Healing While Black
By: Lisa Betty
Tags: Sustainability, Farming, Food, Race, Health And Wellness

Healing While Black

When I first encountered Keke Palmer’s tweet suggesting EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer card) should ONLY be used for “healthy items” I was triggered. Growing up food insecure with chronic asthma, I deeply acknowledge the systemic restrictions placed on marginalized communities to access nutrient dense foods, clean water, and live in environmentally safe spaces. This acknowledgement has always stood as a counterpoint to dislocated elite centered solutions impacting the realities of 42 million American (including 20 million children) Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)/Food Stamps recipients.

Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, praised President Trump at the White House in July, 2020.

In addition to white supremacist capitalist consumerism defining the standards of “health and wellness”, our collective inaccessibility to “health and wellness” is rooted in global systems of food apartheid, medical apartheid, and environmental racism. Specifically, food apartheid can not be fully addressed solely by increasing “healthy options” in marginalized areas (“food swamps”) or global United Nations-based food aid programs. Food apartheid, a term coined by food activist and organizer Karen Washington, is deep rooted inequities in our local and global food system founded in white supremacy, slavery, and colonialism and has been maintained by brutal oppression. Black and brown people in the US and across the globe have experienced military interventions, land theft, and labor exploitation, all in the name of our current global industrialized food system.

“Health and wellness” is not a choice. Coming from historically and systemically oppressed communities, we can not simply elect to “live well”. A health-conscious and sustainable way of life is deeply political. Particularly, Black health, wellness, and healing practices go against 500-year-old institutions founded in the intersectional death cults of capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism. In systems so deep rooted in anti-blackness, it is only with perseverance and determination that Black people have maintained traditions and created innovative enriching healing practices and institutions.

Since food is medicine and food is healing — food is deeply political.

In understanding Keke Palmer’s heavily circulated and very political perspectives on health and wellness, we have to ask: 1) What is wrong with Keke Palmer’s tweets? 2) Why were Black people triggered to respond? and 3) Why is Black healing political?

What Is Wrong with Keke Palmer’s Tweets?

The tweet was not only elitist, Palmer’s statement disregards centuries of revolutionary work by Black, brown, and Indigenous people of color on food sovereignty, decolonization, and fighting against systemic oppression. Currently, this activist work counters white supremacist logic of looking at “individual choices” as the problem and solution to oppressive capitalist systems of food apartheid, farm labor exploitation, and land theft. Palmer displays jarring ignorance about systemic oppression in food resources and the U.S. industrial food system. Although she later backtracked and qualified in an Instagram post that she meant:

“… pertaining to issues w/ healthy foods being 2 expensive & thinking it should be free for those w/ EBT cards. This was not a suggestion for solving all low income issues. Solely a hopeful solution 4 those with EBT that want to run it up w/ meat & produce.”

With millions of followers at the click of her mouse, Palmer’s additional tweet to Vice President Elect Kamala Harris demonstrates that she was serious about her platinum plan to save unhealthy poor people from themselves.

Palmer’s statement was also out of touch. She lacked basic knowledge of current interventions that do what she is advocating for: Most farmer markets across the United States incentivize buying nutrient dense whole foods with EBT/SNAP benefits. Additionally in recent decades, food pantries are more equipped with providing fresh fruits and vegetables. These types of interventions were pushed for decades by community activists, and implemented nationally by the Obama administration’s Let’s Move! campaign, spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama in 2011. Let’s Move! initiatives addressed food deserts and swamps, poverty, malnutrition, and childhood obesity. However, it also emphasizes the role of individual choices, minimizing the layered socioeconomic influences on food access and control of distribution.

In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman advocate for the inclusive participation of low income communities of color in food justice activism and in the creation of alternative food system markets. This departs from neoliberal green economic strategies, such as Let’s Move!, that foster social change through market behavior and away from the public sphere. Community and localized centering becomes important because although activists focus on food apartheid and decolonizing the US industrial food system, this was NOT the focus of Let’s Move! — or the state and local initiatives modeled after it.

Just like neoliberal programs that currently exist, Palmer’s suggestion narrows in on individual choices not systemic inequities. The paternalism and façade of “choice’’ represented within Palmer’s tweet, gaslights SNAP recipients in the same way the Trump Administration’s 2018 proposal to replace a portion of benefits with “harvest boxes”. Presented as a way to reduce fraud, which happens at a relatively low rate of 1.5%, the package of food would have been in line with USDA dietary guidelines providing — “‘shelf-stable’ milk, juice, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, canned meat, and canned fruits and vegetables, all ‘100 percent American-grown and produced.’” Since the USDA already provides food boxes(“government cheese” and canned meats) through a variety of USDA food programming, the administration’s proposal willfully refurbished sensationalize antiblack narratives of “welfare fraud”.

In general, it’s the paternalism for me. This is just another way to create a narrative that the elite have the solutions for low income people. However, these solutions always feed into finely tuned systems of inequity.

Community members, activists, and organizers on ground have found that access, not “individual choices”, is the most significant issue within industrial food systems. Access, not “individual choices”, becomes relevant when we acknowledge the distance, effort, and time involved for communities to access markets with nutrient dense whole foods. In many communities in midst of food apartheid, “healthy options” are two towns or an hour and half on transit away. Access becomes integral especially when considering the fact that many SNAP recipients represent supra-marginalized identities, such as the disabled, elderly, and unhoused. There are a bevy of food system activists (many directly from marginalized communities) doing this work to understand and advocate for the creation of policies and on the ground interventions to address inequality and repression in the local, national, and global food systems.

Aditi Mayer Instagram (@aditimayer)

Additionally outside of government sponsored food security interventions, activists and community organizers leading community based organizations are constantly working to support localized access to nutrient dense natural foods; support Black, brown, and Indigenous farmers; and access land to grow food needed in communities. Moving away from narratives of a benevolent industrial food system increasing market access vis-a-vis food security, localized communities are connecting with global movements, such as La Via Campesina — The International Peasants’ Movement, to center ecological sustainability and decolonization through food sovereignty. Protests against systemic inequities are demonstrated at the global level within the strike of hundreds of millions of farmers across India. Food sovereignty is the solution, not necessarily “healthy options” within a repressive system.

This issue is too complex and global for Palmer’s neoliberal and overdone suggestion. The market-based “individual choices’’ intervention has already been implemented. And has only exposed deeper features of apartheid and systemic oppression within the US based industrial food system and its ties to global systems of inequity.

Why did Black people Respond to Keke Palmer’s Tweets?

Although the majority of SNAP recipients are white, Black people in social media responded with intensity to Palmer’s initial tweet. This was not only because Palmer is a “Black celebrity”. This statement directly correlates with heavily circulated and propagandized narratives about Black health, poverty, and the welfare system from the 1960s and beyond. This opens up aspects of racial gaslighting of Black people, Fatphobia, and shaming poor people on their “individual choices”.

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Black health and wellness has been politicized. Very quickly narratives projected COVID-19 as a “black virus”. This has been precipitated by the increase of COVID-19 related deaths among Black people in the U.S. and circulated racist media projections of COVID-19’s effect on the African continent. In “The Black Plague,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor outlines the systemic inequities rooted in the high rates of death in U.S. cities such as New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Black and brown people fill societal roles as essential workers in grocery stores, health care facilities, delivery services, farms, prisons, and so on. They are also the most vulnerable in systems of incarceration and immigrant detention, which have demonstrated high rates of COVID-19 infections.

In “It’s Not Obesity. It’s Slavery.: We know why Covid-19 is killing so many black people,” scholar Dr. Sabrina Strings (author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia) asserts that “one interpretation of these disparities that has gained traction is the idea that black people are unduly obese which is seen as a driver of other chronic illnesses and is believed to put black people at high risk for serious complications from Covid-19.” So, per usual, white supremacist logic asserts Black pathologies and proclaimed cultural inadequacies around food are at the root of COVID-19 deaths. This defers responsibility to the victims themselves and NOT: an ill-equipped and inequitable U.S. healthcare system; the lack of leadership and misinformation from key government institutions; and systemic oppression.

String shares that these narratives are rooted in 18th and 19th century Enlightenment-era logic and theories connected to how medical treatment should be implemented for enslaved Black people. When it comes on to the COVID-19 crisis, String contends that “the cultural narrative that black people’s weight is a harbinger of disease and death has long served as a dangerous distraction from the real sources of inequality.” It is precisely this institutionally accepted narrative that has led to inequality in already inadequate and racially biased care, where “doctors may use existing health conditions, including obesity, to deny or limit eligibility to lifesaving coronavirus treatments.”

Palmer inadvertently participated in racial gaslighting and pathologizing Black people using dominant narratives about poverty, welfare, and health through a simple tweet. Black people responded because Black people have been targeted by language around healthy options/choices, irresponsibility, and food stamps for decades. And because she kept on digging a deeper hole for herself with successive tweets, I don’t know if she truly realizes the white supremacist logic and harm intrinsic in her message.

Why is Black Healing Political?

“Health and wellness” as a packaged term is white supremacist.

As white, elite, and thin — “health and wellness” is positioned as antithetical to Black, poor, and fat. Being in mainstream “health and wellness” spaces, the narrative has always pushed that Black people needed to be “taught” how to be healthy. Our culture, traditions and ways of being were just innately “unhealthy”, and we will always be “unwell” unless we assimilate to white centered health norms.

Through the narrative of “individual choices’’, this type of racial gaslighting dehistoricizes Black healing practices and cultural traditions. This white supremacist logic model indicts Black people as irresponsible: choosing to eat “badly”, not budgeting accordingly, and not taking their “health and wellness” seriously.

This logic silences Black healing communities while enabling the grotesque cultural appropriation of Black, brown, and Indigenous healing modalities by white centered “health and wellness”. Intrinsic to the industrialized food system is not only the inequity in labor practices and land practices around growing food, but also the countermovement of high quality and culturally connected nutrient dense whole foods away from communities of color.

We need to address this migration of traditional healing foods from Black, brown, Indigenous, POC communities to white centered elite and exclusive health and wellness food retail markets, such as Whole Foods. Once labelled trendy superfoods traditional items are no longer available in quality and quantity, such as legumes and nuts (black eye pea, chana (chickpeas), kidney beans, black beans, gandules, sunflower seed, peanuts, almonds, cashews); grains (teff, corn flour/meal, cassava/tapioca flour, couscous, quinoa, and rice); root vegetables and tubers (sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, taro); dark leafy greens (callaloo, mustard greens, collard greens, dandelion greens, kale); a variety of herbs and spices (thyme, rosemary, cumin, turmeric, pimento, mint, bay leaves, cinnamon, nutmeg, moringa, peppers); a diversity of fruits (plantains/bananas, watermelon, coconut, mangoes, soursop, jackfruit, heart of palms, pineapples, peaches, apricots, custard apple, cacao, avocado); and fish (catfish, snapper, herring spray).

At the turn of the 20th century, the watermelon and coconut were demonized, and damaging stereotypes through blackface minstrelsy circulated by US corporations, mainstream media outlets, political figures, and “experts” around global Black food culture, health and wellness practices, and primitivism. This racial gaslighting fueled Black middle-class respectability politics and incited shame around Black, African, and Afro-Indigenous centered foodways. Omitting historical repression, white-centered health and wellness romanticize watermelon and coconut as “superfoods”.

As nutrient dense foods are diverted, Black people consumption habits — in particular — are vilified and politicized with discussion of “soul food” and “slave food”. Both are celebrated and criticized for being the scapegoat for indulgence, and the influence for the creation of billion-dollar food corporations — such as Popeyes and KFC. These corporations falsely mimic Black recipes and traditional foodways in order to connect with potential consumers. These heavily marketed processed foods are widely available in low income Black communities — see “food swamps” — while at the same time, veering away from including nutrient dense traditional foods and cooking methods.

Targeted by advertisements and trillion-dollar marketing campaigns, Black people in the US across generations have been pressured to “Americanize”. This means consuming store/restaurant bought processed foods and a normative European-American based diet that focuses on high meat, dairy, and gluten intake. This also redirects discussion from unhealthy consumption habits practiced by white Americans and malnutrition in US society. “American’’ consumption practices — that are representative of the centuries-long US corporate agenda and targeted marketing — are minimized to focus on Black people’s “individual choices” and irresponsibility.

Targeted marketing is key to this form of systemic oppression. The 1970s becomes a true turning point in major companies advertising directly to Black consumers.

In “Fast Food: Oppression Through Poor Nutrition”, Andrea Freeman specifically addresses the close relationships between the United States government with processed food industries — such as dairy, meat, and fast food — that support food assistance programs and promote malnutrition through the proliferation of food deserts and swamps. Freeman explores food oppression as “a form of structural subordination that builds on and deepens pre-existing disparities along race and class lines… and stems from a combination of market forces…government policies and the fast food industry.”

Freeman states that from the 1970s to the early 2000s the fast food market has grown by almost twenty times: from six billion dollars in 1970 to over 110 billion dollars in 2001.

By 2022 the fast food market is projected at $690 billion. This increase can be contributed to proliferation of food deserts and swamps in urban and rural communities of color, as well as increased fast food in the Global South — again targeting potential Black and brown consumers at a global scale.

Freeman contends fast food corporations spend billions each year for research, advertising and marketing strategies to appeal to these communities with its greatest efforts directed towards children. Food, beverage and restaurant companies spend almost $14 billion per year on advertising in the United States alone.

As the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed health inequities endured by Black, Latinx and Indigenous peoples, Bloomberg news recently reported major investors are requiring companies to address how the development and marketing of their food products reinforce systemic racism in the U.S. In a letter to 21 leading companies from Coca-Cola Co. to Kraft Heinz Co., this coalition of investors requested to know “the proportion of advertising they spend on unhealthy and healthy products by racial group.” As well as an assessment of the impact of “digital-data practices on the marketing of unhealthy products and the disparate health and economic outcomes on Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities, as well as on children under the age of 14.”

This is groundbreaking action, and if companies abide by this request, jarring information will be exposed. But also this is 40 years plus too late, and in addition to not addressing unsustainable ecological practices that also disrupt and destabilize communities of color on a global scale, food activists have exposed targeted marketing and the processed food industry at the forefront of systemic racism and anti-blackness in the US food system.

Exposing targeted marketing strategies becomes integral in disrupting mainstream paternalistic narratives of “individual choices”. The reality for anyone who is exposed to western dominated consumer marketing, we do NOT have choices — we buy what “they” tell us to. And “they” usually come in the form of a trusted celebrity representative in commercials and advertisements. Here, Keke Palmer is more than complicit in food oppression, from the products she markets to young audiences of color to the companies that sponsor her work. Does Palmer not realize that her work in media, from Nickelodeon to ABC/Disney, is sponsored by Kraft, Frito Lays, McDonald, and Coca Cola? To be frank, her entire career is brought to you by some product that is killing people and the environment. For her to have the audacity to bring forth “solutions” is gaslighting.

Conclusion: Healing While Black

Despite the antiblackness at the core of “health and wellness” narratives and assault made on Black communities via food apartheid and food oppression, Black healing communities exist and have always existed.

Palmer’s arrogance is intersected with (lack of a better word) ignorance in attempting to understand her own body and healing. Recently, she spoke about her own journey in understanding a diagnosis for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal condition that adversely affects people with uteruses, and lack of support from doctors as her symptoms worsened. I do not take Palmer’s personal experience in understanding her body and healing lightly, but I also take note of timing. And acknowledge that this messaging may have been put forth to vindicate her from the pushback she received just a month earlier.

Celebrities really need to take major steps back and uplift the voices of Black and brown healing experts, practitioners and community leaders. These experts must include maroon, global indigenous, Rastafarian, and farming communities. This will divert conversations away from “individual choices”, self-responsibility, and respectability.

It is imperative to interrogate “health and wellness” as a white supremacist colonial construct. This means exposing antiblackness and anti-indigeneity in its narratives and ideological foundations, as well as how racism intersects with cultural appropriation of Black, brown and Indigenous healing practices. It is critical to pivot the narrative to centering Black and brown people and culture at the forefront of healing.

By doing this, we have to address systemic oppression around food, medical treatment, and the environment. This means confronting the current and historic abuses of people of color, with particular attention to antiblackness, in western medicine systems of treatment and logic. Additionally, we must elicit well known and obscure cultural practices that have allowed people at the intersections of Black, brown and indigenous to survive and thrive through the most horrific of circumstances.

In terms of Healing While Black: Black people have always been at the forefront of healing. We are the experts: our elders and ancestors are the guides, and our culture is the blueprint.