnected local needs (Morales 2011). Ron Finley, a guerilla gardener in South Central
LA, described gardening as “[…] the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially
in the inner city,” (Finley 2013). A study interviewing farmers in Havana, Cuba, where
urban gardening developed out of the need given the economic crisis of the collapse of the
Soviet Union, by Angela Moskow (1999), revealed that residents felt urban farming returned
a sense of control through the devotion to something useful, relaxing, connecting to nature,
solitude, and community. Inclusivity to gardens provided communities with both physical
and mental health, and gave them access to adequate, nutritious, culturally relevant food.
They also offered visual appeal, stress reduction, and spiritual satisfaction, which improved
their health (Moskow 1999). A study conducted by Levin et al. (1999) in Accra, Ghana
showed that beautification from community gardens, constructed and maintained by the
community, builds neighborhood pride and safety in places that have been systematically
deprived of it. Though South Central LA, Havana, and Accra certainly hold different
sociopolitical contexts, these studies support the evidence that community based-urban
farming has been a successful form of reconstructing local problems into opportunities for
positive transformation, with an appealing and empowering vision of economic selfdetermination (Morales 2011). Because of its benefits and relative adaptability, it has also
been a successful model and tool for the social inclusion of marginalized peoples, including
the poor, communities of color, and especially women (RUAF 2001). But most importantly,
for these benefits to arise, gardening initiatives must be grass roots, inclusive, and most
successful when led and maintained by well-established and respected community members.
13
Unlike the Alternative Food Movement, Food Security focuses much more on community
health, sovereignty, access, and the experiences of low-income communities.
The intersection of Race and Class: origins of Food Justice and an overview of some
historic factors that have shaped race-class inequality in the U.S.
The Food Justice movement finds its roots in communities of color, who have been
disproportionately harmed by historical policy and food insecurity, stemming from
environmental justice and civil rights movements, and fighting for food sovereignty and
antiracism (Morales 2011). The early leadership of the CFS was predominantly White, but
slowly incorporated a few people of color onto the board and committees, who comprised
the coalition members. However, some people of color working within the CFS Coalition
expressed frustration that “many White members were unwilling to examine issues of racial
privilege within the organization,” (Slocum 2006, cited in Morales 2011, 155). Erika Allen
is a person of biracial descent who helped to launch the Food Justice organization Growing
Food Justice for All Initiative (GFJI) under the auspices of Growing Power, Inc., to
complement food security by placing antiracism as a core principle to bring together agents
of change from diverse sectors to build healthy food systems, multicultural leadership, and a
supportive and empowering network. She expressed,
‘Some of us were frustrated by the slow movement of the CFSC on those
problems associated with communities of color […] We have not created
a new organization but we are teaching each other to see and dismantle
food injustice and use or organization to reconstruct parts of the food
system without destroying the CFSC and the good work they do.’ (cited
in Morales 2011, 155)
Learning from GFJI and the cry of many low-income communities of color across the
nation, ‘race’ cannot be factored out of the understanding of food security because it has
played an integral role in laws, policies, and practices regarding wealth, housing, and food
production.
14
The historical deprivations of people of color that have prevented them from
accumulating assets and trapped many in a cycle of poverty are narratives that are omitted in
mainstream White teaching of American History. After the prohibition of slavery, Blacks
were still prohibited from ownership of any form of wealth and reparations were never
delivered. Meanwhile, many Whites can trace the origins of their family wealth to the
Homestead Act of 1863, which explicitly denied access to land for Blacks and allocated only
to Whites (Feagan and McKinney 2003, 24 cited in Lipsitz, 2006, 107). The Social Security
Act of 1935 exempted domestic and agricultural workers, denying African Americans,
Latinos, and other low-wage groups the ability to accumulate savings and assets. Savings at
old age had to be spent rather than passing it to the next generations, perpetuating
intergenerational poverty (Conley 2009). People of color were taken advantage of, which
advantaged Whites who continue to benefit through asset transfers and wealth accumulation
(Lipsitz 2006).
Housing became a racial project that hyper-segregated communities of color in
poverty, rooting many of the issues underlined by Food Justice, and blinded many Whites
from acknowledging the condition of poverty in the city. According to Quadagno (1994),
trillions of dollars of wealth was accumulated through the appreciation of housing assets
through the openly racist categories that FHA loans made between 1932 and 1962. That
wealth was transferred to Whites as 98% of loans went to Whites (91-92). Beginning the
1940’s, FHA and Veteran’s Administration refused to provide loans to “inharmonious racial
or nationality groups” and underwrote mortgages only for new single-family suburban
homes in predominantly White neighborhoods, channeling money away from inner cities
and into White suburbs (Orfield 2008; Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1993). Even with
the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, federal mortgage insurance programs were
15
exempted from antidiscrimination requirements (Zaremka 1990, 101-103). The FHA, VA,
HUD, along with many other banks, mortgage lenders, and other housing groups such as
HOLC, committed redlining, racial steering, block-busting, and destruction of inner-city
public housing for “urban renewal” with failure to rebuild (Orfield 2008; Conley 2009; Omi
and Winant 1994; Lipsitz 2006). These discriminatory practices, as well as other federal
laws during this time, destroyed the housing value of inner cities and led to the hypersegregation of neighborhoods and concentration of poverty communities of color in the
inner cities. Four million Whites moved out of central cities between 1960-1977, and the
number of Whites that moved into suburbs increased by 22 million. At the same time, the
inner city Black population grew by 6 million (Massey and Denton 1993, 55).
According to research, the flight of the White middle class out of communities also
affects the local tax base, businesses, jobs, adequate housing, and funding used to provide
services such as public transportation and education (Orfield 2008). In fact, many of the
issues that exist today in inner cities and communities of color, such as unemployment,
declining inner city schools, high drop out rates, unstable families, high crime,
environmental contamination, and public health problems, are outcomes of these
discriminatory acts around housing and welfare policy that have centralized poverty and
deprived communities of resources (Massey and Denton 1993). Suburbanization and
decreasing profit margins in inner cities prompted company decisions to relocate grocery
stores from inner cities to the suburbs. Eisenhauer refers to this trend as “supermarket
redlining” by which corporations avoid low-profit areas with the mentality that, “It makes
no senses to serve distressed areas when profits in the serene suburbs come so easily”
(quoted in Eisenhauer 2001 in Morales 2011, 152). There is an observed negative correlation
between the existence of grocery stores and the percentage of Black residents; meanwhile,
16
there exists four times as many grocery stores in predominantly White neighborhoods
(Moorland et al. 2002). The lack of healthy food options contributes to the worsened health
profile of people of color, compared to Whites, in disease such as diabetes, heart diseases,
and other diet-related disease. Cornerstores, or bodegas, left in the inner cities, stock shelves
with mostly nonperishable foods such as canned soup, bagged potato chips, and sugary
drinks. They also charge more for the same goods that are found in suburban supermarkets
to make up for profit margins (Bansal 2012). The urban neighborhood has become a
racialized space denying adequate necessities for health and overall wellbeing.
Furthermore, Blacks have been continuously denied access to healthy foods
throughout history, including the ability to produce them. The advent of large-scale farming
hurt Black farmers disproportionately, leaving behind the peak of farm ownership among
African Americans in 1910 at 218,000 farmers. In the 1990’s, the USDA denied loans,
subsidies, and support Black farmers, which led to a nationwide historic decline of Black
farmers in the U.S. Meanwhile, the loans, subsidies, and support enabled White farmers to
transition into mechanized agriculture, as well as accumulate wealth and environmental
benefits (Alkon and Norgaard 2009). Many young people of color in the nation do not have
the same opportunities for education, income, wealth, and health, compared to Whites, as
“they are on a slippery slope, for the discrimination their parents faced in the housing and
credit markets sets the stage for perpetual economic disadvantage,” (Conley 1994, 152). As
Omi and Winant (1994) state, people of color have a different lived reality than what is
represented as universal, and “denying race is neglecting the fact that race is an autonomous
field of social conflict” (48). Thus, Food Justice, though a relatively new term, seeks to
centralize the racialized experience in addressing food insecurity in the city. It is a parallel
branch to Food Security. They argue that larger food movements need to understand,
17
acknowledge, and recognize the history of race in the United States to understand the equity
and justice in food for which communities of color struggle and fight.
Antiracism at the front lines of Food Justice: Empowering Locally Relevant
Community Solutions and Crafting a Collective Identity
According to Omi and Winant, “Members of subordinate racial groups, when faced
with racist practices such as exclusion or discrimination, are frequently forced to band
together in order to defend their interests,” (as cited in Seidman and Alexander 2008, 414).
For many Black leaders in gardening, food is secondary to empowering Black communities
and reclaiming a collective identity. Food Justice Monica White, a professor of
Environmental Justice at the Nelson Institute, who studies race and urban gardening in
Detroit, describes gardening a form of resistance against the structural factors that result in
racially divided poverty and food insecurity (2011). Karen Washington, a Black urban
farmer in the Bronx who started the Garden of Happiness in 1988, started urban farming to
push out drug dealers, stop illegal dumping, create beauty, and empower residents.
Meanwhile, the more sustainable agriculture-focused Alternative Movement gardeners
working in the city to practice for-profit urban farming have been perceived as
gentrification—pushing people out against their will. Gentrification is usually governments
using incentives to attract higher-income people to the businesses that cater to the more
affluent, raising rent and property taxes, forcing those who live in the community to move
elsewhere. Washington relates and describes the process and emotions: “You have this new
yuppie group coming in that is gung ho about urban agriculture … but the movement wasn’t
about urban agriculture, it was about survival, taking back our communities,” she says.
“Now you have people coming into gardens that have established histories, that were built
on the backs of people who made it safe for you to come in, and you’re gonna talk about
18
urban agriculture? You cannot leave out […] the history and the legacy of the elders who
were there long before so you can do whatever you wanna do.” (quoted in Crouch 2012).
Author Raymon Williams argues that the word “community” has been used to
identify “the sense of direct common concern,” (cited in Gotlieb 2007, 61) and can
transcend geographical boundaries in the desire to create a sense of unity in a homogenous
group or set of values. In another light, Iris Marion Young argues that the creation of
“community” is often achieved “by first defining other groups as the other,” (cited in
Gotlieb 2007, 62-63). Some of the inspiration for Food Justice is rooted in Black Nationalist
ideas and leaders such as Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, who sought to bring Blacks
together with a notion of collectivity under a shared struggle in a White oppressive world—
Whites were considered the “other” as a response to Whites “othering” Blacks. Black
nationalists used food and gardening not only as a means to address hunger, but also to
empower Blacks to build a self-sustaining community (McCutcheon 2011). Self-reliance
meant “self” as a community of only Blacks, excluding Whites, to look out for each other
since no one else would (Harris-Lacewell 2004). Unlike the market-driven, competitionemphasized notion of community prevailing in many White-dominant societies, the
Afrocentric Feminist notions of community, stresses connection, caring, and mutual
responsibility for survival. For Patricia Hill Collins, this comes out of experiences and
struggles of Black women:
For Collins, […c]ommunities created by Black women are aimed at
empowering their members [… and to be] sanctuaries wherein Black women
and men are nurtured in order to confront oppressive social institutions
external to them […] Here power is a tool of creative change and adjustment
and not a hammer of domination (Salerno 2013, 114-115).
Many Black Nationalist organizations do not want to assimilate into a broader and whiter
movement that would only drown out this history, and the pride and strength leaders sought
19
to cultivate. This theory can be seen reflected in Detroit Black Community Food Security
Network’s mission to create a coalition of Black individuals working together to build selfresilience, food security, and food justice by engaging in public policy, agriculture,
promoting healthy eating, encouraging cooperative buying, and directing youth towards
careers in food-related fields. The coalition is preserved as Black to avoid the drowning out
of Black voices amongst Whites. McCutcheon (2011) challenges, “[I]nstead of asking how
organizations centered on race can be part of the [larger] food movement, [ask] rather how
the [larger] food movement can transform itself and a broader society that thus far has not
been inclusive,” (185). In other words, currently the rhetoric of Alternative Food “disallows
discussion” on race, history, and food and needs to centralize the experience of people of
color and be conscious to not drown out marginalized voices (Balasubramanian 2010, 1).
Recognizing this need to raise awareness of the racial experience and disengaged
history, Erika Allen worked hard to place “Dismantling Racism” on the forefront of her
organization’s agenda. By adding the additional concern with regard to racism, Growing
Food Justice for All Initiative effectively included and built bridges for racially diverse
households and farmers, some of the most at risk, to actively participate and support each
other in creating a sustainable food system: “The food justice approach aligns movement
organizations explicitly with the interests of communities and organizations whose leaders
have felt marginalized by White-dominated organizations and communities,” (Morales
2011, 158). It also acknowledges the significance of “sharing across distinct local practices,
celebrating success, commiserating in struggle, and envisioning a more just future,” (171).
Some grass-roots, community-based organizations also utilize local urban gardening
innovatively as an opportunity to create social justice by creating meaningful jobs for
20
vulnerable youth and providing access to other environmental benefits deprived such as
green space, outdoor recreation, and economic empowerment (Jones 2008).
Food Justice activism addresses the intersection of institutional racism with
economic inequality that have denied people of color access to the benefits of alternative
foods. In a way, it seeks to create and celebrate collective racial and cultural identities,
echoing the sentiments of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement, which
sought to rearticulate and redefine the meaning of racial identity by infusing them with new
meaning (Alkon and Agyeman 2012). But just like the differing strategies of the leaders,
there are still contested perspectives of identity formation and food. Wit’s Black Hunger
(2004) demonstrates how Black Muslims condemned soul food as “the diet of a slave
mentality, an unclean, unhealthy practice of racial genocide,” while the Black Panther Party
valorized it as “an expression of pride in the cultural forms created out of and articulated
through a history of Black oppression,” (260). Nevertheless the contestations within, many
Black organizations are using urban agriculture not only as a means to address hunger, but
also as a tool for empowerment of Blacks and to build a self-sustaining strong community.
In summary, race and diversity cannot be ignored as an important factor in the larger
mainstream Alternative Food movement; nor will it be successful if it continues to
disengage with low-income and especially minority groups and perpetuate a social
dominance and exclusivity. Whiteness in the narrative of Alternative Food Movements
excludes low-income communities and communities of color. Although the Food Security
Movement has sought to address the needs of low-income neighborhoods, the formation of
the Food Justice Movement and its emphasis on the intersection of class-race inequalities
illustrate the necessity for cultural competence and addressing local needs in community
development projects. Segregation of middle-class Whites from the realities of low-income
21
minority groups has created a separation in language and understanding of each others’
struggles, creating racial tensions and forming the social conflicts that often are encountered
in inner-city gardening and food movements. Thus, it is important to cross these boundaries
for Whites to be part of the anti-racist movement too.
Stories and Reflections of Interracial Collaborations: solidarity the question of efficacy
Intercultural interaction and sustained collaboration is important in facilitating the
exchange of worldviews and ultimately paving the path to less discrimination, more racial
reconciliation, and greater civil rights and equity. However, as much of the scholarly
literature on race and food has been relatively recent (around 2010-2012), there still lacks
literature focusing on interracial collaborations and urban gardening. Race and Food Justice
gardening literature has predominately focused on criticisms of Whiteness and how
communities have taken matters in their own hands to address food access by demonstrating
agency, transforming vacant lots into spaces for food production, empowering youth and
citizens by engaging in gardening to solve community problems, etc. (Agyeman and Alkon
2011; Guthman 2011; McCutcheon 2011; White 2011). Success has been measured by the
engagement and empowerment of this underserved demographic. But little to no
documentation has been conducted that analyzes the how cross-racial relations function
within these inspiring gardening stories of low-income minority communities.
Rooted in the ideas of Jane Jacobs, research exists on how public spaces can better
facilitate this intercultural interaction. Some strategies suggested in increasing interracial
relations via public spaces include hosting events with high levels of interaction, providing
opportunities for meaningful exchange, having engaging programming, maximizing
accessibility of events, minimizing cultural intimidation, and equally valuing all cultures
22
(Moored 2006, 133-135). Gardens could provide a similar space, and there has been some
literature about urban gardening and social capital. Troy Glover, J. Shinew, and D. Perry, for
example conducted interviews in 2005 with gardeners and staff of the Green Gateway urban
gardening program in St. Louis, measuring trust levels between gardeners, their
neighborhood, people of other races and used a Sense of Community Index (SCI). They
conclude that gardening improves social capital, conflict resolution, and social cohesion
through social lubrication. The leisure activity and setting of gardening bring people
together who don’t normally socialize and enabled them to open themselves up to the
possibility of relationship building (Glover et al. 2005). However, the study focused on
relations at the garden and did not compare interracial contact in communities with a garden.
Furthermore, although Green Gateway engages with Black gardeners, the staff leadership of
the organization is still unanimously White, therefore still lacking interracial collaboration.
One source of racial tension that seems to prevent collaboration is the association of
Whites with gentrification. San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA), an
organization committed to feeding local communities through urban farming that also
advocates for a more just social environment, attempts to build and promote solidarity in its
advocacy. Many of their members consider themselves to be part of the “Food Justice”
movement to ensure accessibility rights to fresh and healthy food for all. Some of their
members expressed concern about SFUAA’s alliance being closer to supporting “urban
agriculture” above the needs of San Francisco’s most marginalized. In response to the
discussions, they created a page about their position on gentrification to demonstrate their
understanding of the concerns and clarify their intentions (SFUAA 2012). They explicitly
stated that they do not support urban agriculture as gentrification, and though they cannot
control the larger forces that are causing gentrification, they want to be a force of good in
23
the struggle that San Francisco is undergoing with gentrification. They call for solidarity and
to link up with other struggles that are about local community control and control over
public resources.
In another example, Patrick Crouch, a White urban farmer who works cross-racially
in gardening in Detroit through his organization Earthworks and serves on the Detroit Food
Policy Council, reflects that listening, building relationships, learning the history, having
humility, being open to criticism, amongst many things, enabled him to be genuinely
invested in the community and established in working with urban agriculture and social
justice. He writes:
I moved to Detroit not because I had answers, but because I had
questions. I moved not into one of the hip neighborhoods, but what I
would call “real Detroit” […] My wife and I were some of the only
white folks around. I had neighbors who spent hours schooling me in
the history of the neighborhood, Detroit, urban farming and gardening,
racism in the community, and much, much more […] Over time,
Detroit became home. I found myself more invested in the work, and
developing more of a leadership role in the urban farming world. This
opened me up to criticism [as a White urban farmer in an almost all
Black community..] I admit to recoiling a bit, feeling defensive, but it
would have been wrong not to face these critiques. So I listened to my
critics’ concerns, and talked with them about how I could address them.
(Crouch 2012)
After listening to concerns and asking for advice directly on how he should address them,
Crouch has since moved the Earthworks organization to focus toward social justice,
reevaluated their decision making and hiring process, work to develop a residents and
business association, develop partnerships with groups actively promoting justice as their
work, joined an antiracism training in Detroit, and joined a white anti-racist group. In this
case, Crouch’s collaborative success is measured by the acceptance by residents and the
depth of his engagement local community issues.
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The benefits of solidarity and extra resources that presumably result from interracial
collaborations can help promote the successful establishment of a particular project, such as
a large-scale localized food system. However, Larry Aubrey, an LA journalist for the LA
Sentinel who writes often about race relations, has observed that cross racial/ethnic
collaboration has historically been “at best a mixed bag for African Americans,” (2012).
Formal interracial collaboration attempts began in the early 20 th century, increasing in the
1960’s as Whites joined Blacks in the Civil Rights Movement, though many left the
movement. Aubrey writes that there have been numerous attempts at cross-racial
collaboration in LA around school integration, housing discrimination, police abuse, and
more in the early 1980s and 1990s, but many of them were unsuccessful. “Of course, local
government’s failure to address causal factors fueld racial and ethnic confrontation,
particularly in South Central LA,” (Aubry 2012). Aubry criticizes that cross-racial
collaboration for African Americans in recent years have been little to none. He attributes it
to Black leadership’s inability to reach consensus and clarity on goals or political strategies,
and also the fact that Blacks are not considered equal players. He states, “[…] unless Blacks
are considered equal players, others control the agenda; in fact, the “unequal” collaboration
makes matters worse by creating the impression that Black’s interests are being met when
precisely the opposite is true,” (Aubry 2012). Thus, it is necessary to ensure that
marginalized interests are heard and that collaborations take into account equity, focusing on
historical factors and needs, not just about envisioning an equal playing field.
The effectiveness of cross-racial collaboration is still in debate and depends on how
groups plan to measure their success. Is it the co-implementation of a large project? Is it
additional clarification of one’s mission on a website? Is it the individual groups’ goals in
addition to collective goals that are still met and met equally? Is it the balanced diversity in
25
its leadership and constituents? Aubry begins and concludes by defining that, “Successful
collaboration requires honesty and explicit agreement among participants regarding the
nature and scope of the particular undertaking […] it is a product of shared objectives,
effective communication and equal power of all participants backed by the support of
constituents and/or stakeholders,” (Aubry 2012).
III. METHODS
The primary research method for this project is qualitative, essential for community
and place-based information collection. Methods used for this paper included (a)
demographic overview of census data and Community Health Needs Assessment from
September 2012, (b) participant observation and field journaling from four different trips to
the SAH and Harrisburg area, and (c) analysis of six in-person interviews conducted with
various community working leaders in revitalization during an overnight stay in October
2012.
Demographic Overview
Before conducting interviews, I compiled demographic data of SAH, represented by
Census Tract 213, from the 2010 U.S. Census and American Community Survey 5-year
estimates of 2006-2010, to get an clearer understanding of the structural influences on the
social condition that might affect food insecurity in SAH. These statistics help illustrate
some general trends related to income and poverty, families and households, race, gender,
age, household types, occupation, and education levels in the community. I also included
statistics on diabetes and heart disease in the county reported in a Community Health Needs
Assessment (September 2012) analyzed by Tripp Umbech and sponsored by Holy Spirit
26
Health System, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, and Pinnacle Health System,
to illustrate public health issues in the area that may be related to food and diet.
Participant Observation and Field Journaling
Participant observation was an essential part of the research enabling me to better
understand the conditions, values, beliefs, commonalities, and diversities present in daily
life. I engaged in participant observation and field journaling from four different trips to the
SAH and Harrisburg area during early September 2012 to late October 2012. Before fully
forming my questions, I visited Harrisburg as pat of a pilot study and to build relationships
with people with whom I had already met through a class field trip in the previous year. I
prioritized building a network of different leaders to reach out to, getting a sense of some
day-to-day life in the area, clarifying my intentions, and building trust with residents as an
outsider attempting to learn more about the neighborhood. The first field trip, September 4,
2012, was an opportunity to participate in a Neighborworks workshop attempting to train
residents how to be leaders and effective block captains to lead a door-to-door neighborhood
survey program. The second trip, one week later, was a personal tour about the “best and
worst of South Allison Hill” led by Chris Fegley, a neighborhood planner at the Community
Action Commission (CAC). CAC is a quasi governmental organization in SAH that serves
the Tri-County area to create and maximize the resources necessary for individuals, families,
and communities to achieve self sufficiency through social, community, and housing service
programs. We visited community gardens, central land marks, empty lots, foundationally
unstable houses, and heard more about the history and current politics surrounding housing,
blight, and community revitalization efforts in this part of the city. The third was a fieldtrip
was in mid-September to the Broad Street Market in midtown Harrisburg to meet with a
community leader to hear more about current efforts around food and tensions surrounding
27
race in the city. The fourth trip was an environmental policy class field trip that I
participated to listen to various community leaders talk about community gardens in the
area, the history of the Harrisburg incinerator, and environmental justice activism. I also
attended a permaculture presentation and graduation ceremony, celebrating community
members who had been studying permaculture under Ben Weissman. Students presented
their plans on how to incorporate the principles they learned into the development of site at
Reservoir Park into a permaculture site to feed the community. I conducted mini interviews
with four participants about permaculture and the community. The following day, I
participated in the Unitarian church service, and interviewed five people in their homes, at
the Catholic Worker’s House, as well as two over the phone. One interview was conducted
at a diner over breakfast.
Description of Interviewees and Coding
The selection of the six interviewees was purposive. All interviewees have worked at
some capacity with the community in revitalization, all but one of them with gardening
and/or food. Three community leaders that I interviewed I met mostly through professors at
Dickinson who have previously collaborated with them through courses in Environmental
Policy and Urban Economics. Others I met through participating in community meetings
and followed up on connections. It is important to note that although these six individuals
are leaders who work in the community, there are still many other very engaged individuals
who are not a part of this discussion due to the constraints of the time frame for data
collection. This sample of voices does not fully reflect the sentiments of the neighborhood,
but nevertheless, their perspectives as individuals who have had experience in working with
revitalization and/or urban gardening still give important insight to better understand the
social issues surrounding food and gardens in SAH.
28
I have given each interviewee a pseudonym to protect their identity and maintain
confidentiality. Victor is an African American male who directs a local organization helping
non-profits and small businesses start-ups. He has not worked directly with gardening but
works with many people in the community as a block captain and business owner. Carl is a
Caucasian male born and raised in SAH, but has moved in and out for schooling and jobs.
Now he works as a coordinator for a local development corporation, working with many
residents and planning various events. He coordinates the maintenance of a garden as well as
has tried to coordinate various gardening leaders in the past. Kailyn is Caucasian female
who moved from to Harrisburg in 1999 and to the neighborhood of SAH in 2005. She
coordinates a garden joint under a local organization mentoring youth and runs a CSA
program, a farmer’s stand along the main artery, and aims to give youth in the area work
experience through the farm. She is also a board member of GUI. Charlotte is a Caucasian
female who went to a local college in the area and has done volunteer work in SAH
including gardening, and now works with a local organization through AmeriCorps. She
used to live in SAH but now lives in mid-town, just north of the area. Willis is an African
American male born and raised in SAH and now works with local churches and runs a
ministry food bank. He runs a few gardens that began as youth education programs and
works primarily with hunger. Rawiyah is an African American female born and raised in
Harrisburg who owns her own local business, as well as leads major projects across the city
of Harrisburg around gardens, including one in SAH. She also has organized permaculture
classes to teach youth and adults how to feed the future. She aims to work with the Black
and Latino male youth population. Nicholais is a Caucasian male who moved to SAH over
15 years ago and runs an organization helping the poor in basic needs, including creating a
garden space for people and bringing food from farmers markets for the needy.
29
I asked the community leaders six structural questions with follow-up questions to
clarify their responses: (1) is food an issue in this community and if so in what ways? (2)
Where do people get their food? (3) What is your organization doing to help alleviate these
issues/what are other initiatives in the area? (4) What are the relationship(s) with other
initiatives in the area? (5) How would you define the role of urban farming in SAH? (6)
What do you think about politics in Harrisburg?
I audio-recorded and transcribed all of the interviews and hand-coded their responses
under six main categories: description of food situation; other variables preventing project
implementation; conflict regarding ‘the other;’ important insights into community behavior;
opportunities to capture; and reflection on interviewees’ perspectives. Subcategories were
created based on the pattern and variance in responses. In the end I coded them firstly on
conflicts and opportunities identified, then various types of conflicts and perspectives, and
eventually organized them under three commonly themed claims, that were identified at
least twice, as the roadblocks of revitalization through gardening and the justifications and
misunderstandings about them that leaders revealed. These three claims became the
structure through which I organize the findings and analysis: (1) Inner-city residents having
other values around food, (2) residents of colors’ hostility and anger towards outsiders, (3)
White outsiders for their lack of engagement, and gentrification.
Reflections: The Impact of an Outsider Status
My research question really began to shape only after my first three visits in an
attempt to incorporate what community leaders and the Community Action Commission
identified as issues and needs with food in the city, along with my interest in better
understanding the intersection of race and food. It was important for me to form my research
question into something that would be beneficial and usable for the community. As an
30
outsider entering the community, I was very careful to be conscious about my subjectivities.
I tried my best to blend in terms of dress and put away my academic language that I have
been accustomed to adopt while in college. Growing up in a neighborhood that was adjacent
to one very similar to South Allison Hill helped me to better understand some of the patterns
I observed while doing participant observation in the neighborhood. I built relationships
with people in the community first before focusing on my project. I was honest from the
beginning with the community leaders and told them that I was limited in resources and that
I couldn’t come to every meeting. I clarified my intentions to primarily listen and seek to
better understand what was happening around the gardening movements and racial tensions
that I heard were occurring in the neighborhood. I was clear with my intention in that I just
wanted to learn more in hopes of being able to document and contribute something useful
and meaningful for the community and future work in community revitalization. For most of
the interviews, I did not need to explicitly ask about race as it became a topic that naturally
arose in describing issues and relationships. For interviewees who did not raise race as an
issue, I explicitly asked about its role in conflicts. The fact that I am a person of color of
Asian descent may or may not have impacted the comfort interviewees felt in responding to
questions about race—perhaps it was easier for people of color to talk about race and more
difficult for White subjects in fear of offending me because of my identity as a person of
color. I attempted to focus all the questions to inquire on how the community leaders
perceive the current situation in the community, allowing residents/community leaders to be
my teachers. This openness as a student with an interest in relationship building, a
willingness to be vulnerable, and sharing of empathy—seemed to help in their process of
reflecting and sharing during interviews, as many of the interviewees acknowledged.
31
Nevertheless, my perspective as an outsider interpreting the interviewees’ perspectives adds
a complicated layer of meaning conveying information about the community.
IV. PORTRAIT OF SOUTH ALLISON HILL
South Allison Hill is a neighborhood in the city of Harrisburg, in Dauphin County,
central Pennsylvania (Map 1-4). It is a post-industrial neighborhood and part of the Mount
Pleasant Historic District, consisting of mainly townhouses, single-family homes,
apartments, small businesses, and project housing. The neighborhood is lively as porches
and front steps are often filled with four or five people and multiple families chatting and
spending time together. The area is home to a diversity of church denominations, from
Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Unitarian, and more. It is also a regional center for social
services, ranging from the YWCA, United Way, WIC, the Community Action Commission,
and many more local organizations dedicated to improving the welfare of residents. The
community has suffered greatly from economic decline and blight since deindustrialization,
including unemployment, rotting buildings, drugs, robbery, and homicides (Fegley 2012).
SAH used to be a bustling community with farmers markets because of all the surrounding
farms (Fegley 2012). Similar to many post-industrial cities during suburbanization in the
U.S., many White middle class residents fled from the community in the 1960’s and 1970’s,
bringing with them the local tax base and small businesses. Now there are many absentee
landlords and the city has lost 30% of its population. Hundreds of millions of dollars have
been invested in building downtown and commercial areas, “but this neighborhood has yet
to see it,” expresses Fegley. Mayor Reed, who was mayor for 28 years, brought in the toxic
incinerator business, and purchased $8.3 million dollars of Wild West items for a museum
that never developed, driving the city into debt and bankruptcy. There’s a rumor that federal
investigation is going on, but the residents seem to highly doubt a fair process.
32
Population, Race, Ethnicity and Class. According to the 2010 Census and
American Survey, South Allison Hill, is the second poorest, second most populated, third
youngest, and most ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhood in the City of Harrisburg
(Tables 1, 2, and 9). The total population in 2010 was 6,612, composed of individuals who
identified as Black or African American (47.7%), White (22.8%), Latino/Hispanic (36%),
Asian (3%), and mixed races (Figure 3). Over eleven percent of residents were foreign born,
about twice the state estimates (Table 3).
Income, Poverty, and Households. Forty six percent of all families in South Allison
Hill had incomes below the poverty level with a median household income of $20,625
(Table 2, 4 and Figure 1). Almost a third of the population earned a total income of less than
$10,000. Thirty eight percent of residents in total received Food Stamp/SNAP benefits in the
past 12 months, compared to 9% of total Pennsylvania residents (Table 6 and Figure 2).
SAH also has the highest rate of non-traditional households (households without married
unit). Single-female households with children under 5 represented 71% of all families living
under poverty, suggesting perhaps high levels of premarital births or out-of-wedlock (Table
4). The abundance of non-traditional families may contribute to difficulties in households
and more widespread poverty because of the lack of shared household income and wealth
(Rector 2001, 63-67). Of the 45.5% of people living below the poverty line, 54% of identify
as Black or African American, 22% Hispanic or Latino and 23% White (Figures 6).
Housing and Occupancy. This neighborhood is undergoing post-industrial blight,
with the highest number of vacant homes in the city and low property rates, and up to seven
times more than nearby census tracts. The number of abandoned buildings and empty lots
increase and perpetuate blight, and becomes a more difficult issue with budget cuts racing
against the pace of rotting buildings. These empty lots, on the other hand, can be harnessed
33
as opportunities for gardening space. According to the SAH Community Action
Commission, this statistically significant trend provides evidence to blight in the area as a
result of the low property rates and high poverty levels, in combination with the area’s
historical corruption by real estate speculators and absentee landlords that fail to maintain
their properties. Meanwhile, every day in the city of Harrisburg, approximately 650 people
experience homelessness, according to the Capital Area Coalition on Homelessness (CHNA
2012, 3).
Employment and Health. About 13.6% of the total population is unemployed,
compared to 7.3% of Pennsylvania estimates (Table 12). Occupations lean towards service
and transport, and lack opportunities for agriculture and information industries. However,
occupations in the arts, services, and transport exceed state percentages. Low wages and
high unemployment leave many dependent on government benefits, especially food stamps.
Income, housing, and occupation interrelate, as families don’t have access to affordable
health care. The rates of childhood obesity in Dauphin County, along with surrounding
counties Lebanon and Perry, are higher than the rest of the state. Heart Disease rates in
Dauphin County, PA’s major cause of death are higher than those of the state (CHNA 2012,
3).
Education. Across the board in age groups, South Allison Hill fell far below state
averages for education levels. Of the total population of South Allison Hill, only 63% were
high school graduates or higher. Only 8% had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to
26.4% of Pennsylvanians (Table 14). About 68.5% of all males ages 18 to 24 had an
education less than a high school degree—a shocking difference compared to the 28.8%
women of the same age group who had less than a high school degree (Table 14). The data
suggests that young males up to 34 years of age remain a vulnerable group in terms
34
education. We could interpret these data as the vulnerability of young men to drop out of
school as a recent trend of the last 30 years, perhaps due to involvement in drugs and
violence that followed the post-industrial blight of this area, as well as the trend of massincarceration of Blacks. In major cities wracked by the drug war starting Reagan’s era, as
many as 80% of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus
subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives, including in educational
opportunities (Cohen 1991, 28-33). This absence in young males becomes linked to many
of the perpetuating problems in low-income communities of color such as SAH. According
to James Hyman’s study “Men and Communities: African American Males and the Wellbeing of Children, Families, and Neighborhoods”, education, income and earnings,
marriage, fatherhood and family formation, crime and incarceration, and child, youth, and
community development are all linked to the causes or the consequences of negative wellbeing outcomes in distressed communities (Hyman 2004, 10).
Building Resilience. Amidst the blight and depression, there are many positive
revitalization initiatives happening in SAH to build the resilience of the community. Purple
banners hang under street lights proudly declaring “Diversity, Opportunity, Community,”
initiated by the Community Action Commission (CAC) whose mission is to maximize
resources and support to build self-sufficiency in the community by connecting people to
services, helping to education on budgeting, buying homes, employment, and to get
neighbors talking. A movement specifically around gardening is growing. On the corner of
Derry and Kittanning sits a beautiful lot with a stage and a mural called “Living the
Conversation,” funded by the Penn State “Beautiful” grant. It has become a gathering space
for events such as block parties. The mural and decorated lot have significant community
support, as they were designed by a local artist and created by local residents with the
35
participation of local children. The mural displays significant leaders and change makers in
the community—all those leaders were Black residents except for one White woman. The
CAC maintains this lot with the help of parole members giving community service.
Churches, the community development corporation, local charities and non profits, and
individuals are recognizing these issues and taking initiatives to provide free meals and
emergency foods, turn abandoned lots into gardens, and provide education about gardening,
cooking, and nutrition to kids.
V. RESEARCH FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
The major finding of this research is that as various groups from contrasting racial
and class backgrounds seek to implement gardening in the community, acting based on their
experiences and upbringing, they spark territoriality in many of the residents of color and
reopen painful, unaddressed wounds about race-class conflicts. The lack of cultural
competency and empathy-based conversations useful for conflict resolution and racial
reconciliation worsen the tension of the already existing conflict. By answering questions
about the community and the relationships between different groups around gardening, these
community leaders of various backgrounds reveal and disect the misunderstandings behind
the three common perspectives and offer insight into the hidden issues around race and class
that need to be addressed before moving forward. I have organized the research findings into
these three main defined roadblocks to revitalization via urban gardening and discuss the
alternate perspectives as revealed by the leaders that are hidden behind each one. The three
themes observed of sources of hindrence in collaboration include: (1) Inner-city residents
holding differing values around food, (2) residents of colors’ hostility and anger towards
36
outsiders, (3) White outsiders intruding and gentrifying the community. I follow with
conclusions and recommendations.
a. “Different Values on Choices of Food” : Urbanism and Poverty Structural
Limitations
One of the first identified roadblock claims is that inner-city residents are perceived
to have different cultural preferences around food. This perception, most commonly held by
individuals not familiar with the experience of low-income residents, often victimizes the
residents by insinuating a moral hierarchy of decisions on food—defining what it means to
“eat right,” associated with making sacrifices to purchase healthy, fresh local and organic
foods, and creating a stigma for “eating wrong.” Although culture certainly has an influence
in the types of foods different ethnic groups eat, many of the differing patterns around food
consumption has been less about “choice” and more about how the legacy of industrial
agriculture, multigenerational poverty, and urbanism have seggregated low-income minority
communities from the privilege of access to fresh and healthy foods. Community leaders
defined the issues around food in South Allison Hill around poverty’s structural limitations
on (i) access, (ii) sovereignty and knowledge, and (iii) leaders’ resources.
i. Access: Availability, Location, and Price of Fresh and Healthy Foods
The issue around food in SAH revolves not around the lack of food, but rather the
lack of available and affordable whole, fresh foods. SAH, though not recognized federally,
is a food dessert. Bodegas, corner stores, mini-markets, and fast food joints occupy every
other block, advertizing meat, sandwiches, cigarettes, drinks, candy, and sweets, and “Food
and Liquor”. Only one supermarket in the city serves 50,000 people. The foods most easily
available are high calorie, high fat, high sodium, processed and packaged, conveniently
placed at the multitude of vending machines, bars, and corner stores: “If their only options
37
are outlets in this neighborhood then there’s not many options other than food that’s in a can
or in a bag,” Victor, an African American male who works in community development
remarks; “You won’t believe how many young people are walking to school and their
breakfast is a twenty five cent bag of chips and maybe a soda. That’s breakfast for a lot of
young people.” Despite the abundance of cornerstones that sell foods such as milk or meat,
they do not purchase large enough quantities to offer them at an affordable price. This easy
access to junk food and difficulty in accessing sources of healthy food has led this county to
have the highest rate of obesity in Pennsylvania (CHNA 2012).
Rumors about a grocery store opening on 19th and Derry St. reverberate in
excitement and optimism in the community, though some remain pessimistic about its
impact. The interviewees distinguish differences between corner stores, grocery stores, and
supermarkets, for example Willis, an African American male who runs a hunger alleviation
program, describes: “Between 13th and Derry there’s a little … what would be the size of an
old 1950’s ‘supermarket’ [laughs] but they don’t offer much… again we’re not at Wegman’s
or Giant or anything like that. We used to have a Weis in walking distance but that’s gone
[…T]here’s no markets like that [...] you can get a couple of lemons or something like that
[laughs].” Supermarkets, such as Wegmans, Weis, and Giant, fled this neighborhood with
the downturn of its economy in the 1960’s. I visited a few corner stores on Derry Street and
mostly found boxed, canned, and bagged foods, such as hamburger helper, canned corn,
sodas and sweetened juices, potato chips, and in one store, onions.
A lack of good public transportation access is also a major issue contributing to the
issue of accessibility to fresh foods. The closest supermarket in the city, Giant, sits at the
edge of the neighborhood on 29th Street on top of a hill and about 15 blocks (1.5 miles) from
the center of SAH. Victor shared that he spent a day visiting different Giants in Harrisburg
38
and surrounding areas to spend an hour or two observing: “[…] it was amazing to see the
number of taxi cabs that pulled up to the 29th street Giant. There were several Giants I never
saw a taxi pull up at all. But as far as that Street Giant, it’s not unusual to see a taxi pick up
or drop off someone every 10 minutes to go shopping.” He shares that public transportation
in the area is limited to the Capital Area Transit (CAT) bus, insufficient in funding and
limited in its service:
You have […] to catch it at the right time […] [Y]ou’re gonna do your
major shopping once or twice a month[…] The hours of CAT just got cut
back… they’re not doing weekends anymore[…]You’ve gotta stand on the
corner at a bus stop and wait for a bus and then carry seven eight bags of
groceries with those 3 little babies, it’s almost impossible for a young
mother to do. So she has no choice if you don’t have a friend that owns a
car, because everyone you know is in that same situation as you, you’re
gonna grab a taxi. And you’re gonna spend all that money.
The only place to find a wide variety and selection of fresh foods is limited by physical
location and transportation access. Therefore, most people who are limited by distance,
mobility, and affordable transportation are limited to the high salt and sugar, processed and
packaged options in the area—a source of many of the health problems in the community.
Another element of food access is the price of food relative to disposable income:
“People hav[e] to make choices about how to spend their money, whether its food or rent or
medication,” says Kailyn. A significant part of the issue is the low wages and income and
high unemployment of most residents in the community. Joshua Farm in SAH offers a
Community Shared Agriculture program (CSA) providing access to local and organic food,
but only 20% of the CSA members live within a half a mile of the farm and it tends to attract
people who are already interested in local and organic food who are willing to pay more for
it. The CSA program requires people to have some disposable income so they can pay the
membership fee upfront, while not many residents in the SAH area meet those
qualifications. There are few places that offer a variety of foods within the price range of
39
residents, even with food stamps, challenging them to make difficult decisions on how to
most efficiently and productively spend their money. Charlotte elaborates, “If it was
between paying $3 bag of oranges and fifty cent bag of chips you’re probably going to
choose the chips.” Carl observes that corner store prices are higher because of the
inefficiency and cost in distribution of the products from distributor to the shelves that
cornerstone owners need to add to the price to survive as a business: “[W]e ship food from
CA, FL, TX, and […]when you have high fuel prices fluctuating from $4-5, one of the
inputs in delivering healthy food is […] cost. And so our food security in this nation is
heavily dependent on foreign oil.” More and more leaders in the community are realizing
that unless prices of gasoline can be stabilized, a more localized food system is necessary to
address the transportation cost reflected in the price of foods.
Thus, there are larger structural issues as a result of urbanism and poverty that have
limited the access of fresh and healthy foods for residents. Many of the gardening initiatives
now seek to address these limitations by localizing production. Rawiyah shares that when
she talks to her kids that she works with at the gardens, she uses a different paradigm
through which to communicate the price of organic food: “It’s not so much the cost, it’s the
location and the access. I always tell people that if they grow their own food they will have
just gotten organic food for free!”
ii. Sovereignty and Knowledge: Production, Home Economics, Nutrition, and Food
Preparation
An abundance of social services in the area have responded to this lack of access to
cooked healthy food by aiding through supplemental food distribution, but sovereignty—
particularly knowledge about production and home economics—remains an issue. Naed
from the Catholic Worker’s House brings food from the farmer’s market in midtown and
40
from the food bank and redistributes to a table at Derry Street as well as opens the doors of
the House to the hungry. The South Allison Hill Community Ministry collaborates with
other churches to collect and provide emergency food for anyone who might need it. But
sovereignty, or autonomy and self-sufficiency over food sources, including “the ability to
produce and purchase your own [healthy] food, and your ability to not have to rely on
charitable giving,” lacks, states Carl. The urban organization of communities and the
peripherisation of agricultural into rural areas has alienated people in urban areas from
production: “If you grow up on a farm you’ve seen chickens slaughtered, you’ve fed the
pigs […] and so folks are much more connected to what food means to them as they see it
more closely. Folks here, you go to the store and buy it in a package--there’s that
disconnect,” he reflects. This disconnect exists across the board in American culture because
of its shift to agro-industry, but the experience of low income people of color has been
exacerbated by multigenerational poverty, racial discrimination t access to knowledge and
opportunities, and their segregation into urban areas further away from agro-economic
activity and food.
Due to the intergenerational lack of accumulation of assets and changing education
programs that have rid of skills like home economics, many families have not only been
deprived of production but also home economics necessary for long-term self-sufficiency
and food sovereignty. People who live in poverty experience and learn a different value of
money than those who grew up with the security of assets. For example, Kailyn, a White
farmer who moved to SAH in 2005 and leads a gardening program, reflects on things that
she has learned about the residents in contrast to her more privileged upbringing:
If someone needs money and they ask you and you have it, and you haven’t
spent it on anything then you obviously don’t need it, you know there’s a lot
more freedom in sharing your resources and so yeah then the idea of saving
up money for a down payment or for college is seen as hoarding resources
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and not sharing with your friends and family in need so there’s not a lot of
societal support there. I love the idea of sharing with those who need but on
the other hand its kind of short-term […] people have had different
opportunities to learn about different skills.
Kailyn reflects that many residents in the community have not had the privilege of being
able to invest and save for the longer term because of the greater need to spend to support
those around and for more short-term needs. She also reflects that these are some of the
mindsets and entrepreneurial skills needed to be a farm manager, but its lack in the
community makes the hiring process more difficult. The Community Action Commission
has been working to address through their Family Educators, who are trained through the
organization to teach families about-home economics such as nutrition, opportunities,
accessing healthy foods, budgeting to cook and use leftovers, and how to encourage their
kids to eat healthy food. Initiatives surrounding urban gardens are fueled by the recognition
of the need for the benefits of more localization of the food production system and
knowledge recentralization. Many community leaders are attempting to tackle the
sovereignty issue through employment and education of youth through gardening. For
example, Ngozi Eco Village Natural and Organic Farmer’s Market is setting up training
centers to harness the potential of urban agriculture in the city of Harrisburg by using
permaculture design as a guide and philosophy. Rawiyah describes that the group’s
initiatives is to train Black and Latino males, “[…] who are basically the most deprived in
our community and we have a high prison and juvenile rate. There are 400 juveniles in our
city though the criminal justice system. So what [the organization is] trying to do is restoring
our youth… teaching basic needs.” They have five locations being prepared for green house
construction for year round farming aiming to tackle the food desert issue in the city by
building self-sufficiency of residents who are not traditionally or easily attracted to the
prospect of urban farming.
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Exacerbating the issue of access and availability, initiatives around gardening have
revealed that people or families lack knowledge on how to cook with fresh ingredients due
to the legacy of poverty, and have too easy of access to cheap processed foods. Even while
people in poverty get support from the welfare programs or food stamps to enable them to
purchase healthy food from the grocery store, “they’re gonna get canned food, boxed items,
dry goods. They’re not going to get a lot of fresh produce. Again they don’t know how to
prepare the fresh produce well…no one has taught them […] You watch your mom do it,
you learn that way […],” shares Victor. A combination of multigenerational poverty, broken
family structures in part due to the need to work, and exposure to advertising contribute to
the differences in knowledge of nutrition and prep. The idea that “eating right” is based on
“right or wrong” choices ignores the structural issue that many families in the neighborhood
never inherited knowledge about home economics, nutrition, or prep for healthy foods due
to sociohistorical processes. Thus, residents need more opportunities for training and
capacity-building in these essential areas and inclusive access of those services.
iii. Overstretched Resources of Organizations and Leaders
Leaders in the community face the difficulty of a growing demand for services as the
economy regresses, as well as a growing insufficiency in resources including funding, labor,
knowledge, and time. The demand for services is growing, reflects Willis: “[G]oing back 3
years ago, we used to serve 62-64 families a month at the pantries with supplemental food.
Now we’re serving 142-150 a month […] Going back three years ago we used to do
emergency food packages for four to five people month[, but now] you can take that up to
12-13.”
Joshua Farm tries to employ youth in the community. However, with the inefficient
workforce and high labor cost, they struggle to survive and face the tough decision to either
43
sell their products to the highest bidder or find a way to subsidize the food produced to make
it relatively more affordable and accessible to people in the neighborhood. Joshua Farm is
attempting to take a middle grown by offering CSA shares that take food stamps and SNAP
benefits for membership. They also offer working shares so people can work and for every
hour they get five hours of the cost. This year, they had 45 share equivalents representing 60
families, where five of them paid through SNAP and 14 households worked some amount.
Five of those 14 worked enough so they didn’t have to pay anything, about 84 hours in total.
The shares are $420 for a 20-week season. Ten out of our 45 shares were fully paid through
SNAP benefits or labor. Many organizations in the area are wrestling with unprofitability
and survival issue—a reason why many supermarkets fled and another reason why many
services struggle to maintain existence and rely on grants and donations.
Lack of time and labor and differing focus goals seem to be the largest factors
disabling leaders from collaborations. Although working in the same community, some
leaders in the urban agriculture sector still do not understand the initiatives or extent of work
that other leaders are doing. During the interviews, when asked if an interviewee was
familiar with one of the leaders, some shared stories of how they collaborate and rely on
each other here and there, but knowledge on main functions and goals of each other was
often misconceived. Some didn’t know that each other were involved in gardening. When
asked about relationships, Rawiyah responded: “We support each other with extra
vegetables and help each other with outreach. Pretty much with other food organizations
pretty much everybody’s their own […] Joshua farm has been [one of the only ones] that’s
come to the table and had dialogue over the years and trying to move forward.” The
interviewees across the board expressed that organizations have been focused internally on
44
their production and services, and lack the time and labor to network and collaborate on a
new project. Willis summarizes:
In a time of financial abundance, more people would have leisure time and
time to devote to spend in doing other things. [E]verything that you do is at a
bare-bone level and putting it on the people that you have because people are
out there struggling. So you’re [already] doing two to three times more than
you should be doing.
Leaders are already overstretched and challenged by personal burn out. Victor explains that
the overstretch just like of that which he observes in the non-profit world: “You create a
501(c)3, you go out to meet that need under your mission statement… but you didn’t really
consider necessarily with another […] and unfortunately there’s […s]ome turfism… that
whole competing for a few dollars for grants.” Leaders recognize that it needs to be a
concerted effort, but survival in order to offer the services their mission defines comes first.
There are so many issues facing people,” Carl reflects, “like the school system, taxes, city
bankruptcy, crime, food.” Because of the many issues that people face daily in poverty, it
can be a challenge for many residents to collectively mobilize to step up to respond to big
issues and feel like their voice even matters or would be effectively address the
overwhelming issues.
In summary, it is unjust to victimize the residents by insinuating a moral hierarchy of
decisions on food, defining what it means to “eat right,” as there are multiple ways and
undersandings of what is “good food.” It is important to recognize and understand the
socio-historical impacts of urbanism and poverty that have deprived many low-income
minority communities of access and sovereignty to healthy, fresh foods, and overstretch
organizations on their resource capacity. Many people are not familiar with these
complicated realities of low-income residents because of the immense segregation and lack
of engagement between contrasting race-class groups. Nevertheless, structural issues around
45
poverty need to be addressed to strengthen the local economy, relocalize and improve
education and livable wages, and enable asset accumulation for residents to enable them
access to more options than the ones to which they are currently limited.
b. “Hostile Personalities”: Historically-based frustration of race-class tensions
The second identified roadblock to revitalization through a localized food system is
described as “interpersonal conflict” and “personalities.” Meetings organized by groups to
bring together leaders to move forward in upscaling a localized food system have often
failed to identify next steps. Several of the interviewees described the cause as “personalities
not being able to cooperate.” The effects of these “personalities” have created a sense of
uncertainty and pressure when larger groups, such as those on county level, hold meetings.
Kailyn shares, “I think people are nervous about bringing in other people to come to the
meetings because we don’t want to be treated with disrespect or feel disrespected or have
power taken away from us when we as a neighborhood have such little power already.” But
when I sought to find out what exactly these “interpersonal conflicts” were, I discovered that
these issues with cooperation stemmed directly from community members’ strong sentiment
of historically-based territorial defense and distrust against “outsiders”, stemming from
frustration of (i) the inequalities spatially existing between race-class groups, (ii) historical
discrimination, marginalization, disillusionment by White dominated institutions, and (iii) a
sense of loss/lack of control of surroundings.
i. Spatial Inequalities: Defining Community as Geographic and Race-Class Lines
Because a majority of the community is comprised of low-income people of color,
segregated from more White, affluent parts of Harrisburg, there is a strong assumption
within this population that those who are White are more affluent and most likely from the
“West Shore.” Dress, demeanor, and speech become clues to what side one might belong in
46
the perceived dichotomy. For example, when the YWCA attempted a community survey
with the help of Messiah College students, it was conducted by a majority White group of
students who dressed and spoke differently than the community residents, who many
residents considered an “other.” Victor reflects: “[I]t failed miserably, they hardly got any
surveys. People wouldn’t open their doors for those folks because those folks didn’t look
like people in the community. They looked like they were outside the community and acted
that way. You can’t do that. We went in with people from the community [and] we had a
phenomenal outcome!” Residents didn’t trust the Messiah students because of the obvious
“markers” that insinuated their wealth, education, privilege, and lack of understanding of
residents—their “outsiderness” from the community. Residents recognize their position in
the inequality scale: “People who live here believe that if [a health facility] is located here it
can’t be good because they have a negative view of their own neighborhood […] people
know that all the good stuff is where the money is,” reflects Carl.
Much of this distrust stems from an understanding that many of the advantages of
those Whites have historically been, and continue to come from, the disadvantages of people
of color. Rawiyah, an African American woman who was born and raised in Harrisburg,
confesses her distrust of those not “from the community” concerning the food sovereignty
issue:
[O]wners of the corner stores aren’t even people from the community. They
live outside of the community. So they come to this poor Latino, Black
community and set up these little corner stores, sell us basically junk. And
put high prices on it and that’s how they make their money […] They just
come and open their stores and they go back to THEIR communities and the
money they make from everybody else and support their communities.
By emphasizing her community as “poor Latino, Black,” she highlights what that owners of
these corner store owners are not, attributing the current poor condition of health and food in
the community to the capitalist activities of these outsiders who have little concern for the
47
residents who actually live there. She also recognizes race-class spatial inequalities that
exist. When I asked her to clarify what she considered the boundaries of her community, she
replied:
My community is only 8.8 miles long, so Harrisburg is very small.
Boundaries would definitely be the river, which is where a lot of these corner
store business people live, which is across the river. So it’s a severe racial
issue, because we call that the White shore and they call this the Black shore
[…]
Her perception resonates with other interviewees and reveals residents’ frustration to the
spatial dichotomy that those “outsiders” from the West Shore are White, affluent, educated,
while the East Shore is Black or Latino, poor, and underserved. She continues: “All my life,
there’s always been severe racial issues […] Racism ain’t no rocket science.” The spatial
inequality and segregation is attributed to the experience of racism, and its perpetuation.
Rawaiyah reveals her negative encounters with Whiteness: the lack of recognition of neither
White privilege nor the realities of people of color.
Looking at the demographics, however, Whites comprise about 30% or more of the
population within the city lines of Harrisburg. When I asked Rawiyah if the fact that they
were White still separated them from this “community,” she responded, “Mmm... I don’t
know what you mean by that question because Harrisburg is mostly Black […] like I said,
this is my home, I’ve know that there’s always severe racial issues and we [apparently]
don’t want to have that conversation. So we’re not gonna move forward in a community
until we have those hard hittin’ conversations." This question remains unanswered, flooded
with frustration on the lack of conversation from Whites about the reality of socio-spatial
segregation. Meanwhile, White leaders who grew up or have lived in the community for ten
years or more, even in the least affluent and most ethnically and racially diverse parts, feel
48
excluded by these confusing notions of “community.” Kailyn, a White resident, reflects on
the exclusivities:
[T]he frustration with me […] is who’s an insider and who’s an outsider? So
the perception at least propagated by some is that [Green Urban Initiative] is
a group of people that is outside of Harrisburg… when all the gardeners were
city residents […] It opened my eyes, since Harrisburg is such a small
community I didn’t think that there was such a deep seated understanding of
neighborhood divisions. And there isn’t a map that I’m aware of that
identifies where a neighborhood ends and where another begins.
Green Urban Initiative is the organization, made up of White board members, whose garden
was bulldozed by the city council after residents complained, as mentioned in the
introduction. Kailyn, a resident of the city since 1999 is on the board, still feels labeled as an
outsider. “How many years do I have to live here?” she reflects. Kailyn describes her
understanding of the “divisions” as guarded along geographical and time lines, hesitating to
call it, or perhaps not interpreting it, as existing along racial lines. However, it seems clear
that notions of “insider-outsider” transcend geographical boundaries and years of residency,
and lie more strongly along race and its intersection with class.
ii. Historical Marginalization, Descrimination, and Manipulation
I participated in the Neighborworks workshop to train block captains in the
community, and one of the questions that we discussed was what turns people away in
community outreach work. One of the residents responded hastily and with certainty:
“Lies.” Intensive nodding and hums of affirmation reverberated in the room, illustrating
some of the legacy of corruption and outside manipulation that people in this community
have experienced. From the failed Wild West Museum, to the garbage incinerator bringing
the city to bankruptcy, to the shutting down of schools, leaders acknowledge the
psychological impact on residents of the corruption at the governmental level. Currently, the
Securities Exchange Commission has released an Order against the city for Mayor Reed and
49
Thompson administrations’ failure to provide financial statements and reporting misleading
information about its fiscal condition—news that residents have long waited. The U.S.
Attorney’s Office may look into the SEC report, adding to other lists of investigation on
which Harrisburg sits under, including the Incinerator Forensic Audit Report and the state
Senate Local Government Committee hearing transcripts (Auchey 2013). Reed cannot be
found. Nicholais, a White male who works in the field of ministry services, poverty, and
justice, reflects:
Mayor Reed was in charge of the education system for ten years […] all of a
sudden the money disappears, political favors are passed, and the grunt of the
day goes to common people… Schoolteachers are laid off but the lawyers of
bonds follow the money. In government you see this worship of money,
people with the wrong priorities.
This community feels disillusioned and has suffered much in terms of the inequalities of the
socio-political and economic system. This has caused residents to build distrust against the
government and a sense of separatism from leaders that are supposed to represent them.
Willis reflects:
Most of the people who live in SAH for example at one time used to earn a
living wage… but you see how depressed they have made the wages? And
how they don’t care that the people work two jobs? And how they don’t care
that there’s no parents in the home? These are the same people who say
“family values”? hahahaha don’t make me laugh.
Many of the community leaders expressed this frustration of the constant cut in benefits yet
lack of replacements and real change promised and promoted. The leaders seem to have
already accepted the reality that the poor will always be left behind, leaving many leaders
and residents distrustful of politics and government.
Whiteness, in particular, plays a significant component in many residents’
association of the image of “distrust.” While walking around the city with Carl and
Charlotte, we ran into a few residents sitting on folder chairs on the sidewalk. One of them
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saw that Charlotte was wearing a Habitat for Humanity shirt, and began asking her questions
about current projects and the next meeting. She gave him more information and asked for
his name, which he gladly gave and thanked her. Carl, who is White yet was born, raised,
and now works with community development in the neighborhood in SAH, said in a low
voice when we walked away, “Funny, I met that guy earlier today but he wouldn’t give me
his name.” When I asked him why he only replied, “You wouldn’t believe how many people
here don’t trust White men.” Charlotte applies the idea to the garden incident with GUI:
It was seen as these White West Shore people coming into the neighborhood
and messing with our stuff and not even taking care of the garden. I think
these initiatives need to team up with other community organizations and
make clear their intensions and what they’re doing… because people are
naturally suspicious, and sometimes for a good reason.
Residents in SAH have witnessed hundreds of outside groups and individuals, majority
White-led, coming into the neighborhood to bring a business, an industry, or a service they
perceive or claim is good for the community, yet employment and other community needs
remain unaddressed. Community members feel frustrated that they do not have an outlet
through which to be included, listened to, or understood. Community members often rally
around big issues like crime at community association meetings, but the inaccessibility of
important stakeholders, like the police and council, discourage them from attending or
mobilizing: “The city council members aren’t accessible and they’re really not accountable
for anyone because they’re in charge to these specific issues not to the neighbors so it’s kind
of disempowering to not have anybody really that they can specifically go to […] it’s a very
up down model which is frustrating.” This issue is largely unacknowledged because of the
lack of political and economic power of residents in this community to influence the
political structure. On the other hand, as residents feel disillusioned by city politics and
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abstain their vote, the more representatives and politicians justify their quality of
engagement with residents in the area.
Along with not being heard, many community members are also frustrated as they
perceive “outside” initiatives as once again exclusive, avoiding, and paternalistic. Willis
shared: “[W]hen you start a garden or something in the community, you need to first go
around that community and have people there buy into what you’re doing. And you can’t be
standoffish from the community or look like you’re above the community doing a project.”
Rawiyah shares similar sentiments concerning how White educated outsiders don’t even
realize how they discriminate when they engage poor underserved communities. She shares
that when White figures ask her about her garden and to her projects around the city, they
always look surprised when she answers they were led by her, a Black woman, and were
completed by a group of Black kids. As Willis describes darkly: “You’re a person who is
born Black, poor, southern: you’re the lowest person on the totem pole.” Many of these
efforts consistently resulted in the community feeling like they are not listened to or
understood, are patronized and imposed, or are being excluded or marginalized for White
interests once again. These recurrent figures of patronizing outsiders lead many residents of
color to remember the trauma and frustration of the lack of progress towards equity for
marginalized racial groups in American society.
iii. Sense of loss of control/sovereignty of surroundings
These recurrent scenarios not only resurface tensions of marginalization and
manipulation, and de-agency, but also of a lack of sense of control over surroundings. For
example, the garbage incinerator business pursued by Mayor Reed has caused severe
negative health impacts on residents and resulted in national reports of being the largest
known single source of dioxin air pollution since the 1994 closure of the Columbus, Ohio,
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Incinerator (Lenton 1997). The incinerator finally closed on June 18, 2003 with the
advocacy of many residents, but a new incinerator led by Mayor Reed shortly was put in its
place. City council voted to guarantee a $125 million bond for the Authority to build a new
incinerator (Luciew 2011). Although DEP claims that the toxins are not hazardous, many
residents recognize its negative impact: “When you take a look at what’s in the air and
what’s in our bodies right now, take a blood test. Say how did those things get in my body?”
Willis said, emphasizing the system that has robbed residents of autonomy and control over
their environment. Nicholais illustrates the frustration and angry lash back of residents
against “outside” projects such as the garden in Uptown as a reaction to threat of losing
control of their environment:
It’s a ‘symptom’ of people jerked around, oppressed, with no opportunities.
They felt threatened by the garden and put pressure on the city government to
bulldoze it […] it’s important to recognize the pathos of oppressed people…
it is a spiritual state of being of people. It’s dehumanizing.
Often times, this sense of losing control leads justifies the perception of “insider-outsider” to
transcended both geographical boundaries and race-class relations, and enables it to center
purely around common concerns. For example, a person of the same race, gender, and age
group who is a minister of a church located three blocks away from the community garden
in Uptown, defended Green Urban Initiative as a group who was doing something she
thought was positive for the neighborhood. But the individual who complained about the
garden claimed that the woman and her church were three blocks away and not part of “our
neighborhood.” Carl shares his reflection about this territoriality that he commonly
observes:
[W]hen people are under chronic stress, trying to get food, having crime
outside, feel like they can’t control their social environment, they have to
categorize “them” out there somehow that they can’t control and then they
focus ever so narrowly on what they CAN control, to the point where their
neighborhood is less than 3 blocks away and it ends because they couldn’t
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control that person who was standing up to defend the community garden.
They could only control their half a block and the community around them
where they had very strong social ties among themselves…
Carl attributes the resident’s impulse to call the city borough to demolish the garden as an
act of trying to regain control. Thus, those that she cannot control can be considered not part
of the community as a territorial defense mechanism. The defense in establishment of
“community” lines echoes the ideas of Raymon Williams and Iris Marion Young. He
continues: “Psychologically, people try to create constructs where it’s all them against me
and I can’t do anything positive so I’ll do something negative in order to have some control
over my environment, and I think that’s what happens.” In nature, “territoriality” is a
predator defense mechanism that uses “announcement of ownership and threats of possible
violent defense of an area,” (Ehrlich et al 1988). The more hostile reactions of residents are
instinctual response to defend an area to which a sense of control has been denied.
In summary these issues with cooperation stem directly from community members’
strong sentiment of historically based territorial distrust against “outsiders,” rooted in
frustration of spatial inequalities, disillusionment, and loss of control. It is important to
recognize these historical and structural justifications for why residents defend their
communities in sometimes more hostile ways. Race as a social conflict is an issue that needs
to be discussed, as discomforting as it might be, in order to move forward in a project in
low-income and diverse areas such as SAH. It cannot remain a silent issue between those
who experience it on a daily level who have little political and economic capital. Whites
recognizing and acknowledging the privilege that they hold and being clearer with their
intentions to residents makes a significant difference in breaking down distrust and opening
doors to build cooperation. However, this acknowledgement and clarifying intentions is not
enough; restoring trust and building the agency of residents to regain a sense of control of
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their surroundings are essential for long-term revitalization, resiliency-building, and racial
reconciliation. Thus, it is important for new people working in the community, especially
those who bear physical markers of “outsider,” to seek to understand and listen to residents
before seeking to be understood and accepted.
c. “Ignorant Outsiders Gentrifying”: lack of relationship building and cultural
competency
A third identified roadblock is that outsiders come to do work in the area without really
caring about the community and are pursuing their own interests, gentrifying spaces and
further pushing out residents. Charlotte described an experience where she was working
with Habitat for Humanity constructing a space: “One of the store owners heard about us
and they were afraid we were a realtor trying to gentrify the whole neighborhood, and so he
spray painted on the side of his building something about Habitat pimps.” Instead of getting
really upset about it, the Executive Director and outreach committee talked to him, listened,
explained what Habitat was, that they understood the issues, didn’t have alterior motives,
and that they were working together currently with local organizations. She continues: “And
what happened was we showed that we really wanted to invest in the community that was
there […] and he became a major supporter of us afterwards.” The Habitat group displayed
cultural competence, understood residents’ concern with gentrification, and used
“communicative action” (Habermas 1986), or empathy-based conversation, to better
understand the storeowner’s concerns and share Habitat’s intentions. However, many
outsiders lack cultural competency and communicative action, enabling their actions to be
interpreted as ignorant, intrusive, racist, and distrusted. However, it is necessary to
acknowledge that non-insiders may have poorly engaged the community with gardening
because: (i) they are not familiar with local history/issues nor effective ways to reach out the
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community, (ii) they did not build sufficient relationships with people, and (iii) they have
different understandings of race and expectations of the conversation about race.
i. Lack of familiarity with local history, issues, or diverse realities
Some of the individuals and groups that are perceived as ignorant outsiders have good
intentions, but do not understand the local history, issues, or diverse urban reality, nor the
implications and context that more privileged perspectives carry. This is often how and why
racism occurs. Carl reflects:
[T]hat’s what happens too much with the academy and the communities, the
towns and gowns. They’re really two different kinds of knowledge [...] It’s
really hard to bring those two things together and not alienate people in just
the way we understand the world.
One worldview, privileged over the other, alienates and disenfranchises the other by pushing
out the more marginalized narrative and discrediting the value and decades of work leaders
from the community have been doing.
White affluent values of agriculture for the sake of Green Sustainability and elite
food choices cannot be imposed onto Black low-income communities without the
understanding of the context it carries. Rawiyah emphasizes how when you talk about
farming, it has an entire historical context in the U.S. with the Black community that Whites
are often not conscious about. Rather than about organic, “trendy,” and “hip” gardens that
result in gentrification, which is how she describes her perception of White initiatives, the
values she promotes through farming are those of food sovereignty and justice for people of
color in the community like those promoted by Detroit Black Food Security or Growing
Power—of reclaiming the past, fighting racism, and empowering identity and selfsustenance much like of ideas of Black Nationalist leaders and Afrocentric Black Feminists.
Because of the position of Whiteness and the lack of exposure to and understanding of the
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racialized experience, Whites haven’t needed to put this identity-empowerment perspective
in the forefront of the mainstream Alternative Food movement.
Lack of cultural competency in outside individuals and groups is evident in the
disconnection between their assumption of community needs and local residents’ primary
concerns. A revitalization project through planting trees was initiated by an environmental
group to raise the value of home prices in this neighborhood by 30%. They based this off a
similar project claimed to be successful by Penn State in West Philly, of similar
demographics to SAH. But many of SAH residents did not want the trees as Carl, a White
Caucasian male who was born and raised in SAH recalls:
If trees aren’t handled well, they will destroy a sidewalk. They will drop
garbage on a brand new car: sap, seeds, leaves… a lot of the ones attract bees
and your kid gets stung because of the sap of getting a tree. And that’s the
material life of someone who hasn’t lived with this great idea for a tree that’s
adding 30% of the value of their house […] I was growing up in the
neighborhood when a lot of these trees were planted and a lot of the
neighbors just killed them… You know we were steel workers and miners,
we valued our cars more than we valued the tree, you know, because it’s
something we worked for […] if it’s going to destroy the value of my car,
I’m going to destroy it.
Without early community engagement and validation about an idea, a community project
would not be successful but rather resurface frustrations about the exclusion, avoidance,
paternalism, and authoritarian treatment from White middle class groups. In the case of food
and gardening, residents such as Sylvia were more concerned with how the unmaintained
gardens and unmowed lawns looked sitting outside her window rather than the opportunity
to garden and grow organic food. The explanation that GUI as a group gave to justify the
existence of the garden did not match the direct and most primary concern of residents. A
lack of conversation and engagement along those concerns worsened the conflict.
However, the articulation of “community needs” also becomes layered and complex,
creating an othering in itself based on internal voices of authority. Some of the territorial
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language around “community needs” expressed by some outspoken residents alienates other
residents’ needs and ignores the divergences in community opinions. Some White residents,
living within the boundaries of the community, have interest in gardening for the sake of
gardening and not necessarily that of a food justice perspective:
I think one of the challenges is those of us who are interested in gardening
live in Harrisburg where there’s not a lot of suitable land for gardening, so
where do those people go to garden. If they’re living in midtown where
because of the recent space of development, there aren’t many vacant spots…
where are those people supposed to go to garden?
Kailyn expresses that she wants to garden, but because she may have prioritized her
resources less in the perspective of food justice because of limitations but also her different
interests, she feels a negative pressure that denies her concerns as a resident because of her
pale skin color. How long will she have to live in South Allison Hill to be considered an
“insider”? Whose needs are prioritized? For a large-scale localized food system operation,
will these differing visions of the “community” need to reconcile and unify before more full
collaborations happen? The diversity in residents’ opinions complicates understanding of
community needs, reducing a holistic understanding of “needs” to limited exposure to more
authoritarian voices.
The notion of collective needs is skewed by the lack of familiarity with how to fully
engage a spectrum of different residents on the issue. Those not familiar with the scope of
the community lack the connections, resources, and labor to go out and survey needs. For
example, Joshua Farm is meant to serve the residents of SAH, but draws most of its
customers from people living in midtown or who already have an interest in urban farming
and organic food. Many in the surrounding South Allison Hill area, however, remain unsure
of what the Joshua Farm is or who it is meant to serve. Some leaders are unsure of how to
tap into the isolated world of urban poverty, in which communication largely depends on
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social circles and face-to-face interactions. Kailyn, who has lived in SAH for over 7 years
and in Harrisburg since 1999, reflects on the difficulty of disseminating information on
nutrition, organic, or localized food systems: “[P]eople who have their comforts met and
disposable income may be more likely to sit down and read a magazine or watch a PBS
special, you know… a number of cultures represented in this neighborhood are based on oral
communication, and relationships.” She shares that she not only lacks the time and funding
to do full outreach because of the lack of profit and limited labor power, but also confesses
that she lacks the local knowledge and networks/connections for how to engage residents.
Outreach to of Whites to residents of color is made more complicated by the legacy
of racial distrust and the differences in symbolism and interpretation for various racial and
socioeconomic groups. Carl describes his experience as an environmental justice activist in
the 1990’s fighting against the waste incinerator in Harrisburg as performing the imagined
roles of familiar situations, or “playing into the script”:
Educated White people, environmentally conscious, […] trying to explain
complex environmental phenomenon and health issues to people who 50%
weren’t graduating from high school. There’s a big disconnect and even
though I grew up here, I was White, and I was looked at as the other. And we
tried over and over and over again to try to get people to stand up in the
community and say no let’s not do this incinerator thing […] but because we
maybe played into the script as “other” and we are [perceived as] more
“educated” than who we’re telling how bad things are […] They didn’t need
to hear all that, folks were trying to survive. So we never got a really big
groundswell of people rising against the incinerator. So what it was instead of
trying to explain things to people trying to reach out to, we played into the
script of White environmentalists.
This White interviewee learned from this experience of failure that outreach language needs
to focus on the everyday experience or be made comprehensible and relatable to the
immediate struggles of local residents and people of color. Secondly, he learned that the
Whiteness of majority of activists during the time, including his own, failed to build trust
amongst the majority community of color as they replayed into the familiar colonialist
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scenario of the White man, the “outsider,” coming to “save” the Black community, excusing
the manipulation that transcends generations of outsiders coming to do “development work”
in the community. Carl continues:
I think that’s what happened to the garden in uptown… a bunch of White
people go, ‘We know all this stuff, a garden increases the value of your
home, does this and that.’ But yeah, a garden is also a place for skunks and
possums and stuff like that hang out, and they scare people who don’t
normally do gardening, you know. Think about it from their perspective. So
we played our educated White environmentalist script and the folks in the
neighborhood played their script of poor Black, Latino or whatever of
uneducated and we never really got it together enough to stop that thing.
The community often does not participate because they already feel exclusion—community
development and revitalization is an education and trust process. Acknowledging first that
people with or without degrees have different types of knowledge that are worthy and
valuable. What is most important is cultivating the local knowledge and building the
capacity of residents.
ii. Lack of relationships and trust-building
A lack of early involvement of residents and clarification of intentions through
relationship building early during project planning, results in more distrust and more
difficult conflict resolution. When I asked Willis, a successful Black community leader in
gardening, why he thought his gardens have not faced the backlash that recent gardens have
had, he emphasized the importance of a more grass-roots approach: “[…] I’m fortunate that
I live in the community, and we garden with the community people. So people have
obviously bought into it and they protect our garden.” When I asked Rawiyah another
successful Black community leader what she thought of outside groups about having
difficulty engaging residents, she focused the issue on White privilege and Whites’ excuses
about “not enough time” for insufficiently engaging the Black and Latino residents. She
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shares that in putting together a permaculture class, she was able to get eleven people from
various backgrounds to become trained permaculture practitioners by prioritizing
engagement:
I beg to differ to what these other people tell you. I’m up all in their
neighborhoods, talkin' the way that I’m talking, but I’m getting support. So I
beg to differ, some people just fear, which they need to get over, and they just
feel like they don’t need to go in those directions for those things to happen
[…] I talk to people just like how you and I talk […] I ain’t scared to talk to
people […] I ain’t stupid I ain’t just gonna knock on anybody’s doors but I do
put out there about meetings, community forums […]
Referring to her successful outreach of both Black and White residents through talking and
building relationships, she implies that it is as simple as ridding fears and preconceived
notions and talking to people from the beginning. The fears are perceived as unwillingness
to fully engage the community and racism towards people of color.
Rawiyah identified the significance of building relationships with established
leaders, recognizing their work, and committing to those collaborations before pursuing
projects. She shares her negative experience of trying to invite outside White groups who
were interested in working with the Black community to join her current community
initiatives:
When I was starting my little program I reached out to [those] groups, which
I knew they were mostly White, to find out how to help me get things started
to focus on our community, but [they] were not interested. So it just amazes
me how everybody is interested in working in the Black community when
some of the people I was reachin’ out to weren’t interested […] they go back
and do their own little thing, ‘We’re gonna go establish and do stuff’ […] No
you can’t come back to me and say ‘Oh here now I get it, I wanna help,’
because now I really don’t trust you, you should have believed me from the
beginning.
Many of the outsiders that came into the community to do gardening work imagined
community outreach as connecting with few community leaders and talking to some
residents, but a concern that Rawiyah raises is the recognition of already existing work by
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community agents and follow up of groups to really build and maintain those relationships.
Victor explains: “We don’t get it right because we want to tell people what to do. If you
don’t have a good relationship first, no one’s gonna know that you care.” When relationship
building is not prioritized before agendas, it breaks down trust and builds mistrust in defense
of the community from potential manipulative plans—turning into another situation to be
perceived as Whites once again pursuing their own interests, exerting authoritarianism, and
excluding people of color. Victor elaborates on how trust and partnerships are built as
involving communicative action and building relationship:
The Social Development strategy [recommends] first identifying the individual
characteristics of the person […] What other risk factors that are impeding in
their lives […] Are they an introvert, extravert, is the person shy [?…] Then you
provide opportunities, build skills, and you give recognition […] That endears
the person to you and you to the person. Now relationship is built. Now trust is
form. Now you can share healthy beliefs and clear understandings. Now they will
be received! And change will occur. Lives will change. Behaviors will be
modified. You get the results you wanted after all.
Victor shares the meaning of relationships as empathetic conversations to understand what
people in the neighborhood are concerned about and what they really need, putting away
agendas, assumptions or value measuring of a degree versus the qualitative knowledge of
residents. It is about clarifying intentions, being genuine, and expressing humility.
Furthermore, there needs to be a willingness from both sides to develop a relationship.
Negatively stereotyping against all Whites is also counter productive and only further
discourages Whites from engaging. Concerning gentrification, Patrick Crouch, a White
urban farmer in Detroit working with interracial collaborations and gardening, writes an
important point in that White residents moving in the community aren’t the causers nor
necessarily beneficiaries of gentrification: “Hipsters and artists have often been implicated
in gentrification, and while both groups are often diverse in race and class, they are not the
beneficiaries of the economic changes of gentrification. The land developers, landlords, and
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banks are the ones who really benefit,” (Crouch 2012). Although land developers and
bankers are predominantly White, frustration towards new and old White residents has little
power in preventing gentrification, as its displacement process is primarily controlled by
land values.
iii. Lack of language on both sides to talk about race-class experiences
With the lack of familiarity with local history, culture, the racial experience, and how
to engage and build relationships, a key to conflict resolution seems to be greater cultural
competency to enable more open empathetic conversation about race and its politics in
revitalization. Rawiyah explains its urgency:
[I]f we don’t have a hard conversation about race none of this is going to
happen because these agencies are working in a community that’s almost
60% African American. I don’t see a lot of these agencies doing a lot directly
to help this community deal with this food desert. A lot of them have their
own agenda. A lot of them are focused on their own membership and that
type of thing […] I’m only gonna work with people who are there to help get
our community up and going, and what the needs of our children are. We’ve
got babies that are starving, I’m not here to build a community garden, take
pictures, and look cute. That has never been my goal.
Rawiyah has dedicated her gardening goals to strengthening and empowering youth of color
and feeding residents in this food desert. In contrast, she finds it appalling that gardening
may be reduced as an aesthetic, a trend, or for personal gain. She claims that without this
conversation about race and dedication to local needs, the intentions of White groups are
presumed as only personally beneficial and exclusive.
The lack of proper engagement of communities of color by Whites largely stems
from the lack of cultural competency to deal in direct ways with race and class privilege and
not knowing where to start conversations in fear of saying “the wrong thing” or be deemed a
“Racist.” In interviews with White leaders, they were more cautious in talking about race,
insecurely referring to tensions as “racial baggage” to which to be “sensitive,” or redirecting
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the conversation to class. These are similar patterns to what Julie Guthman (2011) observed
in CSA managers, where most Whites used color-blind language, avoiding race and
focusing on “ethnic” terms. On the other hand, many Black residents and leaders have
grown impatient and deeply resentful of the recurrent scenes of ignorance, reductionism, and
blatant racism:
Until we have that serious heart to heart talk about race […] we ain’t getting
nowhere. Until we do it, It’s not gonna happen, I don’t see no future […]
Whites still solely dominate and are ruling things, you know the one
percent—they’re White folk. They’re not Black folk, Chinese folk, Latino
folk, they’re White males that has put this country together. And these are the
children of those people—they’re not ready to give up anything. I’m sitting
there standing watching these republican debates and seeing what these
candidates are saying out of their mouth—these White men. When they get
into office, they’re gonna put Black people back on the plantations—
something’s wrong with that. So we got a long ways to go.
Although this frustration is sociohistorically justified, the fact that her frustration permeates
into her tone and language used to address White groups in a way justifies Whites’ fear to
have any conversation involving race. The tensions and collisions in these projects to
“better” SAH are not purely a result of poor engagement by outsiders, but also the hostility
with which some residents respond. Thus, cultural competency is not only about White
outsiders reflecting on their privilege, better understanding the realities of the community,
especially of residents of color, but also it is about Blacks and Latinos understanding how
privilege and historical segregation has limited many Whites from understanding and
building empathy to the plight and suffering of people of color. Although that ignorance is
not necessarily justified, it seems important for conflict resolution to understand the
structural reasons for why many Whites are ignorant of these issues, separate the notion that
all Whites have manipulative intentions, and give Whites a chance to better understand by
rearticulating more calmly these community race-class histories and needs.
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Julie Guthman’s two complications in talking about race (different understandings of
race and fears of where the conversation will lead to) mentioned in “If Only They Knew,”
can be seen in the tension and absence of follow-up conversations after meetings. For
example, while many Whites who are not familiar with race-class critical discourse
understand “Race” as biological and cultural differences with a historical taboo, many
Blacks understand it as a social conflict and everyday reality that Whites avoid talking about
because of their privilege and power they derive from it. Many Whites fear that the
conversation about race will result in White guilt or being called racist, while many Blacks
expect ignorance, racism, and lack of acknowledgement of Black struggle and Black agency.
These differing understandings and fears, and notion of such a sharp dichotomy of the
“other,” already set up cross-cultural interactions to go in a negative direction of avoidance
and hostility, only perpetuating fears and frustration. “So from both sides things need to be
looked at more discretely,” affirms Carl.
Residents and community leaders, both Black and White, are at roadblock in being
able to communicate and collaborate, but Carl reflects that not all is hopeless and that there
are spaces that are working towards integration. One obstacle, he identifies, is the
motivation to bring people together who don’t have “enough things in common to begin
discussing these things”:
The church that I go to has a big emphasis on racial reconciliation... and so I
know how hard its been at our church, and you know it’s certainly a more
integrated church than a lot of churches would be…but we’re not there yet.
[Although w]e claim a common vision as Christians [… for] people who
don’t have as much in common to try to engage in difficult conversations and
invest that much in relationships, it’s just not worth it to a lot of people. I
understand it. Especially if they can do things with members of their own
cultural group or ethnic community… you know? Why try to cross those
boundaries?
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The lack of incentives to build relationships, combined with few opportunities, safe spaces,
and necessities for cross-cultural interaction and community building, hinders people from
coming together and engaging in exhausting and vulnerable conversations. The worldviews
of people of color and Whites, “outsiders” and “insiders” are so segregated that conflict
resolution conversations necessary to reach empathy, understanding, agreement, and
collaboration on each side are still at the emotional stages of anger, fear, and insecurities—
only perpetuating triggers that polarize the “sides” and deepen these sentiments. The
segregation has created an inability for people to sit down and deal in direct ways with raceclass struggles. A cultural competency and communicative action is necessary from both
sides to break down negative expectations, clarify good intentions, understand the sociohistorical factors that have made race-class conversations difficult, and empathize to build
relationships and work together. No conversation about race and class will be clean, quick,
and easy. These “heart to heart discussions” require individuals to challenge themselves to
be honest, vulnerable, patient, calm, and willing to experience discomfort and shift their
worldviews. A transition into more proactive rather than reactive measures to engage each
other will only benefit and strengthen the potential success and collaboration to address
issues of poverty plaguing the community such as food insecurity.
VI. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Many of the identified shortcomings to collaboratively address food insecurity in
South Allison Hill and its surrounding Harrisburg region are social conflicts rooted in raceclass inequality and socio-spatial segregation. These are exacerbated by the groups’ lack of
cultural competency and conflict resolution language that would enable them to engage in
racial reconciliation. The social issues stem largely from historically situated race-class
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projects that have contributed to the vast economic inequality between Whites and people of
color. Access, sovereignty, and resources to consume healthy and fresh foods have been a
privilege denied to residents of SAH. As in many other inner city neighborhoods of color,
this has been a product of historical discrimination, urbanism, and the concentration of
poverty. The extreme spatial segregation of Whites and people of color have created very
different and limited intersectional understandings of each other’s realities. Most of the
predominately White outside groups coming into the city want to promote purely local food
and the opportunity to garden, while most grass-roots community-based groups, led mostly
but not unanimously by people of color, seek to empower residents, feed the community,
and build resiliency amidst blight and poverty. The insufficiency in direct engagement by
outside groups has sparked tensions that reveal race-class conflicts, prevailing in the form of
notions of “outsider” and “insider.” The territorial reactions exhibited by some residents,
especially some residents of color, are natural responses to a sense of loss of control over
their surroundings. They are attempts to defend their communities who have been
historically manipulated, discriminated against, marginalized, excluded, paternalistically
treated, and disillusioned by white groups. Distrust and fear have dominated initial
interactions between Whites and minority groups, setting up barriers to successful
interactions. Lack of cultural competency, relationship building from the start, and conflict
resolution conversations around issues of race, class, and privilege, hinder the potential for
integrated collaboration to solve the food insecurity issue. The paralyzing effects of these
unaddressed race-class tensions permeate beyond the hindrance of a collaborative food
project in South Allison Hill and can be found in most other community revitalization
projects for inner city communities of color across the nation.
67
However, not all hope is lost for collaborative and integrated revitalization projects
in low-income communities of color and the struggle for economic, social, and
environmental justice. This study seeks to expose the backgrounds and experiences that have
motivated or justified people to act in a certain way, to bring individuals and groups to
understand race differently, and to open doors to reveal the gaps and opportunities to
educate, communicate effectively, and work towards conflict resolution and better
collaboration. One need is for White groups, no matter “outside” or “inside,” to reflect on
their own Whiteness, privilege, and power and engaging with racialized experiences.
Furthermore, it is necessary for Whites to prioritize relationship building and community
participatory engagement before starting projects, as well as uphold anti-racism, antigentrification, and other locally identified needs as a part of their project mission. It is very
easy for White voices to drown out voices of people of color because of the power they hold
in a racially structured society; thus Whites must take responsibility to ensure marginalized
voices are heard, supported, upheld, and prioritized as a movement in solidarity. Another
necessary avenue for conflict resolution is for residents of color to understand the many of
the Whites that come to do gardening work are well intentioned, but the socio-structural
dimensions that have limited whites’ understanding of the racialized experience. Thus, it is
necessary to more patiently help to educate them on local experiences and needs, as well as
to communicate the local historical concerns to bridge empathy and build relationships. All
sides need to communicate honestly, share objectives, explicitly agree and express concerns,
effectively communicate, ensure equity in power, and garner the support and backing of
diverse constituents. I argue that these tensions will necessarily surface if these race-class
inequalities are not addressed at the national level in attempts to achieve revitalized and
sustainable communities. On the local level, the a strategy for building cultural competency
68
could be to have more racial integration-focused programs, opportunities to develop crossintersectional relationships, safe spaces to begin dialogue, and conflict mediation through
communicative action. Gardening can provide a space to facilitate this relationship building.
On a national and global level, it calls for fundamental social changes to address poverty in
order to strengthen local economies, improve educational opportunities, improve livable
wages, and enable asset accumulation for marginalized communities. It also calls for the
need for mainstream movements such as that of Alternative Food to better understand,
engage, and centralize the struggle for civil rights and equity.
Nevertheless, there are still many questions to consider in moving forward to
cultivate equitable community revitalization through gardening and racial reconciliation.
The debate of whether separatism or assimilation of movements of people of color with
regard to those of White-dominated movements as the most effective route towards racial
equity and justice remain insufficiently explored. Would a localized food system and
movement for Food Justice run solely by residents of color to empower youth of color better
meet the needs of the community than one that attempts to pursue cross-cultural
collaboration and integrate the differing goals that some of the White gardeners prioritize? It
seems that regardless, the debate should push for the Alternative Food movement to
assimilate to Food Justice rather than the other way around to truly diversify and sustain
efforts for an overall healthier public. Furthermore, questions about how the community is to
define and reconcile diverging residents’ interests in defining collective community identity
and needs require further community-based exploration and discussion. For a large-scale
localized food system operation, will these differing visions of the “community” need to
unify before more full collaborations happen? Can those with resources but are outsiders,
White or of color, still work in the community? Although this paper mostly discusses
69
tensions as a simplified dichotomy of realities between White-Black, middle-lower class,
there are many layers, cross-cuttings, and complexities to the identities and experiences that
have shaped the perception of race, class, and food for each individual which could be
explored. Particularly gender would be interesting to analyze, as there is a vulnerability of
Black male youth in the community to mass incarceration, and leadership in Environmental
Justice for communities has been mostly women. Greater literature on multi-, inter-, and
intra-culturalism would enrich the discourse and contribute to the gaps in knowledge that are
present today as revitalization practitioners, community-based organizations, and non-profits
engage with culturally diversifying cities.
VII. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve truly learned a lot from this process, and I’d like to take this opportunity to
thank those who have been essential in making this study posible. Primarily, the residents
and community leaders who were so willing to participate in interviews, welcoming me as
an outsider, showing me around the neighborhood, sharing intimately about things going on
in the neighborhood, and allowing me to listen and learn. For the purposes of maintaining
confidentality, I cannot place your names in this section but you know who you are, and this
work is dedicated to you and your inspirational strength and determination to serve this
neighborhood and this city. Secondly, I’d like to thank my advisors at Dickinson College for
this Project, primarily Professors Susan Rose and Professors Helene Lee of the Sociology
Department for helping me learn the process of organizing an independent study and of
writing, reorganizing, and doing multiple revisions. Special thanks to Professor Michael
Beevers of the Environmental Studies Department who was also part of my thesis committee
and helped me make connections, to provide moral and emotional support, and much
feedback in the revising process. A special thank you to the Dickinson Community Studies
Center for supporting me with resources to travel back and forth to SAH, to the Catholic
Worker’s House for providing me with a place to stay and nourishment during my research,
and for friends for lending me their vehicles and morally supporting me in the journey of
processing, organizing, and writing. Thank you as well to Professor Bellinger of the
Economics Department and Michael Heiman of the Environmental Studies Department for
providing me with initial contacts. A thank you to Professor Erick Love, of the Sociology
Department, who helped me engage with race, power, and privilege, as well as supported me
emotionally during times when I struggled with how to process certain information. Finally,
I’d like to extend a thank you to Professor Simona Perry, who introduced me to community70
based research and qualitative research two years ago and taught me the significance of
reflecting on my position as an outsider, prioritizing serving the community, and planted my
interest in place, space, identity, and community resiliency.
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R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 1
Maps 1 and 2. Eastern U.S., State of Pennsylvania, Dauphin County, City of Harrisburg
Source: American Fact Finder, 2012
Maps 3 and 4. City of Harrisburg borders and South Allison Hill (Census Tract 213),
Dauphin County, showing the Susquehanna River, and intersection of major highways I-83, I-81,
I-78, I-76, PA-22, PA-322, PA-422, PA-209 Source: American Fact Finder, 2012
Maps 5 & 6. Borders of Census Tract 213, South Allison Hill Source: American Fact Finder, 2012
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 2
Table 1. Race composition by Census Tracts in Harrisburg, PA (ACS 2006-2010)
Census Tracts, City of Harrisburg
Dauphin County, Pennsylvania
Total
White
alone
Census Tract 201
Census Tract 203
Census Tract 204
Census Tract 205
Census Tract 206
Census Tract 207
Census Tract 208
Census Tract 209,
Census Tract 211 (part),
Census Tract 212
Census Tract 213
Census Tract 214
Census Tract 215
Census Tract 216 (part),
Census Tract 217 (part),
2,593
1,727
1,634
3,226
1,340
2,637
2,697
3,815
3,380
2,190
5,699
5,436
3,354
3,096
6,508
1,775
705
1,346
1,941
376
392
992
1,499
117
215
1,680
1,027
1,029
666
2,787
Black
or
AfA
671
929
183
1,103
903
2,215
1,364
2,022
2,677
1,803
3,189
2,743
1,919
2,165
2,906
Total:
Asian
alone
116
9
30
8
0
0
66
157
7
0
151
238
0
0
432
Other race
alone
Two+
races
31
56
10
101
6
8
135
66
253
142
428
687
155
127
202
0
28
65
73
55
22
140
71
326
30
251
741
251
138
181
Table 2. Mean Income in the past twelve months by Census Tract in City of Harrisburg
(ACS 2006-2010)
Census Tract, Dauphin
County PA
Census Tract 201
Census Tract 203
Census Tract 204
Census Tract 205
Census Tract 206
Census Tract 207
Census Tract 208
Census Tract 209
Census Tract 211
Census Tract 212
Census Tract 213
Census Tract 214
Census Tract 215
Census Tract 216
Census Tract 217
All households
Mean Income Estimate (dollar
adjusted inflation)
35,852
35,450
50,078
47,009
38,409
32,853
46,050
60,136
41,339
36,697
28,677
26,985
35,973
34,771
55,476
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 3
Table 3. Place of Birth of Residents in Pennsylvania and Census 213 (ACS 2006-2010)
PLACE OF BIRTH
Total population
Native
Born in United States
State of residence
Different state
Born in Puerto Rico, U.S. Island areas, or born
abroad to American parent(s)
Foreign born
PA
12,612,705
11,908,373
11,723,524
9,397,884
2,325,640
184,849
PA %
12,612,705
94.4%
93.0%
74.5%
18.4%
1.5%
C213
5,699
5,035
4,790
3,481
1,309
245
C213 %
5,699
88.3%
84.0%
61.1%
23.0%
4.3%
704,332
5.6%
664
11.7%
Table 4. Percentage of Families and People with income below the Poverty Level
PERCENTAGE OF FAMILIES AND PEOPLE WHOSE
INCOME IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS IS BELOW THE
POVERTY LEVEL
All families
With related children under 18 years
With related children under 5 years only
Married couple families
With related children under 18 years
With related children under 5 years only
Families with female householder, no husband present
With related children under 18 years
With related children under 5 years only
All people
PA
Percentage
8.5%
14.2%
16.0%
3.6%
4.9%
4.0%
27.7%
37.8%
46.6%
12.4%
Census
Tract 213
Percentage
46.1%
62.2%
75.8%
12.6%
5.9%
0.0%
70.9%
86.2%
100.0%
45.5%
Table 5. Household Income and Benefits. Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
INCOME AND BENEFITS (IN 2010 INFLATIONADJUSTED DOLLARS)
Total households
Less than $10,000
$10,000 to $14,999
$15,000 to $24,999
$25,000 to $34,999
$35,000 to $49,999
$50,000 to $74,999
$75,000 to $99,999
$100,000 to $149,999
$150,000 to $199,999
$200,000 or more
Median household income (dollars)
Mean household income (dollars)
With Supplemental Security Income
Mean Supplemental Security Income (dollars)
With cash public assistance income
Mean cash public assistance income (dollars)
With Food Stamp/SNAP benefits past 12 months
PA
estimates
4,940,581
358,330
289,547
559,425
539,934
705,090
938,866
610,403
577,062
188,172
173,752
50,398
67,282
219,808
8,484
158,481
2,847
445,506
PA
percentage
7.3%
5.9%
11.3%
10.9%
14.3%
19.0%
12.4%
11.7%
3.8%
3.5%
4.4%
3.2%
9.0%
Census
Tract 213
2,208
592
334
297
406
270
141
71
75
22
0
20,625
28,677
381
8,623
131
3,402
857
Census
Tract 213
26.8%
15.1%
13.5%
18.4%
12.2%
6.4%
3.2%
3.4%
1.0%
0.0%
17.3%
5.9%
38.8%
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 4
Figure 1. Percentage of Households and Income of Census Tract 213 and Pennsylvania
Percentage Households and Income
(2010 inflation adjusted dollars)
30
25
20
15
10
Census Tract 213
5
Pennylvania
0
Median income in SAH (Census 213): $29,625
Median Income in PA: $50,398
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
Table 6. Households living below poverty levels & receiving Food Stamps in PA and C213
FOOD STAMPS
Subject
Pennsylvania
Estimate
4,940,581
35.9%
30.4%
Receiving
food stamps
Estimate
445,506
25.0%
52.1%
Census Tract 213, Dauphin
County, Pennsylvania
Total
Receiving
food stamps
Estimate
Estimate
2,208
857
16.4%
7.2%
38.6%
49.0%
12.1%
57.1%
45.4%
75.0%
=
50,398
15,031
20,625
12,067
Total
Households
With one or more people 60 years and over
With children under 18 years
POVERTY STATUS IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS
Below poverty level
HOUSEHOLD INCOME IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS
(IN 2010 INFLATION-ADJUSTED DOLLARS)
Median income (dollars)
Figure 2. Percentage of Households and Types of Benefits
Percentage of Households receiving Benefits
60
40
Census Tract 213
20
Pennsylvania
0
With supplemental
security income
With public assistance With Food Stamp/SNAP
income
benefits
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 5
Table 7. Household Types in Pennsylvania and Census 213 (ACS 2006-2010)
HOUSEHOLDS BY TYPE
Total households
Family households (families)
With own children under 18 years
Married-couple family
With own children under 18 years
Male householder, no wife present, family
With own children under 18 years
Female householder, no husband present, family
With own children under 18 years
Nonfamily households
Householder living alone
65 years and over
PA
4,940,581
3,231,021
1,374,406
2,445,083
951,277
206,716
99,124
579,222
324,005
1,709,560
1,437,503
566,744
PA %
4,940,581
65.4%
27.8%
49.5%
19.3%
4.2%
2.0%
11.7%
6.6%
34.6%
29.1%
11.5%
C213
2,208
1,281
729
445
158
160
101
676
470
927
788
173
C213 %
2,208
58.0%
33.0%
20.2%
7.2%
7.2%
4.6%
30.6%
21.3%
42.0%
35.7%
7.8%
Table 8. Age Groups and Sex of Total population in Census 213
(U.S. Census Bureau 2010)
Age
Under 18 years
18 to 24 years
25 to 44 years
45 to 64 years
65 years and over
% total
22.0
9.9
24.6
28.0
15.4
% Male
23.1
10.3
25.2
28.2
13.3
% Female
20.9
9.6
24.1
27.9
17.5
Table 9. Occupancy Status of Housing Units by Census Tract in City of Harrisburg
(ACS 2006-2010)
Census Tracts in the City of
Harrisburg, Dauphin County
Census Tract 201
Census Tract 203
Census Tract 204
Census Tract 205
Census Tract 206
Census Tract 207
Census Tract 208
Census Tract 209
Census Tract 211
Census Tract 212
Census Tract 213
Census Tract 214
2,455
1,457
1,208
1,919
610
1,263
1,482
1,770
1,621
1,170
2,966
2,076
Total:
Occupied
2,001
951
1,033
1,551
409
893
1,180
1,402
1,276
797
2,208
1,972
Census Tract 215
Census Tract 216
Census Tract 217
1,565
1,365
2,746
1,321
1,107
2,653
Vacant
454
506
175
368
201
370
302
368
345
373
758
104
244
258
93
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 6
Table 10. Race in Population in SAH and City of Harrisburg by Number and Percent
White
Black or African American
American Indian and Alaska Native
Asian
Census 213
6,612
6,195
1,506
3,152
49
203
%
100.0
93.7
22.8
47.7
0.7
3.1
Harrisburg
49,528
46,974
15,181
25,957
251
1,709
%
100.0
94.8
30.7
52.4
0.5
3.5
Hispanic or Latino (of any race)
2380
36
8939
18
RACE
Total population
One Race
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
Figures 3-5. Population by Race Division in SAH, Harrisburg, and Pennsylvania
Population by Race Divisions in South Allison
Total Population:
12,702,379
Hill, Census 213 Dauphin
County,
PA
White alone
Black or African American
36%
Other
Asian
Hispanic or Latino
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
22.8%
47.7%
3%
1%
Population by Race Division in Harrisburg
White alone
Black or African American
3%
Other
Asian
Hispanic or Latino
18%
0%
30.7%
52.4%
Population by Race Division in Pennsylvania
White alone
Black or African American
0% 3% 5%
11%
81%
Other
Asian
Hispanic or Latino
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 7
Figure 6. People Living Below the Poverty Line in SAH and Racial Division
PA levels below poverty: 12.4%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2010
Table 11. Households receiving food stamps by race (U.S. Census Bureau 2010)
WHITE
Total:
Household received Food Stamps/SNAP
in the past 12 months
Household did not receive Food
Stamps/SNAP in the past 12 months
BLACK/AFRICAN AMERICAN
Total:
Household received Food Stamps/SNAP
in the past 12 months
Household did not receive Food
Stamps/SNAP in the past 12 months
HISPANIC/LATINO
Total:
Household received Food Stamps/SNAP
in the past 12 months
Household did not receive Food
Stamps/SNAP in the past 12 months
Pennsylvania
Estimate
4,233,215
286,383
Census Tract 213, Dauphin County,
Pennsylvania
Estimate
721
299
3,946,832
422
479,922
115,584
1,179
490
364,338
689
184,517
55,522
468
174
128,995
294
Table 12. Civilian Labor force and Occupation, PA compared to Census 213 SAH
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
OCCUPATION
Civilian Labor Force Percent Unemployed
Management, business, science, and arts occupations
Service occupations
Sales and office occupations
Natural resources, construction, and maintenance
occupations
Production, transportation, and material moving occupations
INDUSTRY
Civilian employed population 16 years and over
Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining
Construction
Manufacturing
Wholesale trade
Retail trade
Transportation and warehousing, and utilities
Information
Finance and insurance, and real estate and rental and leasing
Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative
and waste management services
Educational services, and health care and social assistance
Arts, entertainment, and recreation, and accommodation
and food services
Other services, except public administration
Public administration
PA
Estimate
PA %
Tiarachristie A 8
213 SAH
Estimate
2,092,428
985,928
1,507,431
528,285
7.3%
35.2%
16.6%
25.4%
8.9%
263
595
366
102
213 SAH
%
13.6%
13.6%
30.8%
19.0%
5.3%
826,900
13.9%
604
31.3%
5,940,972
74,319
368,430
771,180
184,408
693,991
315,085
121,488
391,578
565,753
5,940,972
1.3%
6.2%
13.0%
3.1%
11.7%
5.3%
2.0%
6.6%
9.5%
1,930
0
72
224
107
94
222
0
180
289
1,930
0.0%
3.7%
11.6%
5.5%
4.9%
11.5%
0.0%
9.3%
15.0%
1,470,918
461,454
24.8%
7.8%
343
197
17.8%
10.2%
277,856
244,512
4.7%
4.1%
148
54
7.7%
2.8%
Table 13. Median Age of Males and Females by Census Tract in the City of Harrisburg
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix A: Maps, Tables, and Figures Index
Tiarachristie A 9
Table 14. Educational Attainment in PA and Census 213 by age and sex
Subject
Total
Estimate
1,232,370
13.7%
32.2%
Male
Estimate
623,783
15.9%
35.1%
Female
Estimate
608,587
11.4%
29.3%
Census Tract 213, Dauphin County,
Pennsylvania
Total
Male
Female
Estimate
Estimate
Estimate
588
251
337
45.7%
68.5%
28.8%
45.6%
31.5%
56.1%
43.0%
40.0%
46.0%
8.7%
0.0%
15.1%
11.1%
9.0%
13.3%
0.0%
0.0%
0.0%
Population 25 years and over
Less than 9th grade
9th to 12th grade, no diploma
High school graduate (includes
equivalency)
Some college, no degree
Associate's degree
Bachelor's degree
Graduate or professional
degree
8,558,693
4.0%
8.6%
37.8%
4,070,150
3.9%
8.8%
37.3%
4,488,543
4.0%
8.5%
38.2%
3,038
14.2%
21.5%
37.0%
1,177
18.6%
15.2%
37.2%
1,861
11.3%
25.5%
36.9%
15.9%
7.3%
16.3%
10.1%
15.9%
6.6%
16.8%
10.6%
15.9%
8.0%
15.8%
9.6%
12.0%
7.6%
6.1%
1.6%
14.6%
7.2%
4.8%
2.4%
10.4%
7.8%
6.9%
1.2%
Percent high school graduate
or higher
Percent bachelor's degree or
higher
87.4%
87.3%
87.5%
64.4%
66.2%
63.2%
26.4%
27.4%
25.4%
7.7%
7.1%
8.1%
Population 25 to 34 years
High school graduate or higher
Bachelor's degree or higher
1,483,471
91.2%
34.6%
742,283
89.9%
30.6%
741,188
92.4%
38.5%
817
67.1%
8.9%
332
56.3%
0.0%
485
74.4%
15.1%
Population 35 to 44 years
High school graduate or higher
Bachelor's degree or higher
1,690,147
91.6%
30.5%
837,830
90.3%
29.1%
852,317
92.9%
31.9%
751
66.7%
13.6%
318
64.8%
14.5%
433
68.1%
12.9%
Population 45 to 64 years
High school graduate or higher
Bachelor's degree or higher
3,458,218
90.5%
26.7%
1,689,525
89.9%
28.1%
1,768,693
91.1%
25.4%
1,133
59.8%
2.2%
437
71.4%
5.7%
696
52.4%
0.0%
Population 65 years and over
High school graduate or higher
Bachelor's degree or higher
1,926,857
75.3%
15.8%
800,512
75.9%
21.3%
1,126,345
74.8%
11.9%
337
68.0%
10.4%
90
82.2%
14.4%
247
62.8%
8.9%
Population 18 to 24 years
Less than high school graduate
High school graduate (includes
equivalency)
Some college or associate's
degree
Bachelor's degree or higher
Pennsylvania
R,C,FJ in SAH
Appendix
B: Chart
of Main
Findings
Appendix
A: Maps,
Tables,
and Figures
Index
Tiarachristie A 10
Q: What are some of the social issues preventing the collaborative implementation
of a localized food system and better access to healthy and fresh foods?
Predominant claims on social
roadblocks to efforts for a
food-secure community
Explanation of situation/
1. “Inner city residents have
different values and
preferences for food…”
Less about preference and more
about urbanism and poverty’s
historical impact + structural
limitations on people of colors’:
justification for behavior
•
•
•
access
sovereignty, knowledge
leaders’ resources
Recommendations for
Conflict Resolution
Analysis of Whiteness + Alt.
Food Movement; better
understanding of
marginalized groups’ histories
and experiences
Economic Justice + Social
Equity policies
to healthy and fresh foods
2. “Residents of color are
hostile and angry towards
outsiders…”
Territorially defensive sentiments
rooted in historical:
•
•
•
3. “White outsiders are
intruding and gentrifying the
community…”
Race-class inequalities
Marginalization +
disillusionment by whites
Sense of loss of control of
surroundings.
Socio-spatial segregation has
created:
•
•
•
limited cultural competency
(self-reflection +
engagement with R,C,
power, and privilege)
lack of relationship building
lack of language to talk
about race-class
Acknowledging White
privilege and R-C inequalities
More localized understanding
of needs; centralizing
leadership of people of color +
existing efforts
Antiracism + Justice at
forefront
Greater cultural competency
Better engagement of
residents (participatory
planning)
Empathy-based discourse and
relationship building for racial
reconciliation