Ratio Juris: Black History Month (13) — Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources

Our posts of bibliographies and brief reading guides in recognition, honor, and celebration of Black History Month comes to a close with this—our thirteenth—post on Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources.

If you have been unable to keep up with our postings or by way of making it easy to view the material in our posts for the month, I have listed the bibliographies and guides below (in alphabetical order, thus not the order in which they appeared here throughout the month of February) with embedded links. I hope at least a few of our readers have found (or will find) them helpful. For what it’s worth, I was disappointed that, at least at the law and other blogs I read routinely, there was, unlike in past years, comparatively little or nothing deliberately posted for Black History Month. Sartre memorably wrote: “[Marxism] remains [...] the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.” One might analogously state that we cannot transcend Black History Month until we have gone beyond the circumstances that indirectly (because unintentionally) engendered it (e.g., slavery, spontaneous and systematic violence against African-Americans, job and other forms of discrimination, segregated schooling and housing, Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, and so forth), including the recalcitrant and seemingly intractable racism that still—unconsciously, subconsciously, and consciously—rules the minds of far too many individuals, groups, and institutions in this society. The formal and informal historical knowledge of a disturbing number of people in the U.S. has yet to sufficiently come to epistemic, moral, and political terms with Black history such that the qualifying word is no longer necessary, in other words, so as to render the adjective “Black” redundant because it has become an integral and well understood part of our country’s grand historical narratives, having assumed the form of common knowledge. Until such time, it will be necessary for us to enlist a variety of means and methods equal to the task of recognizing, honoring, and celebrating Black History Month.

The links from our posts (thus not the posts themselves, for a few of them contained more than one link) for the month:

Images:

(at top of post) Rev. Floyd D. Harris Jr., founder (2015) of the Freedom School in West Fresno.
(immediately above) Freedom School Fresno’s demonstration farm, located behind New Light for New Life Church of God.