anti-asian racism
Professors and Students Demand Institutional Change Against Anti-Asian Racism
|
Following a national wave of protests in support of the Asian American community, Cornell professors and students call for institutional change.
The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/racial-justice/)
Following a national wave of protests in support of the Asian American community, Cornell professors and students call for institutional change.
Dr. Carolyn Finney delivers the Cornell Botanic Gardens’ annual Class of 1945 speech, addressing racial justice in green spaces.
In 2014, in what can only be described as some kind of mid-life crisis, I decided to turn our sprawling backyard in Northeast Ithaca into a small suburban farm. The disquiets and ponderings that activated this decision were these: an increasing awareness of the global environmental ramifications of industrial agriculture, the alienation we feel from the sources of our own food, the carbon miles embedded in each bite we take, the unfathomable suffering of the people who work to bring us our cheap food and the desire to have better control over the quality of the food I eat with my family. I was also interested in the slow carving up of productive farmland into small plots, and felt this “third space” of wasted land in the suburbs could be both scalable and transformative in the quest for a better, more immediate food system. At the deepest level, I wanted to understand the implications of my own manual labor and the labor of food production, the true costs of which have become largely a hidden externality in our lumbering, wasteful food production system. This was not some back to the land movement on my part, but rather a decision borne out of my moral discomfort with the food system in which I live, the social justice violence it entails, and how this system alienates us from our own hands and bodies and those of the people who do the manual labor of growing and harvesting and transporting crops.
As the murder of George Floyd has shocked the nation into protest and the realities of systemic racism are further exposed, it is important to consider just how deeply this racism permeates. As the farmers market pavilion in Ithaca opens for its 46th year and many home gardens in the upstate region finally begin to flourish after a long winter’s frost, it is incredibly important to consider the intersection of food and racial justice. Our country was founded on colonialism and inequality. These same inequalities proliferate into our current food system, creating vast disparities in access to food and land. As a growing number of movements seek to dismantle our current food system in hopes of erecting one founded on principles of sustainability, health and justice, we must also acknowledge that food justice is racial justice.
Michael Dawson outlined the histories and possible future of reparations struggles in the United States and discussed the ways contemporary calls for reparations can learn from the events of the past.