Greetings from my small corner of this city I love.
Emergency and urgency are all around us. Institutional violence, spiking unemployment, food insecurity, low-wage work without adequate protection, crippling debt, insufficient healthcare—all of these emergencies amplified by the weight of a global pandemic. The roots of these and other disparities are the result of legacies of white supremacy and systemic racism that have for centuries shaped policing, housing, food and land access, criminal justice, education, and healthcare.
So the turned up patches of dark, fertile soil in our gardens seem more urgent than ever. As we consider what we plant and how we plant, we’re mindful that we can’t expect a just yield without centering the work of equity and racial justice. The luminous Toni Morrison, in her novel The Bluest Eye, has me thinking about what soil can nurture and yield when she wrote, "the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit, it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late."
It is past time to sow seeds that yield justice and a more equitable future. The profound impact of racism on life and death demands a full response from every single part of American society. At The Nashville Food Project we know we do not have all the answers, but we believe we can be part of the solution. We have learned and continue to learn that anti-racism work cannot be treated as side work, but it is the work of community food justice. The crucial nature of our mission to grow, cook, and share nutritious food must be paired with an active commitment to learn and unlearn, to listen, to deepen empathy, to name injustice, and to leverage every resource available to us—money, relationships, time, effort, ideas and more—to address and undo the systemic racism that permeates every aspect of American life.
In full transparency, in this time of COVID emergency and all the ensuing change, so much of what we at The Nashville Food Project want for our community has been relegated to the back burner. We are guilty of pausing our momentum towards fulfillment of our current equity goals, and we have work to do to re-center anti-racism as a crucial part of our daily work and identity. I want to share with you The Nashville Food Project’s Equity and Inclusion Plan, a true work in progress that we have been pulling together over the last few years. It is not perfect but neither is this work, and if these recommendations can amplify your own organization’s commitment to anti-racism, please feel free to lean on them and borrow freely! Our staff and board recommit to educating ourselves, amplifying voices of Black and brown leaders and communities, sharing resources and moving many of our equity and inclusion goals into actionable next steps. We recommit to making room for this work and funding our capacity to grow it. We will also be using our blog and social platforms to listen, share, respond, lead.
To the Black members of our community and other affected people of color—we mourn your pain, celebrate your joy, lift up your contributions, honor your experiences. We see you and are with you.
To the white members of our community, this work is lifelong. Start where you are and attend to it daily. Skip no days. Get in the conversation, do the work, listen deeply, make mistakes and own them, stay with it, and be transformed. Galvanize what you learn by turning your learning into action. It is our responsibility to bring our personal privileges into public life in support of real and lasting change.
Grace and peace,
Tallu Schuyler Quinn
Click here to read The Nashville Food Project’s Statement of Anti-Racism, as well as our other core organizational values that ground us to this work to which we are called and by which we are challenged.
I really appreciate this post by the brilliant nonprofit leader Vu Le about doing the daily work of flossing out racism.