Food and land at the center of everything

In RECOMMONING, we are searching out a more open, collectively held world where, once again, land is held in common. A collaborative series with Dark Properties.

Many of us know that by imagining new worlds, we’re taking the first step towards building them. But what about the next step, and the step after that? How do we actually enact the abundant, equitable, sustainable societies we long for? Well, it’s hard and messy—but it is possible to build them, right here in the present.

In Detroit, Michigan, there is a “green revolution” afoot, led by Black farmers, organizers, and entrepreneurs who see food and land as the keystone building blocks for righting societal injustice, and re-writing the story of our shared future. With somewhere around 2,200 community gardens and farms, Detroit is literally offering us a glimpse at what cities can look like when we envision them to work in more relational, regenerative ways.

Willa Köerner:

How would you describe the nature of your work?

Shakara Tyler:

I work to build the worlds that we know can exist—the worlds that we need and deserve. A lot of that is around defining what liberation looks like when we center land and food. Food sovereignty, environmental justice, Black liberation… My work goes by many names, but it all falls under two main pillars: abolition and decolonization. There can be no truly radical transformation unless land is returned back to the Indigenous peoples it was stolen from, and unless we address reparations for Black people. I mean “reparations” in a broad, creative sense of the word. Not just money, but infrastructure and resources. To me, that is at the heart of building towards liberation for everyone.

WK:

How does having a PhD fit into the work that you do now?

ST:

I started in academia because I wanted to make a lot of money and be at the top of my field. As the saying goes, I believed in the myth of meritocracy. But as I went along on my academic journey, my political consciousness grew and I began to critique the very systems that I aspired to advance within. While I was learning about colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, and the other root causes of injustice—whether it’s hunger, soil and water contamination, diabetes and heart disease, or bipolar disorder and ADHD—I saw that all of these broader societal ailments particularly plague communities of color. That’s because they’re a strategic attack on our people. 

While learning the root causes of these things, I began to see that getting a PhD wasn’t going to save us, and therefore wasn’t the best use of my time. I finished nonetheless, but I knew I wanted to commit my life to a grassroots approach. I began to explore decolonial research methods and pedagogies so that I could attempt to dismantle things from the inside out. That was my goal, but at this point I’m not really sure if that’s possible. To be in the belly of the beast is something really precarious. Ultimately, I’ve tried to use my PhD as a way to return stolen resources back to their communities. I aim to leverage the privilege of these academic institutions to better our communities and to give our people what we need.

WK:

Can you explain the ecosystem of organizations you’re working with in Detroit, and how you’re involved with each?

ST:

We live in a system where we are constantly under attack, and we have very little ownership and control over what we put into our bodies. We want to be in a better position to control our food, energy, and educational systems. It’s all intersectional: food sovereignty and justice touches everything.

In Detroit, we say that we’re building a Black ecosystem, in a majority Black city, that is majority controlled by Black farmers and food entrepreneurs. Inside of that, we’re building an ecosystem where people can make meaningful contributions in defining not just what our food system looks like, but how we live our lives. To me, that’s what food sovereignty is: It’s about coming up with grassroots solutions to the everyday problems that we believe are unacceptable, with food and land at the center.

The Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN) is the container for this ecosystem of Black folks building out a model for what living “unapologetically Black” means. What that looks like is us owning the land that we live and farm on, sharing resources, developing mutual-aid processes, and building up organizations that help our people thrive. It’s also about being rooted in our African Diaspora cultures, and many other cultures that people deem important.

Overall, DBCFSN is like the pot that holds everything together so that farmers can own their land through the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, and also build adequate farming infrastructure—whether it’s rainwater retention ponds or catchment systems on their land so that they can irrigate crops without the city’s polluted water, or fences and tool sheds and raised beds—all these infrastructure needs that everyday growers have. We support that. 

We also started the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op so that we have a cooperative retail institution that lets us build power. When we pool our coins together, that’s how we really generate wealth. It’s impossible for Black people in this day and age to generate enough wealth to actually beat the system at its own game on an individual level. So that’s why we emphasize mutual aid and collective ownership, and that’s why we emphasize building beloved community.

The Detroit People’s Food Co-Op is the retail arm of building Black food sovereignty so that people can become member-owners of the grocery store. That way, the grocery store can aggregate discounts for everyday items like flour, rice, and kale, even. Also, the co-op is a strategic site for local produce and products, because if farmers are going to get paid a fair price for their products, they need a retail outlet that’s going to respect their labor. We’re not going to sell a bunch of collard greens at 75 cents a bundle like at Walmart, for instance. More likely, it’ll be around $3 a bunch, because we want the farmer to get paid. We’re emphasizing people over profits, and we’re dismantling the notion that market forces should drive the economic development in our communities. Instead, people need to be at the center of economic development. This means we must cooperate to ensure that farmers are paid a fair price, and treated with dignity and respect along with everyone else in the food system—including distributors, processors, food waste handlers, and of course consumers.

Then, the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund is a cooperative network of Black growers in the city who we help with purchasing their land from the Detroit Land Bank Authority, and we support them in developing infrastructure and sharing resources. Basically the money that we fundraise, we give that back out to the community. It’s a mutual-aid strategy to make sure that our people have what they need.

Lastly, the Black Dirt Farm Collective is rooted on the East coast. I’m a founding member, and we are a collective of Black agrarian organizers, researchers, seed keepers, and farmers. We coined the term “Afroecology” as a particular process of Black folks reconnecting to not just land and food, but to the overall spiritual systems that govern our connections to land and food. For the Black Dirt Farm Collective, and for the organizations that I work with here in Detroit, a lot of our motivations are spiritual. It is not just about growing food; It’s ultimately about repairing our souls from the extreme traumas we’ve experienced over centuries. 

Mama Hanifa, the Director of Education for DBCFSN, says that we’ve been dismembered, we’ve been taken away from ourselves to the point where we don’t even know who we are. This work is about reattaching ourselves so that we can move through the world in healthier, more grounded ways—which then reverberates outward. If we have a grounded sense of who we are, if we have a stronger sense of purpose and identity, then we can build stronger systems that work for us on our terms.

We prioritize this kind of work because we know that togetherness is something we can’t avoid if we’re going to heal ourselves. adrienne marie brown says that we can’t heal in isolation. Healing is a community process, so we have to actively be in community if we’re going to achieve our goals of cleaning up our water supply, cleaning up our air and our soil, and making sure that our folks aren’t hungry—not just physically, but also spiritually. Healing in community is what will actually move things forward. Other things play a part, too—it’s like assembling a car where certain things are the fuel and the tires, but for us, beloved community is the engine. Nothing runs without it. 

WK:

I’m so curious how you keep it all running. I’m sure it’s a huge process of everyone playing to their strengths, and learning and unlearning all sorts of different ways of working together. But also, it just seems like a ton of work, learning how to start a grocery store and win grants and such. How have you learned to do all these things? 

ST:

It’s a lot of trial and error, but it’s all driven by hope. Miriam Kaba, an abolitionist from Chicago, talks about hope as a discipline. We are urged forward by the deep belief that we can really change the world by changing ourselves first. A lot of that has to do with never giving up. Many people thought that the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op would never be erected. We were building a brick-and-mortar from the ground up, and it took 14 years. There are still a lot of naysayers, but what keeps it going, again, is beloved community, and a strong sense of hope and perseverance. 

We also put a lot of pressure on philanthropic actors to fund this work because it represents what Black food sovereignty can be: Building the power on the ground that we need to have greater control and meaningful participation in our food system. Having an intentional, participatory governance process where people have a say in what they put in their bodies is such a big deal. They also get a say in what companies we support, and which companies we don’t. When the genocide in Gaza first started, the Sabra Hummus brand—which is operated by an Israeli company that supports the Israeli military—was on our shelves. But the member-owners made it very clear that we do not want to support that. So, the inventory was cleared out. It was a done deal.

As another example, we don’t want to enact a culture of surveillance in the store. When people are accused of theft, we don’t call the police, because we all know how that can end up. So, we’re developing anti-carceral approaches to security so that we can keep our people safe, while ensuring that the business can maintain a strong bottom line. Essentially, we’re reworking the system against the system while we also continue to survive in the system, which is hard and messy. We experience lots of tears, harm, and discomfort—but this is the work. For that reason, we place a lot of emphasis on conflict-transformation processes. We have to come up with strategies that will support the emotional, mental, and physical safety of everyone based on where they are, not just on where we want them to be. It’s tough. It often feels like riding a bike as we fix it.

Overall, we are adopting the blueprints that our ancestors have laid out for us around cooperative development, which is a very sophisticated system. However, we’ve never been in a climate crisis in this way. People of color have been feeling the strong effects of climate injustices for some time, and now it’s widening where everyone is feeling it regardless of income or race. But we’re living in precarious times with a political administration that is very harmful to all living things—not just human life. They are very anti-life, and this is what fascism is. So we’re working to sustain our cooperative, community-based, people-centered systems in a fascist environment, which we don’t know how to do. We have no choice but to experiment, pivot, and re-evaluate. It’s all kinds of newness, mixed with oldness at the same time. And that’s the beauty of the cycle, right? Time and space is a misaligned circle. Right now, we are seeing the circular orientations of what building new worlds actually looks and feels like.

WK:

As a last question, what can this world look like when we do have more access to healthy food, grown with and for our communities—when we have the ability to connect spiritually to land, and to steward land? It seems like in Detroit you are getting closer to what that actually feels like. So, what does a day look like when all these systems are working?

ST:

Practically speaking, spring is upon us. Black farmers are collaborating to prepare the soil for planting. As we sow seeds in the ground, we pull from our ancestral power. We pay homage to those that got us here. As we move along in the process, we’ll nourish those seeds and ultimately harvest those plants to be processed and distributed at the local level. Ideally, the farmers will bring their crops to the Detroit Food Commons. If it’s shelf ready, it will go straight to the grocery store. If it needs to be processed, it will go upstairs to the kitchen to be turned into something like kale chips, or watermelon jerky. We’re creating this closed-loop ecosystem where the local produce can be kept intact, so that by the time it gets to the bellies of our people, it will retain most of its nutrition. 

In this world, everyone is treated with respect, and everyone is paid a fair price. We’re regenerating wealth by keeping our coins in our community, all while we feed our people high-quality, affordable, nutritious foods. And then whatever organic waste is generated is composted and recycled back into the soil of farms throughout the city, so we’re not contributing to the methane in the air, or to the climate crisis.

So, that’s what it looks like very practically, but it doesn’t end there. It’s the relationships that keep the work going. We often say that the ultimate currency is not dollars, but relationships: Our relationships to each other, and to the cosmos that govern our lives. The ants and butterflies and worms and trees, and the spirits that we can feel emanating around us.

Another huge part of the picture is how we become interdependent on one another—not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. So, what do we do when complexity erupts? We go into a conflict transformation process so we’re not throwing each other away. We’ve been socialized within racial capitalism to compete with one another, so even when we have this goal of being in cooperation, we feel instinctual triggers that stem from the very oppressive systems we’re fighting against. But to move forward, we need to use conflict as a tool to pinpoint areas of growth within ourselves. It’s quite complicated and dynamic, but it’s ultimately rewarding because, what else are we going to do? Every community that I’m a part of has this ethic of, “We’re going to keep trying again and again, even when we fail.” Because failure is a setup for a comeback. So, we continue on the journey, because we know that we don’t have the option not to.