Systemic Racism and the Food System

Abstract

Racial inequality is (re)produced in a multitude of ways, reflective of the different components that make up social systems: structure, institution, culture, and agents. In the United States, we are socialized to focus only on the agent (personal/individual) scale. What happens when we include the other components of the United States’ social system...

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Details

Subject Area(s):

Race, Class and Gender, Racial and Ethnic Relations, Rural Sociology, Stratification/Mobility

Resource Type(s):

Assignment, Class Activity, PowerPoint

Class Level(s):

College 100, College 200

Class Size(s):

Medium, Small

Usage Notes

This workshop will define and discuss concepts of systemic racism and the food system and the connection between the two; it will generate a conceptual framework through which participants will develop tools to collect and analyze data so as to understand and visualize the impacts of systemic racism on BIPOC communities. The instructor will have a...

Learning Goals and Assessments

Learning Goal(s):

1. Gain a concrete understanding of systemic racism, its components, and how they operate in the food system through data collection and analysis.
2. Gain a concrete understanding of how these social processes operate within the food system and reproduce racial inequality (see Learning Assessments).
3. Develop skills in utilizing official statistics and documents, understanding digital data, and interpreting data alongside sociological concepts.

Goal Assessment(s):

1. Participants will become familiar with the USDA-NASS website and the 2017 Census of Agriculture. Participants will learn about the types of data that the USDA collects on agricultural production and how this data is compiled into categories by race. They will complete a worksheet using information found from the USDA website.
2. Participants will become familiar with class-action lawsuits filed against the USDA. Participants will present a complex reading to their peers after reading a law review article about socially disadvantaged farmers, as well as examining information on nationwide race-based discrimination class action lawsuits against the USDA. Participants will work in...
3. Participants will become familiar with Google Images search engine. They will complete a worksheet based on their search results of directed terms related to representations of race in agriculture; they will also write responses to reflection questions about their experience of the activity.