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FOOD, RACE, AND JUSTICE: A QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF (IN)EQUALITY IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA’S URBAN ALTERNATIVE FOOD MOVEMENT

HEATHER K. COVINGTON

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2018

To Those Who Dream, Seek, and Serve

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would have been impossible without the help of a number of people. First and foremost, I would like to thank the Birminghamians who participated in this research project, generously donating their time and energy to build knowledge about the communities they inhabit. Additionally, Charles W. Peek, my mentor and dissertation committee chair, worked tirelessly to hone my shifting methodological design and help focus my theoretical wanderings within an overwhelming sea of data. I would like to equally thank Barbara Zsembik who provided me with the much-needed support, academic as well as emotional, throughout my years as a graduate student.

Christine Overdevest helped to nurture my research skills, serving as my first mentor during my MA years, and Mary Ellen Young’s expertise in visual qualitative methods contributed to my methodological approach with which I accumulated data great in depth as well as breadth. In addition to these core committee members, I would also like to thank every other professor in UF’s Department of Sociology and Criminology &

Law who helped me grow along the way, including but not limited to Sophia Acord, who encouraged me to think boldly and lead fearlessly, as well as Monika Ardelt and Kendal

Broad, both of whom taught me to appreciate qualitative approaches for the demanding yet worthwhile processes I discovered them to be.

I am also grateful to my family members and friends without whom I could have never completed this marathon. My mother, Julie Saunders, father, Chris Covington, step-parents, Gordon Saunders and Jamie Covington, and all five of my sisters played critical supportive roles throughout my educational career. My close friends were equally important, and I will never forget the encouraging words of my officemate and forever friend, Jennifer Jarret, as well as Jackie Koopman, Michelle Cumming, John

Blasing, Kristen Benedini, Ron Floridia, and many others. My oldest friend, Stacy Oliver, housed me during data collection for this work and has provided the most sincere and compassionate moral support for what has now been over half my life, and Natalie

Sargent cared for my fur baby when I had nowhere else to turn during my travels between Gainesville and Birmingham. Ryan Willoughby, who cooked many dinners and cleaned many dishes while I was too distracted with writing and editing to keep up, deserves a thousand thank yous. I have had so much support over the last five years that I cannot possibly name all of the people who have played key roles in my path toward dissertation completion, but I extend my deepest gratitude toward each and every individual within and outside of the UF community who supported, encouraged, and pushed me beyond my known limits.

Finally, I would like to thank Cuy, the sweetest angel of a dog I have ever known, for her countless kisses and cuddles. Without her, I would not have made it through a single year.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 9

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 10

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 11

ABSTRACT ...... 12

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 14

Overview ...... 14 A Brief Reflexive History ...... 17 Summary of Dissertation ...... 20

2 LITERATURE REVIEW ...... 24

Introduction ...... 24 The Production of Inequality ...... 29 Cultural Processes ...... 31 Identification ...... 35 Rationalization ...... 38 Deconstructing Inequality ...... 40 Identification ...... 41 Rationalization ...... 43 A Brief Review of the Sociological Research of the AFM ...... 46 The Salience of Cultural Processes to Racial Inequality in Birmingham’s AFM ...... 49 Production of Inequality in the AFM ...... 49 Deconstructing Inequality through the AFM ...... 53 Transformative Processes in the AFM ...... 55 Conclusion...... 59

3 METHODOLOGY ...... 61

Introduction ...... 61 Epistemological Approach ...... 62 Ethical Approach ...... 62 Data Collection ...... 63 Study Site ...... 64 Ethnography ...... 66 Windshield test and pre-immersion ...... 66

Immersion: interviews and fieldwork ...... 68 Sampling Strategies ...... 69 Data Analysis ...... 70 Ethnographic Data Analysis ...... 70 Validity/Reliability ...... 75 Ethics and Political Considerations Statement...... 77

4 CULTURAL PROCESSES AND INEQUALITY ...... 78

Executive Summary ...... 78 Introduction ...... 80 Identification Processes and the Production of Inequality ...... 81 History of Identification ...... 81 Identification and Ongoing Assumptions ...... 89 Identification and Exclusion ...... 95 Identification, Distinction, and the Importance of Class in Inequality ...... 98 Identification and the Burden of Inequality ...... 106 Rationalization and the Production of Inequality ...... 107 History of Rationalization ...... 108 Evaluation and Inequality ...... 110 White Evaluations of the AFM ...... 111 Black Evaluations of the AFM ...... 118 Evaluation and Inequality ...... 125 Whites evaluation of the black community...... 125 Charity models and assumptions ...... 127 Black evaluations of white intentions ...... 128 Evaluation and Change ...... 132 Standardization in the AFM...... 135 The Standardization of Inequality in the AFM ...... 139 Conclusion...... 142

5 UPWARD MOBILITY IN THE AFM ...... 145

Executive Summary ...... 145 Introduction ...... 146 Upward Mobility in the Alternative Food Movement ...... 147 Social Justice Valuation ...... 148 The Interplay of Evaluation and Identification ...... 154 Striving Toward Upward Mobility in Birmingham’s AFM ...... 159 Culinary Training Program ...... 160 White-Dominant Farmers Market, Seeking Diversity ...... 164 Educational Pipelines to Agricultural Careers ...... 167 Conclusion...... 172

6 TOWARD A TRANSFORMATIVE ALTERNATIVE FOOD MOVEMENT ...... 175

Executive Summary ...... 175

Introduction ...... 176 Transformative Processes ...... 178 Identification ...... 178 Rationalization ...... 182 Revisionist approaches to transformation...... 183 Revolutionary approaches to transformation ...... 186 The Transformative Food Movement ...... 187 A Café for the People ...... 188 Agribusiness for the People ...... 192 Community Land Trusts for the People ...... 195 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 200

7 CONCLUSION ...... 203

Overview ...... 203 Summary of Key Findings ...... 204 Implications ...... 208 Intellectual Merit ...... 208 Broad Social Impacts ...... 210 Limitations and Future Directions ...... 214

APPENDIX

A LIST OF RESPONDENTS ...... 216

B INFORMED CONSENT FORMS ...... 218

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 219

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 230

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

A-1 List of Respondents in Ethnography Stage ...... 216

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

B-1 Ethnographic Interview Informed Consent ...... 218

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AFM Alternative Food Movement

CLT Community Land Trust

CRT Critical Race Theory

IRB Institutional Review Board

UAB University of Alabama at Birmingham

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

FOOD, RACE, AND JUSTICE: A QUALITATIVE EXAMINATION OF THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF (IN)EQUALITY IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA’S URBAN ALTERNATIVE FOOD MOVEMENT

Heather K. Covington

May 2018

Chair: Charles W. Peek Cochair: Barbara Zsembik Major: Sociology

My dissertation examines the racially-divided alternative food movement (AFM) in Birmingham, Alabama using ethnographic methodologies. The city’s past and persisting racial segregation generate cultural and socioeconomic differences between black and white communities that inhibit black involvement in the white-dominated mainstream AFM and vice versa. This work seeks answers to three primary questions:

1) How do cultural processes contribute to the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM? 2) How does Birmingham’s AFM use cultural processes to generate upward mobility for its participants? 3) How can cultural processes be employed through Birmingham’s AFM to disrupt and reverse inequalities?

Employing contemporary cultural theorists like Michele Lamont and Charles Tilly, this work examines the cultural processes and social sources of inequality, the potential for upward mobility, and the possibility of social transformation within Birmingham’s

AFM. With ethnographic methods like participant observation and in-depth interviews, this dissertation employs the wisdom and experiences of the people on the ground to explain inequities as well as the potential for change. Ultimately, this dissertation finds

that Birmingham’s history of segregation, which persists in many of its 99 neighborhoods, results in cultural processes that generate social boundaries and identities, often rationalized into institutional and organizational structures, in ways that create and maintain inequalities between social groups. These cultural processes extend to the city’s AFM and encourage segregation and inequality between movement organizations and events. However, many of these same divisive cultural processes, given careful attention and appropriate context, have also led to upward mobility in the

AFM. Some respondents suggested that these cultural processes, critically-attended, hold promises of deep, transformative change that will promote greater equality within and outside of Birmingham’s AFM. This work builds on current literature through its unique attention to cultural processes and inequality in a Southern US AFM, as told through the experiences of people on the ground, and it informs policy and organizational bodies through its examination of the complex cultural and social sources of persistent inequality within and outside of Birmingham’s AFM.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Overview

This dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to examine the cultural processes which contribute to the production, maintenance, and disruption of inequality in the racially-divided alternative food movement (AFM) in Birmingham, Alabama. For the purposes of this paper, the alternative food movement will be defined as a politically charged movement which asserts that local, fresh, organic food is better, both morally and nutritionally, for bodily, environmental, and economic health. However, because of the racial divisions, different sides of the AFM approach this definition with different emphases and ideologies that make them philosophically, culturally, and even locationally different.

Cultural processes are collectively accomplished, “shared representation systems” that involve “ongoing classifying representations/practices that unfold in the context of structures (organizations, institutions) to produce various types of outcomes”

(Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014: 586). Through cultural processes, people collectively classify social groups, imbibe them with meanings, both negative and positive, and separate groups across symbolic boundaries. Cultural processes also unfold when social groups assign worth, or lack thereof, to specific entities, and then standardize such evaluations into organizational, institutional, and structural practices through the establishment of rules and regulations based on cultural evaluations. When these cultural processes follow the needs and desires of dominant groups, as they often do, subordinate groups’ unique needs and desire go unconsidered. Thus, inequalities develop when cultural processes favor the needs and preferences of dominant groups.

More often than not, cultural processes develop to favor those with the most resources. Because people with large resource pools tend to dominate decision making processes, the needs and desires of the well-resourced become structured into institutions more deeply than those with fewer resources. In Birmingham, a city with a

72% black population, those with the most resources are and always have been disproportionately white (US Census Bureau 2010). Thus, the city’s institutions, including the AFM, developed to primarily address the needs, preferences, and ideologies of its richer, white participants. The reasons for this are multiple.

In the wake of historical cultural processes connected to racial classification and regulated segregation, much of Birmingham’s inner city population remains residentially segregated by race. Further, these same cultural processes led to decades of socioeconomic disparity for African Americans, and race and class in the city have long been tied (Connerly 2005, Wilson 2000, Massey and Denton 1993). The structural inequalities which created persistent socioeconomic differences between black and white Birminghamians affected many of the city’s institutions, including its AFM. Gaining popularity in the early 2000’s, Birmingham’s early iterations of the AFM included primarily those who could afford the luxury of purchasing higher priced, local produce from the large downtown farmers market, as well as the transportation needed to access the market, at which no bus stops existed. Further, to eat at “farm-to-table” restaurants, which cooked with local, AFM-friendly ingredients, one needed to be able to fork over the minimum twenty dollars needed for a single entrée. With such expensive, exclusive options, it is no surprise that the earliest renditions of the AFM included an overwhelmingly white and middle to upper class customer base. While the

exclusivity of the AFM has shifted drastically over the years, it was the rich and white who planted the seeds of the movement, and it is these same groups who populate the movement’s dominant institutions. Thus, the cultural processes which guide the AFM’s development continue to maintain inequalities unless specifically addressed with the intention to reverse the inequalities.

For example, biased cultural processes which favor the ideologies and preferences shared among white AFM participants often fail to account for those of black AFM participants. Thus, however unintentional, these biased cultural processes prevent proportional black involvement in the white-dominated mainstream AFM.

Symbolically barred from comfortable participation in the larger AFM, which does not account for black or low-income needs and desires, black and poor Birminghamians interested in organic, local food must construct a separate space for a new version of the AFM that addresses their own ideologies, needs, and preferences, generally unheard by the white AFM.

This dissertation unravels the cultural processes enacted in Birmingham and its

AFM to better understand the production and maintenance of inequality in AFM participation, organizational success, and movement definition. Using a multi-stage, ethnographic approach, this project seeks to answer three broad research questions:

• How do cultural processes contribute to the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM? • How does Birmingham’s AFM use cultural processes to generate upward mobility for its participants? • How can cultural processes be employed through Birmingham’s AFM to disrupt and reverse inequalities?

The first research question lays the foundation for the second two, which function collectively to address enacted and potential motions toward a more inclusive and equal

AFM in Birmingham, Alabama.

A Brief Reflexive History

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, I was always aware of race, albeit peripherally. As a white person in a white suburb, I had few opportunities to confront skin color until I switched school systems in high school and began to spend most of my time in downtown Birmingham. The city of Birmingham was much different than my white, suburban home. As a majority-black city, Birmingham’s political, social, and economic climates vary pretty drastically from the rest of the (politically red) state, but the city’s story is not so different from the rest of the state’s separatist philosophy.

Historically, white residents flocked together in concentrated pockets, while black residents were subjugated to those areas in which whites were not or did not want to be, often as a result of laws and regulations which deemed the segregation warranted.

Segregation and its resultant inequalities were seen as warranted due to those cultural processes which classified groups and attached meaning and significance to their assumed differences. With these identification processes already centuries underway, early Birmingham’s whites were able to both meaningfully separate themselves and continue to assert their group’s dominance. This dominance granted whites the power to control narratives, establish rules and regulations, and construct city structures to reflect their own needs in ways that, quite intentionally, ensured the maintenance of their dominant status and the continued production of racial inequalities (Connerly

2005).

Since the 1960’s Birmingham, also known as Bombingham (Connerly 2005), has carried the weight of a reputation for not only segregation but racial violence as well. In the early 20th century, city planners designed the city’s neighborhoods based on Jim

Crow laws that separated black and white residences by law. These laws demonstrate one way in which whites deliberately used cultural processes to standardize inequality into the city’s structure. Even after the Supreme Court ordered legal segregation unconstitutional, many of the city’s whites attempted to maintain segregation through additional laws and planning policies (as well as bombs and threats to blacks moving into traditionally white areas), under the guise of maintaining property values and neighborhood safety, evaluated as key values by the white property owners of the time.

Eventually, when attempts to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods failed, whites moved out of the city to avoid integration, taking their families, incomes, and tax base into the suburbs. The removal of the tax base impacted Birmingham neighborhoods by reducing the resources available to support schools, city infrastructure, and other urban institutions needed to sustain communities and foster upward mobility for the city’s poor residents. The drastic inequalities that resulted from white flight out of the city continue to plague many of the city’s institutions, perhaps most drastically public education

(Hannah-Jones 2017, Connerly 2005, Massey and Denton 1993). Thus, those cultural processes which, half a century ago, led white homeowners to evaluate property as more important than people unlike themselves also created to lasting inequalities that continue to affect the city’s black majority.

Now, over half a century since segregation was deemed illegal, the scene is not much different. Housing projects and homeless shelters are common in the city’s north,

east, and west sides (where the black population is highest), and university students,

UAB medical center affiliates, and upper/middle-class city dwellers can be found walking the streets of the south side. While many of Birmingham’s urban white residents are democrats who believe in integration, and I heard many say they chose to live in the city because of a desire for diversity, the city remains obviously segregated.

Patterns of racial segregation emerged based on the nation’s long history of negative, biased identifications of racial minorities, and, at least in Birmingham, because of local laws, public opinion, and city planning and development. Such social realities had real impacts on Birmingham’s black majority, limiting the resources at their disposal for upward mobility, quality of life, and health, among other things. Black communities have fewer economic and political resources by which to support community endeavors, including alternative food procurement and movement participation. The feelings of exclusion and difference, still resonant from past cultural processes, limit black community members’ desires to participate in the well-resourced white AFM organizations and programs around the city.

For example, in my time as a researcher in Birmingham, I heard from multiple black respondents that they felt uncomfortable in white AFM spaces because they perceived black people weren’t welcome in them. This discomfort with racial integration lends comfort to separatism and consent to segregation in the politically progressive

AFM. At a glance—likely supported by dominant discourses and cultural identification processes which advocate the erroneous assumption that black residents are unhealthy—the difference in AFM participation among black and white residents gives the appearance that black residents aren’t interested in healthy, alternative food.

However, black communities typically contain fewer grocery stores, higher numbers of fast food establishments, and rarer farmers markets in comparison to white communities; black communities come equipped with scarcer resources and support than their white counterparts. This is not to say that black residents are uninterested or even unknowledgeable about AFM practices and healthy eating. They simply must traverse more barriers and commit more steadfastly than whites to access such options, sometimes building them from scratch without the city and private sector support often received by white AFM projects.

As noted throughout this introduction, understanding the role of race and other factors driving the Birmingham’s divided opportunity structure requires critical attention to the cultural processes that produce and maintain inequality in Birmingham. Through attention to these processes, AFM organizations and others may attempt to disrupt inequality, providing opportunities for upward mobility to individuals and communities through specific AFM programs. Further, these processes, carefully attended, may be employed in ways that transform inequalities, deeply disrupting them at their roots to create wholly new structures that reverse the production and maintenance of inequality and promote a just and egalitarian AFM.

Summary of Dissertation

As noted above, this dissertation explores the cultural processes leading to the production, maintenance, and disruption of inequality in Birmingham, Alabama’s AFM.

The cultural process of classifying people based on social characteristics, such as race and socioeconomic status, and subsequently imbibing those classifications with meanings, negative and positive, has lasting impacts on inequalities between social groups. Further, the cultural processes related to the evaluation of people and other

entities and the subsequent standardization of such values into institutional structure also impact the production and maintenance of inequality. These processes combined continue to influence inequalities in the city of Birmingham and its AFM. Without attention to and redirection of these processes, inequality will persist. However, with critical approaches and intentional changes, these cultural processes can be altered in ways that disrupt and reverse the production of inequality.

Following this introduction, Chapter 2 details the literature related to specific cultural processes and the production and disruption of inequality. Examining two broad groups of cultural processes, identification and rationalization, Chapter 2 employs the work of Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014), Tilly (2005), and others to address the role of culture in the production and maintenance of inequality. Chapter 2, as well as the rest of the dissertation, extends the work of these researchers to explore the role of cultural processes in both the production and the disruption and reversal of inequality. Just as cultural processes can generate differences and structural inequalities, they can also be purposefully employed to deconstruct them by producing new narratives and building new organizational and institutional structures that promote inclusion as well as a more equitable, just distribution of resources. Chapter 2 lays the theoretical foundation on which the analytical chapters, Chapters 4, 5, and 6, rely.

Chapter 3 provides details on the methodology used throughout the research process. This chapter describes, in chronological order, the multi-stage ethnographic approach, the variety of qualitative methods employed, and the analytical strategies used to answer those research questions listed earlier. This chapter also addresses the

ethical decisions and evaluative standards used to ensure the quality of the dissertation’s results.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 each address one of the research questions listed near the beginning of this introductory chapter. Chapter 4 concerns the first research question posed: How do cultural processes contribute to the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM? This chapter discusses the historical and ongoing cultural processes that created and maintain inequalities in the AFM, using historical analyses, researcher observations, and direct quotes from respondents as supportive evidence.

Chapter 5 extends the analysis of cultural processes provided in Chapter 4 to examine the ways in which specific AFM organizations have attempted to produce opportunities for upward mobility by addressing the harmful cultural processes which limit such opportunities and working to create new cultural processes as well as alternative paths around the harmful processes. While the efforts are certainly there, as the chapter describes, they are often less successful at creating lasting changes than the implementing organizations might desire. This chapter examines the varying levels of success of three AFM programs that attempted to disrupt inequalities by providing opportunities for upward mobility by working, sometimes unknowingly, against or around the cultural processes which produced social inequalities in the city.

Chapter 6 builds upon Chapter 5 by exploring the ways in which AFM organizations can employ cultural processes in transformative ways, reversing inequalities by drastically altering old processes in ways that promote break down the harmful classification processes and construct equitable structures built on just,

egalitarian values. This chapter discusses three specific AFM organizations that have attempted to employ transformative cultural processes to alter the inequalities present in both the AFM and the overall city.

Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation’s main text with an overall summary of findings, a consideration of the broad conclusions gleaned from the three analytical chapters (Chapters 4, 5, and 6), a discussion of the social and academic implications of the work, a consideration of the methodological and other limitations which constrain the project, and suggestions for future research.

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

This chapter begins with a detailed exploration of cultural theories of inequality, including the work of Michele Lamont and Charles Tilly. Both Lamont and Tilly examine culture in action—how people create and are shaped by culture in ways that produce and enforce social hierarchies and inequalities. I then provide a brief overview of sociological research on the AFM in the United States. In the final sections of this chapter, I describe how cultural theories of inequality apply to the national AFM generally as well as those located in Birmingham, Alabama, and I conclude that specific cultural processes related to identification and rationalization, such as racialization and evaluation, have indeed affected inequality in the AFM. The use of cultural theories of inequality in this work shines light on the meso-level sources of inequality, rarely, if ever, directly addressed in current bodies of work on inequalities in the United States AFM.

Through the meso-level cultural processes identification (the categorization of people into groups) and rationalization (the creation of rules and evaluative standards), which form and are formed by micro-level cognitive processes (or thoughts) as well as macro- level resource distribution, inequalities take shape in the AFM. Direct attention to cultural processes in the AFM will both inform the literature and provide insight into ways organizations can address inequalities to more permanently disrupt the harmful impact of inequality within the AFM.

As Berezin (2015) described, the explicit sociological study of culture proliferated in the United States during the mid to late 20th century through the translation and circulation of research by cultural theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Foucault, and

Jürgen Habermas. The study of culture examined collective meanings and norms

(Douglas, 1975; Geertz, 1973), the impact of culture on social structure (Bourdieu,

1977) and the actions and processes, both agentic and structural, which create and sustain cultural phenomena and their consequences (Sewell 1992; Swidler 1986).

Michele Lamont, a student of Pierre Bourdieu’s, examines culture itself as a practice. Lamont argued that cultural processes play a large role in the production of social inequality. She studied processes like the production and maintenance of boundaries that designate distinctions between groups of people and produce inequality

(Lamont and Fournier 1992), and much of her recent work unpacks the role of cultural processes, such as identification and rationalization, as both direct and indirect causes of social inequality.

While still focusing largely on socioeconomic status, Lamont did step beyond

Bourdieu’s primarily class-based assessment of culture and structural inequality in her accounts of other dynamic social positions, or status groups such as race (Lamont

2000, 1992), that play a separate but equally important role in the production and maintenance of inequality. Lamont’s conceptualization of cultural processes includes concepts popularized by both classical and contemporary theorists (Weber 1978,

Goffman 1963, Omi and Winant 1994, Espeland and Stevens 1998, Burbaker and

Cooper 2000, Brubaker 2001, Timmermans and Epstein 2010, Lamont 2012), and they impact inequality in intersubjective and often unintentional ways. They categorize cultural processes broadly as identification (ways in which processes are categorized and recognized; i.e., racialization, stigmatization) and rationalization (how processes are

reasoned and structured; i.e. standardization and evaluation), and note that such processes contribute to macro-level inequality at both micro and meso-levels.

As Lamont and Fournier (1992) describe, humans have always constructed boundaries and sorted themselves into differentiated groups with specific names, labels, and varying levels of inclusiveness. The process of boundary construction leads to the creation of specific identities, or identification, by which people come to understand themselves in relation to others (Tilly 2005). The boundaries can by physical boundaries, such as constructed walls or defined city limits, as well as symbolic, such as those which divide racial groups based on phenotypical characteristics (Omi and

Winant 2014). Symbolic boundaries are conceptual boundaries, constructed by people as the compete to define reality and secure resources necessary for survival (Lamont and Molnar 2002). These symbolic boundaries become social boundaries once they are agreed upon (sometimes coercively) by many people, and they are used to maintain and rationalize the production of inequality.

Boundaries and identities both shape and are shaped in large part by cultural processes, and such processes have serious consequences for inequalities among social groups. Cultural processes occur through

inter-subjective meaning-making: they take shape through the mobilization of shared categories and classification systems through which individuals perceive and make sense of their environment… they contribute to the production and reproduction of inequality in routine ways, often as a side effect of other ongoing activities, and as such do not necessarily involve the intentional action of dominant actors… they operate not only at the level of individual cognition but also inter-subjectively, through shared scripts and cultural structures (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014: 574-575).

These taken-for-granted processes are used by dominant and subordinate groups alike, and they are so routine in everyday life that they usually go unnoticed. While cultural

processes themselves are not inherently bad, they function in ways that produce inequalities when the proceed unchecked.

As social groups emerge through boundary construction and the creation of identities, groups often compete for limited resources. Groups use cultural processes, often without realizing it, to consolidate resources and promote their group’s success.

When some groups are more successful at resource accumulation than others, inequalities emerge. Groups’ success with resource accumulation depends on a number of factors, including power structures and previously available resources, many of which are fortified by a larger culture and associated cultural processes that either help or hinder group efforts.

Culture is often referred to as though it exists in relative stasis, as a nearly tangible thing that people possess. However, as poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida and Michele Foucault began to address identities as a relational construct (Foucault

1980, Derrida 1997), and cultural sociologists like Bourdieu and his colleagues developed theories of practice to explain cultural differences and inequality (Bourdieu

1977), sociologists began to examine culture as a process, a result of collective action set within structural parameters, that had serious effects on power relations and the stratification of society. Orlando Patterson (2014) discussed culture as both creative and created. He stated:

Culture emerges as a dynamically stable process from the complex interactions of two components of thought, feelings, and action: one of collectively created declarative, procedural, and evaluative knowledge structures that are unevenly shared, held in common, and distributed, among particular networks of persons; the other of practical rules for their usage, as well as contextually bounded alternate knowledge (22).

Following Padgett & Powell’s (2012) quote, “In the short run, actors create relations; in the long run, relations create actors” (2–3), Patterson understood cultural pragmatics

(where relations and cultural processes are created) as short-run, while the long-run concerns those cultural structures which “fashion, direct, enable, and constrain actors”

(2014: 22). Following this description, culture is both creative and created. Interactions between people create culture, and culture constrains the actions of people. It follows then that, should culture generate inequality between different social groups, this inequality is created by people. However, this inequality-creating culture also limits the actions of people, particularly those most negatively affected by the inequality, so that culture-created inequalities are difficult to overcome.

In many cases, identity-similar groups come to form their own distinct subcultures with more or less similarity to the culture at large. Culture also shapes ideologies and domination patterns which privilege some groups over others. Culture is structural—it affects and is affected by those institutions which structure society and social opportunities. Cultural processes affect the domination of subordinate groups. Cultural processes impact identities and social positions by encouraging inequality through dominant ideologies that support groups in power. According to the dominant ideology thesis (Marx and Engels 1960), dominant ideologies typically support the motives of ruling classes in ways that either ignore the needs of or harm those with less power, and these ideologies reproduce inequality under the guise that they represent the values of the majority of society. These ideologies are deployed through cultural processes to produce and maintain social inequality.

When allowed to unfold naturally and without critical thought and resistance, cultural processes tend to produce inequalities that afford more resources and opportunities to people who hold the most power because these are the people who generate the rules, values, and definitions by which society is organized. However, when groups employ them with intent, cultural processes can also disrupt and reverse inequalities, generating upward mobility and equality where inequality once abounded.

This chapter reviews the current research surrounding cultural processes and their relation to inequality, upward mobility, and transformation.

The Production of Inequality

The production of inequality itself is not solely the product of resource distribution. The social hierarchies along which power and resources are distributed emerge from multiple levels. At the micro-level, individuals’ cognitive processes, or thoughts, feed into cultural processes by which people are sorted into unequal groups by processes of identification. Following this sorting, the cultural process of rationalization allows groups in power to standardize the distribution of resources in ways that appear fair yet may still favor the powerful. These cultural processes give way to pervasive and unequal resource distribution, and without attention such processes may continue to reproduce themselves and their outcomes indefinitely. The following subsection details these processes in greater detail.

Tilly (2005) described inequality as “a maze in which clusters of people wander separated by walls they have built for themselves, not always knowingly” (71). Tilly’s description vividly depicts the absent-minded manner with which inequality often develops through cultural processes. People act in routine manners, interacting using cultural scripts (Patterson 2014, Schank and Ableson 1977) and repertoires (Swidler

1986, Lamont and Thevenot 2000) which prevent them from having to think too hard about how to behave every time they come into contact with another person—the communication norms are predefined and used habitually. Cultural behavior between those of the same culture is so repetitive that people do not have to improvise very often. While this frees people from the cognitive overload that accompanies new, unscripted scenarios, the cultural scripts do produce the same sorts of outcomes time and time again. Thus, if a routine cultural practice generates inequality, actors participate in the production and maintenance of inequality, perhaps without even realizing.

While inequality was once understood as a simple economic concept, in which one had more money than another, the concept of inequality shifted over the years to encompass additional, non-economic, factors. Weber for instance, extended the concept of inequality to include more than the economically-based classes to that of

“status groups,” or groups stratified on the basis of non-economic characteristics such as race, religion, and prestige (Weber 1978). Tilly (2005) broadly defined inequality as a relation between people where interactions advantage one more than the other because of a difference in resource control. When one person controls more resources than another, Tilly argued, that person will have the advantage. Inequalities can be durable, enduring over entire lifetimes, and, as seen in Birmingham and many other cities across the world, stretching to touch many generations over decades, even centuries (Tilly

2005).

Similar to the vast definition proposed by Tilly (2005), Lamont, Beljean, and Clair

(2014) defined social inequality as

unequal access to resources between individuals or social groups and thereby distinct from, yet overlapping with, economic or income inequality. While economic inequality focuses on differences in wealth and income, social inequality considers other differences between individuals, groups and nations that matter for one’s quality of life and general well-being (573-574).

Here, Lamont and colleagues separated economic from social inequalities to signify that groups can be unequal regardless of economic differences or similarities. Inequalities interact with cultural processes bidirectionally. On one hand, cultural processes create and maintain social inequalities through their facilitation of identity and social boundary construction and reinforcement. On the other hand, inequalities create cultural processes because they, too, reinforce boundaries and identities as unequal groups interact less frequently with one another and continue to reproduce the power hierarchies at play.

Cultural Processes

As Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014) describe, much of the research on the processes that lead to inequality explores cognitive processes, processes related to place, and social processes related to material and nonmaterial resources. Until very recently, the literature failed to address the cultural processes that mediate and moderate, and in some cases directly affect, other processes and inequalities, material, symbolic, and place-based. Cultural processes play a critical role in the structuration of the symbolic boundaries and other social processes that promote inequality. Lamont,

Beljean, and Clair (2014) define cultural processes as

ongoing classifying representations/practices that unfold in the context of structures (organizations, institutions) to produce various types of outcomes. These processes shape everyday interactions and result in an array of consequences that may feed into the distribution of material resources, symbolic resources, and recognition—and thus, often contribute to the outcomes considered by each of the three dimensions of

inequality. These processes are largely a collective accomplishment as they are shared representation systems involving dominants and subordinates alike (Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014: 586).

Cultural processes are impacted by the micro-level cognitive processes that constitute them (Lamont et al. 2014). Micro-level cognitive processes concern internal individual thoughts, and they become collective processes through interactions among individuals, and eventually groups, where those cognitive processes create shared ideas and values. Through the emergence of collective thought and action patterns, such as identifying oneself as characteristically and meaningfully different than others, cognitive processes guide the direction of cultural processes, classifying groups and defining symbolic boundaries as shared meanings develop through interactions over time.

As people generate shared classification systems that help them to make sense of the world, cultural processes emerge to sort actions, people, and surroundings into categories through boundary-making processes. Cultural processes structure interactions and available possibilities for individuals and groups alike, leading to varying degrees of inequality and opportunity for individuals based on their social position, which is dependent on the reality the cultural processes create. These processes are largely unconscious, but they help to dictate the distribution of resources, material and symbolic, and the recognition and validation of groups and individuals, shaping available opportunities across the lifecourse. Thus, cultural processes mediate relationships between cognitive processes and inequalities.

The cultural processes that generate social inequalities first construct salient identities and the boundaries which separate them. Social boundaries structure group interactions, segregating people into groups based on perceived differences; they can

by imagined or physical, and they consist of between group and within group relations with a common understanding of where the boundary ends and begins (Tilly 2005).

Black and white races, given as a simplified example by Tilly, have phenotypical markers, and each side has a way of interacting with others in their racial group, a way of interacting with people who are not in their racial group, and shared understandings of those phenotypical markers that divide the black group from the white group. Once in place, these boundaries create significant identities by which people understand themselves and others.

When identities come to be adopted by groups and recognized by both group members and outsiders, collective identities emerge, as do inequalities associated with those identities (Tilly 2005, Lamont and Fournier 1992). The social characteristics associated with particular identities, particularly identities associated with binary or multiple, mutually exclusive categories (i.e., man v. woman, black v. white, rich v. poor), are employed in almost every social interaction. People employ identity-specific scripts to interact with those who are similar to or different from them, and without a clear understanding of a person’s identity, people become uncomfortable because they do not know how to act in a way they feel is appropriate (see Butler 1990). Beyond interactional norms, identities create wholly separate lived experiences, social networks, and resource access for respective groups. These differences connect identities to particular positions on a power hierarchy, in which identity groups with greater power have an advantage over those with less. Through identity differences, social inequalities solidify.

By defining group boundaries and designating social values and rules of operation, cultural processes impact inequality indirectly and directly. Indirectly, cultural processes impact inequality-producing social processes related to the control and distribution of material (e.g., closure, exploitation) and non-material resources (e.g., distinction, symbolic violence) as well as socio-ecological processes (e.g., segregation, social isolation). In this situation, cultural processes have a more distal effect on inequality than the more immediately connected social processes. Thus, cultural processes serve as moderators in the relationship between these social processes and inequality, exacerbating or lessening the impact of the social process depending on the context.

Cultural processes like identification and rationalization also impact inequality directly, such as when inequality is institutionalized through the cultural process known as rationalization in which dominant groups formulate standards that benefit their group, sometimes at the expense of subordinate groups. The development and impact of cultural processes vary across history and context, and while these processes may always be present in the development of social inequality, the variation in their unfolding results in variation in consequence.

Several scholars have attended to cultural processes (Lamont 1992, 2000;

Lareau 2003; Blair-Loy 2001) and incorporated culture into studies of inequalities, such as neighborhood effects (Harding 2010, Small 2004, Lamont and Small 2008), but few existing studies attend to specific cultural processes related to the two primary categories of cultural processes Lamont and colleagues defined: identification and rationalization.

Identification

According to Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014), cultural processes fall into one of two groups, either identification or rationalization. Identification describes “the process through which individuals and groups identify themselves, and are identified by others, as members of a larger collective” (587). Through specific identification processes, such as racialization, people are grouped into categories, often with differential power, based on perceived characteristics like skin color. Lamont, Beljean, and Clair, following the footsteps of Brubaker and Cooper (2000), argue for the use of the term identification rather than identity because the latter suggests fixity while the former suggests active processes and speaks to actors’ agentic role in identifying groups. Identification focuses on boundary creation and reproduction in which individuals self-identify and identify others and groups.

Lamont and colleagues note a few specific identification processes including racialization and stigmatization. Racialization, or the process that marks racial difference between people, occurs when people implant meaning onto phenotypical or biological differences. Through racialization, race is given meaning. Lamont and colleagues (2014) summarize, “racialization is a collective accomplishment that occurs through a wide range of interactions” in which both dominant and subordinated groups employ schemas that construct and reinforce group boundaries and hierarchical social structures (589). Racialization acts as both a precondition for material, symbolic, and place-based inequalities to surface, and as a direct causal factor for misrecognition- related (through devaluation) inequality.

Omi and Winant (2014) described racialization as a process which imbues phenotypical characteristics with racial meaning, and over time these meanings gain

significance, identify race groups, and shape social structures as well as everyday life.

Actors share collective understanding of the racial markers, and these markers are used to distinguish groups from one another. While race is considered “fluid” by many researchers (Omi and Winant 2014, Saperstein and Penner 2012), able to shift meaning from one context to another depending on local understandings, racialization produces real consequences, such as boundaries that result in hierarchical power structures that favor some races, usually whites, over others. This hierarchy produces differential access to resources, and, due to long histories of racialization and unequal resource access, many important social institutions, such as education and government, built racial hierarchies into their structures. Structural discrimination is a largely unintentional process that occurs when assumed neutral policies negatively affect some groups more than others (Lee et al. 2006). Through this hierarchical structure, racialization contributes to the development of symbolic, material, and place-based inequalities.

Further, racialization, as well as the class-based segregation that often coincides with race-related power hierarchies over time, can lead to the development of class- and place-based differences in embodied habits and mannerisms that reflect a particular social status with a particular position within an unequal power hierarchy.

Pierre Bourdieu popularized this idea with his concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977). Due to persistent segregation with little interaction with people from other backgrounds and circumstances, each separated group develops a distinct, embodied habitus that 1) reflects their own social position, and 2) separates them from people who occupy different social positions and therefore embody a different habitus. Bourdieu argued that a person’s habitus both binds them to a ground while permanently and obviously

distinguishing them from others, making it difficult to seamlessly interact with groups outside of one’s own without appearing as an obvious outsider. While Bourdieu attended primarily to class, the concept of habitus transfers well into the United States concerning spaces where racial segregation has affected generations of people. In such segregated spaces, distinct cultures, ways of speaking, and embodied habits do indeed develop within, often intertwined, segregated class and racial groups. When groups have minimal interaction with one another, they may develop more than a distinct, group-reflective habitus. Segregated groups may also develop opinions of other groups that reflect an incomplete understanding of the other group due to a lack of interaction.

Such opinions may be ignorantly formed and misguided, built from negative stereotypes and fear. These sorts of opinions contribute to another cultural process of identification: stigmatization.

Stigmatization is the process by which individuals and groups with particular characteristics are negatively labeled, stereotyped, separated, and discriminated against by symbolically defining their differences as undesirable (Goffman 1963). Link and Phelan (2001) extended this definition by placing the concept of stigmatization within the context of power structures as people are segmented, segregated, and discriminated against based on negative perceptions of difference. Both dominant and subordinate groups can be stigmatized (Lamont 2000, McCall 2013), but within a hierarchical power structure, subordinate group stigmas have more deleterious effects.

For example, while rich whites who capitalize on low market values of gentrifying black communities may be negatively labeled as socially unconscious “gentrifiers” who are shunned from the existing communities into which they move, this label has little effect

on the power structure, and should gentrification continue the gentrifiers may soon be surrounded by other, demographically similar, in-movers. For subordinate groups, however, stigmas can reinforce or exacerbate hierarchies. Mentioned previously, the stigmatization of black men as criminals leads to profiling which leads to higher arrests.

These arrest rates promote additional profiling, labeling of black communities as dangerous, and the maintenance of hierarchical power structures that negatively impact black men and women.

Stigmatization is often coupled with racialization and can lead to material, symbolic, and place-based inequality through similar social processes. Because stigmatized groups are often avoided by the unstigmatized, networks may prove smaller and less resourced for stigmatized individuals. The stigmatized may have difficulty accessing material resources like stable living wage jobs due to negative stereotyping, lending them to exploitative and/or low-paying labor in efforts to survive. The stigmatized may also experience symbolic violence and subsequently self-relegation as they learn to see themselves as lesser, perhaps falling prey to self-fulfilling prophecies of poor performance. Through these social processes and many others, stigmatization, alone and coupled with other cultural processes like racialization and classification, affects material, symbolic, and place-based inequality.

Rationalization

The second group of cultural processes Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014) defined concerns the processes of rationalization, or the standardization of rules and regulation and the development of evaluative standards. Rationalization leads to inequality when standards and evaluative criteria favor some groups more than others.

For example, when separate-but-equal laws were created, they were created by white

people with white interests in mind. Although these laws held the guise of equality in their namesake, people of color suffered as a result of the stark power and interest differential and quickly found that these laws actually created both separate and unequal circumstances between races.

Weber (1978) popularized the concept of rationalization as a force associated with modernization, capitalism and nation states, and the development of science and technology. Rationalization focuses on efficient means to ends and appears most obviously in bureaucratic organizations where rule-laden processes guide every step of activity and profess value-neutrality, making it difficult to locate specific sources of inequality within. Lamont, Beljean, and Clair (2014) identify standardization and evaluation as key process within the category of rationalization, and both processes serve to limit as well as create social inequalities.

Racism has been rationalized through the creation of dominant, or hegemonic, ideologies that defend privilege and oppression as products of merit. Omi and Winant

(2014) note that colorblind ideology, the hegemonic notion that the U.S. operates as a post-racial society that affords equal opportunity to all, serves to further oppress people of color by dismissing ongoing inequality as an issue of the past. Colorblindness perpetuates the American myth of freedom and justice for all by shielding the racial hierarchies and subsequent oppressions that are ever-present in the American landscape. Even those whites who do not think they are racist usually hold some racist ideologies deeply seated in their being. Racist rationalizations, or even the refusal to admit racism, further divides racial groups by discouraging intergroup interactions and appreciation and encouraging social isolation and restricted networks.

Lamont and colleagues discuss two specific cultural processes that fall under the wing of rationalization: standardization and evaluation. Standardization concerns the production of rules that promote homogeneity (Timmermans and Epstein 2010). While standardization may be meant to promote fairness and neutrality across the board, it often results in the bureaucratization of society and distribute resources in manners which advantage those who begin with the most resources. Groups who participate in standardization often already have resources (i.e., business elites and government officials). While their efforts may be genuine, the standardization processes they create may, unintentionally or intentionally, benefit them and others like them while taking less care not to harm those who are different. Thus, standardization can easily privilege dominant groups.

The second social process related to rationalization that Lamont et al. discuss at length is evaluation. Evaluation justifies assignments of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot

1991) and “concerns the negotiation, definition and stabilization of value in social life”

(Lamont et al. 2014: 593, paraphrased from Beckert and Musselin 2013). Categorization and legitimation, or recognition, operate as subprocesses during evaluation (Lamont

2012), and these subprocesses may discriminate against certain groups, particularly when other cultural processes like racialization or stigmatization happen in tandem with evaluation. Evaluation can allocate resources unevenly when a hierarchical power structure guides its development, and the outcomes are dependent on the practices organizations, institutions, and individuals use when assigning value.

Deconstructing Inequality

When left to their own volition, cultural processes produce and preserve the hierarchical power structures that generate social inequalities (Lamont, Beljean, and

Clair 2014). However, when attended to with intention, cultural processes can also disrupt and reverse the development of social inequalities. For instance, consciously employed cultural processes can lead to upward mobility for subordinated groups, and these processes can also transform the power structures from which inequalities grow.

Both identification and rationalization processes can be consciously deployed in efforts to deconstruct inequality, or to reverse some of the inequality-creating processes in ways that divert resource distribution to create a more just, equal playing field for all.

Identification

People can consciously employ identification processes, such as racialization and stigmatization, through direct attempts to change the way groups understand themselves and others. These changes can break down hierarchical power structures that generate lasting social inequalities between social groups. The people and organizations who seek changes may work toward breaking down the assumptions and stereotypes attached to specific groups, promote inclusivity in exclusive spaces, and even work to redefine themselves and others. When such processes take place in the wake of unjust identification processes, the shift reflects a process of re-identification, in which people reclassify themselves and others, break down social boundaries, and promote new definitions about what it means to belong to a particular group.

As previously noted, narrative construction and institutional power pose major problems for low-powered groups. The stories of low-powered groups are often told by higher powered groups, and high-power groups may benefit from portraying low- powered groups in ways promote the preservation of the hierarchical, unequal power structures (Tilly 2005, Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014, Marx and Engels 1960). Should low power groups tell their own stories and participate in the construction of narratives

that become widely accepted by society, inequalities related to identity formation, as well as their associated boundaries, may diminish (Price 2010, Parker and Lynn 2002).

Just as symbolic boundaries enforce and normalize social inequalities, they can also be used to dispute and revise inequalities. Through the acknowledgement of boundaries and their consequences, people can observe the production of social inequality and work toward solutions. Boundaries can be taken down through the deconstruction of their justification for their construction (Wolfe 1992).

While boundaries such as those that designate race are well implanted into the shared meanings of society and they are therefore difficult to change, boundaries do in fact change. Tilly states that those wishing to change boundaries can only do so by a) controlling resources, b) lower the costs and increase the benefits compared to existing bounded group, and/or c) create cross-boundary ties that can sustain opportunities and help group members to access and benefit from resources.

Through the identification process of racialization, or the process of assigning meaning to racial differences, racial hierarchies emerge and drive economic stratification, social and political inequality, and racism, overt and covert, in society (Omi and Winant 2014, Burton et al. 2010). Because these complex processes are difficult to understand on an individual level, those who do not experience the resulting injustice directly have difficulty accepting, or even seeing, the problems. Many scholars have employed the experiential knowledge of people of color through storytelling, which allows for new perspectives that can help others understand and empathize with those unlike themselves (Delgado 1989, Bell 1987, 1999). In the absence of knowing what a group of people is like, negative stereotypes easily emerge. When people are racially

separated, they do not often have the opportunity to understand the life experiences from another race group’s perspective. Storytelling affords this possibility, and, when others listen, it has the power to disrupt some of the harmful effects of unjust identification processes.

Rationalization

In an academic effort to disrupt harmful rationalization processes, critical race theory (CRT) began in US legal studies in the 1970s as a growing number of (mostly black) legal scholars began to question the effectiveness of racial reform after the civil rights movement (see Delgado and Stefanic 1993 for an early bibliography). As

“oppositional scholars” (Taylor 1998), these theorists critiqued and challenged the new racial hegemony asserting legal equality for all. Both liberals and conservatives had adopted “colorblindness” as widespread ideology, declaring race a social construct that only carried negative outcomes because race was acknowledged as a meaningful difference. If people could only stop acknowledging race as meaningful, colorblind ideology asserts, then racial inequality would cease to exist (see Bonilla-Silva 2010).

Reforms in legal processes emerged with the colorblind ethos in mind and were initially praised for their ability to ethically and equally promote racial justice (i.e., the assumed fairness of standardized rules and regulations). With closer scrutiny, CRT scholars found that the reforms did not create racially just processes. In fact, many of the reforms upheld white supremacy and made it more difficult for minorities to address injustice. Anti-discrimination legal reforms, for example, were limited to individual, overt discrimination cases in which the victims carry the burden of proof. Thus, cases against structural discrimination were hard, if not impossible, to win because no individual could be blamed and such practices are rarely overt in nature (Carbado and Roithmayr 2014).

Additionally, the inclusion of “token” people of color in political and social power positions gave the illusion that the barriers toward true inclusion of racial minorities had been overcome (Price 2010). The recent election of President Obama further solidified perceptions of a “post-racial” society in which race was no longer an issue that prevented minorities from reaching the same social statuses afforded to whites (see

Omi and Winant 2014). However, upon closer scrutiny, CRT scholars recognized that the social climbs of such token individuals did not represent the experience of all people of color. In fact, tokens were just that: a token few who were “allowed” upward mobility, which some asserted to be a strategic move to quell movements that might disrupt the white-dominant power hierarchy.

CRT scholars recognized that in order to understand and overcome structural racism, historical origins of discrimination and the ongoing experiences of people of color would need to be illuminated to dispel the myth of the post-racial society. Over the several decades following its debut into academia, CRT scholarship developed to address themes specific to the structural inequality of racial minorities: a broad critique of liberalism and ineffective reform, the use of narrative to illuminate experiences of people (minorities) whose voices were rarely considered in policy and public opinion, exploration of race and the roots of racism, structural determinism, intersectionality, essentialism, cultural nationalism and separatism, critical pedagogy, and self-reflective research (Delgado and Stefanic 1993). CRT consciously attended to cultural processes related to both identification and rationalization in efforts to change the evaluations and standards which created racial inequalities under the guise of impartiality, as well as the

racialization and stigmatization processes that led to symbolic and material inequalities alike.

Orlando Patterson (2014) stated that evaluative knowledge concerns the norms and values within a group. Values involve shared preferences, affect toward objects, and evaluative methods can be general or context specific. Values, created through the rationalization process evaluation, possess varying degrees of strength or importance and operate in a positive or negative direction (“attraction or repulsion” [12]). Ultimate values demonstrate a group’s desired ideals, embedded throughout life in both direct and indirect ways. Values, as with the racist values held by white supremacist groups, are not always correct or amiable. Meglino and Ravlin (1988) identified a “feedback loop” in which public values influence increasing individuals (384). Patterson (2014) illustrates the positive potential of the feedback loop by stating, “If people in a formerly racist or sexist community feel compelled always to espouse the value that they are not sexist or racist, this may eventually result in a significant reduction in racist and sexist behavior” (12).

For instance, the AFM in the United States has come under fire in the last decades for its lack of attention to racial and class-based inequalities. In response, a number of inequality-focused off-shoots have sprouted beneath the larger AFM umbrella to attend to some of these inequalities both within and outside of the AFM itself. However, neither scholars nor activists have employed direct analyses attending to the meso-level cultural processes which may in large part create the inequalities they seek to overcome. This theoretical framework can add to the otherwise incomplete

analysis of AFM-related inequalities through its attention to specific cultural sources of inequality.

A Brief Review of the Sociological Research of the AFM

Since its inception, arguably as far back as the 1960’s, the AFM in the United

States has continuously expanded and “diversified” (Sbicca 2015: 675) to embody what is now a highly differentiated, multifarious conglomerate of movements rather than a coherent, single AFM. While this differentiation has often proved successful in tackling distally related aspects of alternative food, this differentiation of movements also serves to perpetuate the segregation that existed prior to the AFM’s attention to racial and socioeconomic exclusivity. As the AFM grows increasingly segmented, rich whites can continue to take separate, arguably easier, paths toward participation in the AFM than people of color and/or the poor.

In the beginning, the mostly wealthy, white-led alternative food movement emerged in the United States in response to the rapidly globalizing and industrializing national food supply (Allen et al. 2003, Guthman 2011). As anxieties about food safety, environmental degradation, and the scientific modification of food became more common, concerned citizens began to mobilize to create a new, “alternative” option

(Belasco 1989). The alternative food movement prized small organic farms over large industrial ones, local over global, slow over fast, and whole over processed (Scrinis

2008, Nestle 2002, Pollan 2006, Allen and Hinrichs 2008, DuPuis and Goodman 2005).

These alternative ways of producing and accessing food were (and often still are) filled with high priced products that are only affordable to those in higher socioeconomic brackets. Thus, the alternative food movement has been criticized for its exclusionary practices that leave out people of lower socioeconomic statuses (Biltekoff 2013).

Additionally, the cultural-dietary needs of many ethnic and racial groups are not filled by the products available at many alternative food markets, and this has sparked criticism that notes the primarily white customer base seen in many alternative food markets

(Alkon and McCullen 2010, Agyeman 2005). While sub-movements and organizations have emerged to combat some of these issues, others lag behind and continue to cater to privileged classes (Alkon and McCullen 2010, Gaytan 2004).

The food justice movement, one offshoot of the alternative food movement that seeks to address inequality issues in both the conventional and alternative food systems, made strides in raising awareness about the disparities many social groups experience concerning food access. Researchers and activists in food justice work showed that people of color, low socioeconomic status, and senior citizens often lack the resources and ability to access healthy foods, and therefore these social groups are at a higher risk of obesity and obesity-related diseases (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). In response to this information, many activists and alternative food supporters initiated new movement concepts, such as the “black markets” described by Alkon and Norgaard

(2009) as farmers markets constructed for and by black people, the acceptance of food stamps, and even the reduced costs and installment pay options for CSA subscriptions.

As noted, much of the AFM is made up of notoriously more expensive products and markets, positions itself in upscale areas, and caters to primarily richer white customers. While the efforts of food justice activists and researchers have brought attention to such divisions and made moves to reduce food disparities in minority communities, the distinct segregation of race and class is still very present in alternative food networks. As much of this dissertation details, this distinct separation of social

groups exacerbates differences and imparts even greater distinctions of experience between groups.

Purchasing food at a farmers market is about more than just buying food—it is a social experience in which consumers can affirm their political beliefs as well as their identities through the practice of consumption (Guthman 2011, Alkon and McCullen

2010, Alkon and Norgaard 2009, Biltekoff 2013). One important aspect of farmers market shopping, and AFM participation in general, is the idea that this participation is superior to buying mass produced, conventional supermarket-sourced goods (DuPuis and Goodman 2005, Hinrichs 2000, Winter 2003). Most often, those affirming their positive actions and identities are white, middle to upper class people that appear to be relatively homogenous. By shopping together, affirming one another’s identities, and practicing homogenous culture in a given AFM arena, social groups use the AFM to solidify social boundaries and affirm their position within a given group. Thus, in the case of white-dominant AFM spaces, it is this normative population who is constructing the “alternative” space and defining the “good” food that the rest of the corporate food dissenters are expected to mimic (DuPuis and Goodman 2005). In many cases, this

“unreflexive” or under-representative construction excludes minorities such as working classes, minorities, and large bodies on the grounds of unaffordability, discriminatory practices, and physical distance (DuPuis and Goodman 2005).

In the recent past, several minority and poor-led AFM offshoots have emerged to address such exclusionary practices, particularly for working classes and racial/ethnic minorities (Sbicca 2012, Alkon and Norgaard 2009, Allen et al. 2003). As noted above, food justice movements in the United States have successful incorporated people of

color and people of low socioeconomic status into the planning, management, and every day practices of specific AFM organizations. Globally, the food sovereignty movement uplifts the cultures, expertise, and importance of people of color, primarily from the Global South, in the face of industrial agriculture (Block et al. 2011, Alkon and

Mares 2012, Via Campesina 2009, Patel 2009). AFM offshoots like food justice and food sovereignty, while often still overshadowed by the mainstream AFM markets and organizations, do provide avenues by which some AFM-related inequalities might be dismantled. The next section explores in greater detail how cultural theories of inequality may be used alongside these movement offshoots to understand and address

AFM inequality appropriately.

The Salience of Cultural Processes to Racial Inequality in Birmingham’s AFM

Organizations often function in ways that stimulate boundary production and maintenance by monitoring who is and who is not part of the organization, part of the group it serves, and/or within the physical bounds that concerns the organization’s activities. AFM organizations are no exception. Many organizations in Birmingham strictly identify what types of people and groups work with and for the organization, the specific characteristics of the people and communities the individual AFM organization serves, and the limits of assistance the organization chooses when providing help for individuals, groups, and even other organizations. This subsection explores how the theory described at the beginning of this chapter both informs AFM culture and is demonstrated within Birmingham’s AFM.

Production of Inequality in the AFM

Both identification and rationalization impact inequality’s development wihthin and outside of the AFM in Birmingham, Alabama. Identification processes leading to

inequality can be found throughout the AFM, in Birmingham as well as nationally. For example, while growing food has long been a survival strategy for low income minorities

(Hayden-Smith 2006; Lawson 2005; Smit, Ratta, and Nasr 1996), those who readily admit to AFM participation consist largely of young, middle class whites (Alkon and

McCullen 2010, Guthman 2008, DuPuis and Goodman 2005). This lack of connection minorities have to the AFM could be in part because of a cultural separation from the concept of the AFM, and the connections between agricultural and the history of slavery exacerbate this separation. The association between agriculture and slavery limits the interest of many people of color who do not wish to live out the emotional pain of the past (Meenar and Hoover 2012, White 2011b).

Identification processes, particularly when coupled with segregation and boundary construction, lead to exclusionary networks in which groups with access to certain resources tend to network with others who have similar resource levels. High- resourced majority groups have access to others with many resources, while low- resourced minorities may only have access to others of similar status. These connections generate exclusive networks in which those with many resources gain access to many more through their resource-privileged networks, and those with few resources may lack connections to privileged others who would be able to build resource potential. In the AFM, exclusionary networks can limit the ability of subordinate groups to access resources and impact food and agriculture policies (Reynolds and

Cohen 2016). Reynolds and Cohen (2016) discuss how people gain awareness of and access to the funders, services, and resources needed to create successful AFM organizations through vast and privileged networks, or networks full of socially and

economically privileged groups and individuals. Thus, those without access to such networks, often also under resourced in multiple ways, are further disadvantaged and may have a more difficult time securing the funds that better resourced, better connected organizations easily amass. Further, Reynolds and Cohen argue that well- resourced groups may have the funding needed to hire staff members whose sole purpose is to seek and secure additional funding. Without the ability to pay fundraising staff, low-resourced organizations may struggle to attract board members, volunteers, and other employees with the skillsets needed to effectively build resources. Because of the boundaries constructed during and after identification processes, exclusionary networks persist until boundaries are breached or broken down to encourage relationships between members of divergent groups.

These identification processes can also limit success due to the assumptions and stereotypes they attach, often erroneously, to social groups. The stereotyping of minority groups exacerbates inequalities in the AFM. Through harmful identification processes which attach sweeping, negative generalizations to individuals, groups, and communities, specific stereotyped organizations and places may be avoided and have a difficult time finding participants and funders willing to join their causes or attend their events. When a place that houses an AFM program is identified as dangerous, potential participants may avoid that place, making it difficult for the AFM program to succeed.

Reynolds and Cohen (2016) discussed one New York market that faced difficulty finding famers willing to vend at a market in a place perceived as dangerous. Multiple respondents mentioned place and social group stereotypes as reasons for AFM programs’ slow starts or failures. Brooke (50 years old, white, female), for example,

discussed the trouble she had recruiting farmers to vend at her farmers market, located in a primarily low-income, black community. The farmers, Brooke explained, were afraid to come to the market because of the negative reputation the community had developed over the years. In these farmers’ eyes, the community was a crime-ridden place, too dangerous in which to vend produce. While Brooke worked hard to deconstruct these stereotypes over the years, she expressed some frustration with these farmers’ assumptions of the community in which she lived and worked. As Reynolds and Cohen

(2016) argued, the fears associated with stereotypes, like those of the farmers who resisted vending at Brooke’s market, are often less rooted in reality than in the

“subconscious, erroneous association of people of color with illegal activities and violence” (102).

Like identification, rationalization also plays a key role in the development of inequality in the AFM. As Reynolds and Cohen (2016) note, “What is problematic is that the uncritical embrace of urban agriculture as a solution to a variety of urban inequities, without attention to the racial and class dynamics that underlie them, allows unjust structures to remain unchecked” (9). Mares and Pena (2011) argued that the white- dominant AFM work as “the center by which all other practices” are understood, thus the evaluation processes of the dominant side of the AFM are widely employed as the status quo, while those of subordinate groups are often given less attention or ignored entirely, thereby undermining the ability to address issues of social injustice (200).

Scholars and activists alike have addressed the imbalance of power rampant within the national AFM (Reynolds and Cohen 2016, Guthman 2011, DuPuis, Harrison, and Goodman 2011, Mares and Alkon 2011). Many activists of color argue that the

failure of AFM organizations and policy makers to include people of color, low-income community members, and other minorities in their decision-making processes creates and intensifies power imbalances when the interests of minority groups go unaccounted. The absence of these voices at the table leads to the standardization of the interests of those with power (the rich and white) rather than regulations that are equitable for all. When standards create privileges for the rich and barriers to success for the poor, structural inequalities materialize. These structural inequalities are built into the operations of AFM organizations and governmental institutions, and because of their seeming neutrality, their inequality-generating mechanisms are difficult to both locate and change without drastic overhauls. Thus, particularly when disenfranchised groups are left out of the conversation for extended periods of time, the structural inequalities that emerge over the years may require great effort to reverse.

Deconstructing Inequality through the AFM

When AFM organizations bring people from different social groups, cultures, and backgrounds together to share and build relationships, negative identification processes can be deconstructed and reversed (Zebrowitz, White, and Wieneke 2008, Lebrecht et al. 2009). Thus, the more encounters and opportunities people have to listen and relate to others with different backgrounds and social positions, the better able people are to reject stereotypes and dissolve the social boundaries which separate groups and promote inequality.

Further, when organizations address the identification processes in which they themselves participate, harmful identification processes may be reversed. Some AFM organizations have addressed the whiteness of their organizations and programs with direct attempts to increase diversity, hoping this increase will ensure the organization

addresses the needs and desires of communities of color (Taylor 2014). However, as

Reynolds and Cohen (2016) note, “Leadership is different from diversity, and without explicitly addressing the demographics of organizational leadership and how this relates to power and privilege, efforts to merely add diversity actually risk perpetuating white, middle class dominance as the status quo” (63). Simply bringing more people of color or low income people into the AFM as participants, while this does encourage the dissolution of social boundaries through exposure, does little to address the structural inequalities present in the AFM, implanted largely through the cultural process of rationalization.

In a context where conversations about race in both formal and informal settings are abundant and growing, such as within Birmingham and its AFM, the feedback loop may offer on avenue by which to shift public opinions and rationalizations of racial differences, and more attention may be given to correcting ongoing racial inequalities.

Food production has been described as an act of resistance, in which those who struggle with culturally implanted inequalities can promote their own upward mobility and to overcome oppressions related to agriculture (White 2011a, 2011b). Many urban agriculture programs seek to foster upward mobility by teaching people how to produce food, job and life skills, and even how to start their own agricultural businesses (Blair

2009, Parr and Trexler 2011, Hynes 1996, Pinderhughes 2003, Feenstra, McGrew, and

Campbell 1999). However, AFM efforts like community gardens have been described as structural inequality-perpetuating neoliberal projects, despite their efforts to address those systemic inequalities which make community gardens and other social justice- focused AFM projects necessary (McClintock 2014, Weissman 2015a, 2015b). These

projects often rely on neoliberal notions of personal responsibility and market compatibility rather than structural change, which would require sweeping, transformative changes that address and correct the roots of inequalities. Some scholars argue that the efforts that do not seek transformative change actually make structural inequalities more difficult to see and thus more difficult to change (Colasanti,

Hamm, and Litjens 2012, Cohen and Reynolds 2014, DeLind 2015).

Transformative Processes in the AFM

As Tilly (2005) noted, while bigotry and identity-related hostilities may maintain inequality, such mindsets are secondary to organizational and institutional structures.

The reduction of bigotry among individuals, Tilly argued, does little to reduce inequality.

New organizational and institutional models, on the other hand, will yield greater change.

When organizations and institutions adopt transformative cultural processes in conscious efforts to disrupt power hierarchies, as seen in several of Birmingham’s AFM organizations, they will be more successful in disrupting and reversing inequalities. For the purposes of this paper, transformative processes concern those intentionally employed cultural processes which aim to unravel and reweave identification and rationalization processes in ways that promote lasting upward mobility, equality, and justice for entire social groups.

For example, granting people of color, low-income people, and minorities in general more space at the proverbial table, at which major decisions are made about the regulation of urban agriculture, allows for the more equitable standardization of the

AFM. With this inclusive structure, the concerns, needs, and desires of those who would otherwise be excluded from policy and regulation construction are heard and

addressed, creating more equitable outcomes than possible with a homogenous group.

Creating truly just and equitable standards requires that disenfranchised groups be included from the beginning, before structural inequalities can be built into organizational and institutional operations. As previously described, these structural inequalities, once integrated into standard organizational processes, can be difficult to locate and change. Thus, it is important to create inclusion on the front end, such as structuring executive boards to include representatives from a number of social groups before a single group standardizes all processes with only their goals in mind.

Transformations of institutional cultures and the cultural processes which create them happens through local interactions (DiMaggio 1992). Locally, groups may shift inequalities related to identification by changing the narratives surrounding identities.

Marginalized racial groups, for example, may seek recognition, inclusion, and representation by countering oppressive forces, revising organizational structures, and changing popular opinions about the group in ways that mitigate the development of inequality. Stigmatized groups, such as racial minorities and low income communities, may actively promote alternative definitions of the identities in ways that change the stigmas’ impact. Similarly, consciously employed rationalization processes can also reduce inequalities when the processes reevaluate groups values and standardize more equitable distributions of resources and recognition.

AFM participants may use everyday actions to stimulate transformative processes that disrupt and reverse inequalities (Bang and Sorenson 1999, Marsh 2011,

Wagenaar and Cook 2003). Doing things such as illegal beekeeping (Reynolds and

Cohen 2016, Brustein 2009), growing food on vacant city properties, and teaching

agriculture in public schools serve as “everyday resistances” (Wekerle 2004) that generate slow, local changes that, over periods of time, can transform rationalization processes and build equality. Moreover, AFM organizations themselves can structure their own organizational processes to embody transformational processes (Reynolds and Cohen 2016, Taylor 2000). There are AFM organizations which use their programs to educate people about systemic inequalities and disrupt power hierarchies. The organizations focused on transformative potential may even address those power hierarchies which exist between teachers and students by using critical pedagogy, popularized by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) in which all those involved in the education process are simultaneously students and teachers (Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Using nonhierarchical, cooperative governance practices and critical pedagogy, these organizations use transformative practices in their organizational efforts to effect transformative social change, standardizing the same rules and values into their own operations that they wish to see in broader society.

Social movements often seek sweeping transformative change through their social change efforts. Food movements which marry social and environmental concerns have been identified as a particularly fruitful arena for transformative social change

(Connelly, Markey, and Roseland 2011, Guthman 2008). For example, the global movement for food sovereignty seeks “fundamental social change, a transformation of society as a whole” by addressing “persistent, diverse and interconnected struggles” related to food production and consumption across the world (Desmarais and Wittman

2014: 1156). As Desmarais and Wittman describe, “the transformative potential of movements for food sovereignty lie in their broad vision for social change, a collective

vision that is shaped by understanding the particularity, diversity and connectedness of food sovereignty struggles” (1157).

Some scholars have argued that applying a food sovereignty approach to AFM endeavors could stimulate structural changes that challenge and transform the rest of movement and global industrial food (Alkon and Mares 2012, Schiavoni 2009, Patel

2009). The push for food sovereignty began with the International Peasants’ Movement as a retaliation to global industrial agriculture’s harmful impact on small-scale farmers in the Global South, promoting instead local markets, fair farmer wages, and community- controlled resources (Via Campesina 2009). While food sovereignty shares values with the AFM, such as local production and environmental protection, La Via Campesina’s food sovereignty declaration (2009) explicitly opposes industrial agriculture regimes in favor of truly democratic systems that advocate the rights and voices of minority groups.

As Alkon and Mares (2012) consider, a more direct employment of food sovereignty in the broader AFM in the US may “radicalize” (351) existing programs to work toward not only creating alternatives but challenging the power of dominant agricultural regimes. Such direct opposition offers greater opportunity for truly transforming food systems. In Chapter 6, I will discuss a few organizations in

Birmingham’s AFM who have initiated transformative processes similar to food sovereignty in the early stages of their work. These organizations consciously employ cultural processes in transformative ways that intentionally disrupt and reverse inequalities by changing those unjust identification, evaluation, and standardization processes which generated and maintained inequalities over long periods of time.

Conclusion

Policy makers and organizational leaders who wish to shift power and status related inequalities could employ critical approaches, such as critical race theory, which attend to hierarchical power structures and offer insight into deconstruction of social status related inequalities. Paraphrasing Fay (1987), Graham et al. (2011) describe critical theory as “concerned with empowering human beings to rise above the restraints placed on them by race, gender, and sexuality” (82). One specific branch of critical theory, critical race theory, incorporates the experiential knowledge of communities of color by integrating the narratives of minority racial groups into the dominant narratives, often featuring intersectional experiences, or the experiences of those with multiple subordinated statuses like black lesbians or poor people of color. Those employing critical theories may critique liberal understandings of power structures, such as those who argue that they do not see race or that the US serves as a post racial society, arguing instead for the specific attention to structural racism and the manner in which race is socially constructed. Through attention to such sources of racialization and inequality, critical race theory offers policy makers and organizational leaders one avenue by which to address racial dissimilarities and revise structures and standards to reduce those inequalities that result from social and cultural processes.

Using critical approaches, such as critical race theory, to contextualize historical and ongoing status based inequalities may help to explain those cultural processes which produce and maintain inequality. As previously noted, little, if any, research on the AFM in the United States attends directly to the meso-level cultural processes which generate inequality within the AFM itself. Cultural theories of the development and persistence of inequality, particularly those offered by Tilly and Lamont, can help explain

why, despite the AFM’s good intentions, movements often produce and maintain inequalities that mimic the hierarchical power structures in place elsewhere in society.

Through attention to the specific cultural processes involved in the production and maintenance of inequality, scholars and activists alike can more accurately unpack the development of inequality, diagnose the sources of inequality’s persistence, and begin to address cultural sources of inequality in ways that make lasting impacts on the distribution power both within and outside of the AFM.

In Chapter 4, I begin my analysis of inequality in Birmingham’s alternative food movement by assessing the historical social and cultural processes that contribute to the ongoing inequality seen in the alternative food movement and the city at large. This contextual analysis serves as a foundation on which I build my understanding of inequality’s roots in the remainder of the chapter.

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

Introduction

This dissertation used an ethnographic and constructivist approach to develop a rich, in-depth understanding of the alternative food movement (AFM) in Birmingham,

Alabama. The constructivist approach required close attention to the beliefs and actions that create cultural processes and the inequalities such processes produce. The ethnographic approach allowed for deep exploration of the interactions, unique experiences, and place-based characteristics which created Birmingham’s cultural history and current social context related to the AFM.

The ethnographic approach involved a series of data collection and analysis methods including grounded document analysis of local food market websites, windshield/community observation, artifact analysis, participant observation, and in- depth interviewing. For each of these methods, I modified the grounded theory analytical approach to suit the nature of the data collected at each step. In this modified approach, I employed both ethnographic and grounded theory techniques to guide my data collection processes toward saturation. I employed ethnographic methods, participant observation and interviewing, with recursive data collection and analysis throughout my time in the field—true to grounded theory guidelines (Charmaz 2014).

I begin this chapter with a description of my epistemological and ethical approaches. Next, I detail data collection strategies, including sampling approaches and ethnographic methodologies used, during multiple stages of research. Finally, I explain how I conducted analysis, ensured validity and reliability, and undertook ethical and political considerations.

Epistemological Approach

Operating from a largely interpretive perspective, this research project explored the unique perspectives of individuals, recognizing differences and specific lived realities as important components of social position and place, both integral components that lead to the development of the segregated AFM.

To best appreciate these differences, a deep knowledge of the field of study as well as the development of respondent trust is necessary. Participant observation began with strict observation. During this stage, I observed communities and AFM programs by driving around and gaining a sense of the field. Later, I incorporated participation into observations, where I participated as a shopper and by-stander at markets and other community spaces. Over time, I met community members, organization leaders, and others who served as key informants, or people who helped me navigate the communities, and I slowly moved from an outsider to an insider by building rapport and establishing trust. The friendly conversations, informal and formal interviews, and passive observations that occurred in the initial stages of research helped me to gain access and establish an ongoing rapport with members of multiple communities and

AFM organizations in the city.

Ethical Approach

While steps were taken to ensure respect and reciprocity, I maintained consideration for the consequences my social position might have on my perspective. I also remained considerate of how my social position might affect the depth of information respondents who differed from me were willing to provide. As a Birmingham native, I have seen the citywide food system change and bloom into what many interpret to be a productive and economically-sound business venture. My experiences

in the alternative food system, as a consumer, student farmer, and market vendor have shaped my understanding of the local food movement. However, I also recognized that my experience and privilege as a white woman in the racially charged southeastern

United States served to obstruct my perspective on the minority experience. While my privilege may have helped me to gain entry and insight into the higher SES markets, it hindered my ability to truly understand the perspectives of those who live under drastically different circumstances than those in which I grew up. Precautions, such as member checking and discussions with key informants, were taken to acknowledge and overcome these hindrances to the best of my ability throughout the research process.

Ongoing personal memoing, transparency of the research agenda, and the use of the

University of Florida’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) were also employed to maintain reflexivity and ethicality.

Data Collection

The data collection process occurred in multiple stages spanning over two and a half years (January 2015-August 2017). Each stage employed a different toolset of methods and associated analysis appropriate for the level of depth and type of data necessary for the specific stage of research. Beginning with simple observation in the early stages and slowly increasing my presence and involvement as I progressed into the later stages of research, I grew into the field and developed the trusting relationships necessary for ethnographic work over time. After the following brief overview of the study site, I will describe each data collection stage, in chronological order of their collection.

Study Site

Birmingham, a city in a region of the US understudied in reference to food justice and food sovereignty, offers a lens into how black and white Southerners navigate alternative food in ways that sustain Southern food cultures while promoting environmental, economic, and personal health. Birmingham serves as a rich field in which to observe the complex relationship between the AFM and community characteristics. The racially divided southeastern region of the United States has a reputation for continued, off-the-record segregation (Frankenberg 2009). This segregation, while not uncommon in other regions of the US, is particularly stark in

Birmingham, Alabama, a southern city well known for its history of racial violence and oppression (Garrow 1989, Manis 2001, Wilson 2000).

Birmingham, Alabama began as a boom town, emerging quickly as a major producer of the US supply of steel. While Birmingham never had a plantation culture as a result of its post-Civil War emergence, the city has always been segregated. Since its inception, Birmingham’s residents have been divided into certain types of communities, starkly dividing racial groups. Even after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, an era in which Birmingham has a sordid history, residents failed to integrate into the same neighborhoods. To this day, white residents tend to populate the south end of town, while the city’s approximately 70% black population fills in the west, north, and east sides (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Through this ongoing segregation, the habitus

(Bourdieu 1977) of residents in black versus white communities develop quite differently. The different habitus of black and white communities prevent residents from fully integrating into communities unlike those in which they were raised, thereby reinforcing difference and ongoing segregation (Henson and Munsey 2014).

Because of this history, as well as its booming and highly differentiated alternative food market system (Henson and Munsey 2014, Lamichhane et al. 2015),

Birmingham serves as a prime location for exploration of those research questions previously listed. The historical separation of people by both race and class in

Birmingham led to a variety of neighborhood-specific subcultures (Henson and Munsey

2014, Lamichhane et al. 2015). Based on the studies of Bourdieu (1977) and others

(Bridge 2006, Webber 2007, Henson and Munsey 2014), each of these location-specific subcultures may prove to have a different habitus, or embodied way of behaving and reacting to their surroundings. As a result of such differences, various communities and community-based AFM organizations may respond to the AFM and local food-related concerns in a way that differs from others in other locations around the city.

Until very recently, most AFM efforts in Birmingham promoted a white, upper/middle class approach, offering charitable assistance and education to low income areas through a variety of urban gardening projects in neighborhoods and schools across the city. While it is difficult to assess how much these projects have affected the people they serve (many of whom are still in middle and high school), the projects were largely created and managed by groups of white people. In the last several years, a variety of programs with black leadership have emerged to address community needs as the community identifies them. While many of these black-led projects operate with values similar to that of white AFM programs (i.e., environmental protection, local food production and consumption, etc.), their approaches and relative successes could differ from white organizations.

Ethnographic exploration early in this project’s design found that multiple participants felt there were two distinct sides to the AFM: one black and one white. This dissertation thus explored the differences between white and black AFM projects, uncovering divergent cultural processes and inequalities related to segregation within and outside of the AFM. Birmingham’s historical and ongoing segregation, as well as its vibrant and growing AFM, made the city an ideal site for fieldwork concerning the cultural processes leading to inequality in the AFM.

Ethnography

Following a brief “windshield test” study, in which I drove around and observed

Birmingham communities with minimal participation or interaction with others, this study began with traditional ethnographic methods, participant observation and in-depth interviews with individual respondents, in the early fall of 2015. Over the years, a variety of themes emerged in from the data, many of which were strikingly different than those sensitizing concepts I had originally included in my proposal, including the intriguing differences between black and white sides of the city’s AFM. During the ethnographic data collection process, I interviewed a total of 42 respondents about their AFM experiences in the city, and more than half mentioned striking differences between the programs in place in segregated areas. Of these 42 respondents, 32 were women (14 black and 18 white) and 10 were men (6 black and 4 white). I discuss these procedures in detail below.

Windshield test and pre-immersion

In the fall of 2015, I conducted a “windshield test” of the city of Birmingham.

These tests involved driving around each community and making observations of broken windshields, structural quality, abandoned buildings, and perceived

demographic characteristics of several racially segregated communities within the city limits. During these tests, I visited farmers markets and conventional grocery stores, speaking only informally to community members as I was spoken to. Following the windshield test, I slowly transitioned from a strict observer to a participant-observer. I participated in public events, and I met potential key informants that I returned to during later fieldwork for more formal interviewing.

After each time in the field, I wrote fieldnotes immediately upon my exit. After writing the fieldnotes, I documented changes in my perspective of the places and people, identification of initial ideas, and notes on my analysis of my experiences in the form of memos. These initial interactions and memos provided grounds for the subsequent stages of research.

In winter of 2015, I began to conduct semi-structured, in-depth, one-on-one interviews with AFM organization leaders. The questions asked during these interviews were relevant to the specific individual’s position in the community and/or AFM in

Birmingham. I conducted 6 interviews during this pre-immersion period. These interviews lasted between 20-90 minutes, were tape recorded, and then transcribed.

Following transcription, the interviews were analyzed using line-by-line coding (which I will describe in detail in the section on data analysis). Interview notes and memos were also drafted as critical data pieces. During this “pre-immersion” period, I had yet to move to the study site for in-depth ethnography. The pre-immersion stage allowed me to continue to build relationships with key informants, better understand the context of

Birmingham’s AFM, and recognize the concerns and divergent experiences of

Birmingham citizens. During the pre-immersion period, I established rapport with key

informants, community members, and organizational leaders from a variety of communities and AFM organizations across the city.

During the pre-immersion period, I also conducted archival research on

Birmingham’s history in which I examined the newspaper and media archives related to

Birmingham’s development over the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, available in the Southern History Department of the Birmingham Public Library. I photocopied all of the archives relevant to my work, and I coded them for emergent themes and wrote a long memo recording the history I gathered from the archival data found in the library.

With this memoed history, I gained a clearer understanding of how Birmingham’s communities shifted to reflect the dynamic, yet persistently segregated, city it is today.

Such information helped to contextualize the distinct cultural processes and related inequalities that I will discuss in Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Immersion: interviews and fieldwork

The majority of my fieldwork took place in the summer and fall of 2016. In my six- month residence, I made many connections, conducted the majority of the formal interviews, and uncovered several concepts important to community members that I had not previously considered in my list of sensitizing concepts. I had many impactful experiences, both positive and negative, that changed my perspective of the field,

Birmingham people, and myself, both as a researcher and a Birmingham resident.

In May of 2016, I moved to Birmingham to be an active participant in the local

AFM, fully immersed in the larger Birmingham community. I shared an apartment in a mixed-income neighborhood on the south side of the city, and while my neighbors were predominantly white, there were a number of black, Latinx, and Asian individuals and families living on my street. To continue to build trust and rapport with the respondents

and informants I had met earlier in the research process, I spent the first month of my immersive experience volunteering with various AFM organizations, having informal conversations, and attending farmers markets and AFM events across the city. During my time as a participant observer, I took thorough fieldnotes after each time spent in the field, and I wrote memos weekly to detail my experiences, emotions, and shifting ideas.

These writings allowed me to move between data collection and preliminary analyses throughout my time in the field, fulfilling one critical component of the constructivist grounded theory approach Charmaz (2014) described, detailed in the analysis subsection to follow shortly.

Sampling Strategies

Purposive sampling was used in early stages of participant observation to gain an understanding of community member and organization leader perspectives on important concerns related to the city’s AFM. These initial interviews also served to identify important key informants for consultation throughout the research process.

Local chefs, farmers market organizers, urban food development organizations, and non-profit employees participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews, lasting 30-120 minutes. These interviews were tape recorded and transcribed, removing all identifying information, before deleting the audio recording to protect respondent identities. After these initial purposive interviews, as is common in ethnographic work, snowball sampling was incorporated into the sampling strategy, in which respondents and key informants identified others who might have valuable contributions to the study.

In early June, I began to recruit new participants from a compiled list of potential respondents gathered during other interviews and conversations. This snowball sampling strategy quickly amassed a pool of willing respondents, and by the end of the

summer, I had completed 22 additional interviews. By December of 2017, I had completed all interviews with a total of 42 respondents, some interviewed more than once. Like the interviews in the pre-immersion period, these interviews were tape recorded and transcribed soon after the interviews took place. These interviews lasted between 20-240 minutes, and they were conducted at times and in locations chosen by each individual respondent to ensure respondents’ comfort and convenience.

While interviews were largely unstructured, based upon the individual experiences and roles the respondent played in Birmingham’s AFM, I prepared brief, semi-structured interview guides that differed for each respondent. These interviews held common themes, asking each respondent questions about their personal experiences with the AFM, segregation, food and health concerns, and their visions for a better Birmingham. When respondents provided short, undeveloped answers, I would ask probing questions for more information, using phrases such as “What else can you tell me about that experience?” and “Can you give me an example of what you mean?”

When needing clarification on a subject or concept, I would use probes like “This is my understanding of what you are saying. Is that correct?” These sorts of probes helped me to develop rich, detailed discussions in interviews with each respondent.

Data Analysis

Ethnographic Data Analysis

As previously noted, one critical component of grounded theory as an analytical approach concerns the simultaneous collection and analysis of data (Charmaz 2014). In grounded theory, data analysis occurs throughout the research process, and the early analytical stages help to shape and sharpen collection methods to better address important concepts as they emerge. Thus, while this analysis explanation is separate

from that of the collection description in this chapter, these two processes did not occur entirely separated from one another.

Throughout my time as a participant observer, I recorded memos which detailed my ongoing and shifting thoughts about the observations in the field. These memos helped to shape my primary concerns to fit those most relevant to the issues and experiences shared by respondents. Thus, because I allowed my research process to shift to fit the lived realities of the people on the ground, rather than my questions as a relative outsider to the communities I studied, my research process changed drastically from start to finish. These memos helped me to track my changing thoughts and reorient myself to the fluid research process. I employed reflexivity in these memos, addressing my preconceptions directly and noting the shifts they made as I spent more time in the field. I memoed about expectations and assumptions, checking them regularly against new, grounded awareness of the field. These memos also helped me to identify and understand emergent concepts as I analyzed interviews, and they allowed me to locate unresolved issues in my data. One such issue concerns saturation. Grounded theory approaches require researchers to continue to collect data until they have reached a point of saturation, or a fully developed state in which no new information is emerging when new data is collected (Charmaz 2014). These memos, filled with preliminary analysis of older data’s primary concepts, allowed me consider whether new data generated any new information until I reached a point of saturation.

Beginning after the pre-immersion period in winter of 2015, I began line-by-line coding of interview transcripts, which I continued following every interview until I reached saturation and stopped recruiting new interviewees. I memoed about the

emergent concepts and patterns I located during the line-by-line coding process and began to craft more focused codes. Following the suggestions of cultural and grounded theorists alike (Lamont et al. 2014, Charmaz 2015), I coded using gerunds (-ing words) which depict activity rather than thematic or categorical codes. As Kathy Charmaz

(2014) describes, coding allows researchers to “define what is happening in the data and begin to grapple with what it means” (113). The action-specific style of coding pursued with grounded theory fostered a rich understanding of respondents’ practices, including the meaning-making activities and cultural processes which imbibed the AFM with significance and served to divide black and white movements. Charmaz (2014) suggests using gerunds to demonstrate the emergent performances of respondents, to

“see actions of data…rather than applying pre-existing categories to the data” (116).

Sticking to action in initial coding also created space for respondents to change as the events, time, and places changed, allowing for more realistic variation. Attention to this variation allowed me to move beyond Bourdieu’s consideration of habitus to explore not only how the world affects people but the ways people affect their world as well.

Charmaz also notes that action-based codes prevent “conceptual leaps” that may cause researchers to prematurely focus on an undeveloped category or theory (117).

Ultimately, line-by-line coding is a labor intensive and time consuming process.

However, this form of coding fosters data intimacy, defines unspoken meanings, and generates new directions, comparisons, and connections which guide less time- consuming focused coding once initial codes have been established.

When I began the coding process early on, I organized interview transcripts into

“sets” of data for more thorough analysis. Broadly, these sets were divided into two

primary groups: black AFM and white AFM actors. Within these groups, I separated respondents into three additional subsets: leaders, intermediaries, and public. Leaders signified heads of agricultural organizations and markets, intermediaries were employees or regular volunteers at AFM organizations, and the public signified more passive users of AFM goods and services. I coded sets and subsets separately, using initial line-by-line coding for each to establish emergent actions and meanings unique to each set of respondents. As I progressed, I coded each set with focused codes relevant to that set, however I returned to line-by-line coding to generate new ideas or ways of looking at the data as needed. Throughout this process, I memoed to organize codes and thought processes relevant to each set of data, generating focused codes as patterns and important concepts emerged.

Focused codes represented the initial codes which had greater significance or frequency than others. Focused codes represented either a single repeated initial code, or they depicted a conglomeration of multiple initial codes that signified a common concept. Thus, focused codes often had nuances and/or subdivisions. I memoed about these nuances and continually assessed for whether initial and focused codes should be combined or further unpacked to represent the richness and detail of the data. As focused codes built concretely, I used them to reanalyze each interview, memo, and fieldnote recorded. Consequently, I returned again and again to the same documents throughout the coding process. Thus, while focused coding was a speedier process than line-by-line coding, the reiterations of analyses took a great amount of time. As more examples and patterns emerged, focused codes grew to reflect larger conceptual

categories with rich exemplars of how cultural processes in the AFM led to inequalities as well as the reversal of inequality.

While the grounded theory approach is theoretically different than ethnography, ethnographic analysis is hardly uniform (see Creswell 2013). However, following

Wolcott’s (1990) guidelines for ethnographic analysis, which suggests ethnographers begin with detailed, direct, chronological description of time in the field, I drafted a detailed, chronological description of my fieldwork throughout January 2017. I looked primarily to fieldnotes, memos, and reports to jog my memory, and I excerpted pieces which clearly illustrated specific events and experiences. My description began with my birth and upbringing in Birmingham, including my experience as an actor in

Birmingham’s alternative food movement (AFM) in 2006-2007. I discussed my early research, pre-dissertation, including both experiences in the field and the document analysis I completed in spring of 2015. I described my experiences during the windshield test week of October 2015, my earliest interviews and participant observation during November and December 2015, the summer and fall of 2016, and winter break of the same year. I followed these experiential descriptions with neighborhood and respondent descriptions (sociodemographic characteristics, physical appearance, and personalities), and I memoed throughout when new ideas and considerations emerged. During this process, I sorted recurrent and important ideas into the focused codes and categories which had also emerged during interview coding processes. The processes described above align with Wolcott’s (1994) suggestions for ethnographical analysis: investigate for patterns in the data. Once these patterns have been established, Wolcott argued, the researcher can then turn to theory to support,

further explain, or make predictions about the meaning and futures of the cultures studied.

Validity/Reliability

Since the 1980’s, qualitative researchers have searched for and developed new ways of describing the credibility and trustworthiness of their research that moves beyond the rigid, positivist concepts of validity and reliability (see p.244 in Creswell

2013). Because qualitative research is largely interpretive and often based on subjective accounts, multiple correct answers may exist for different members of the same group.

Thus, reliability loses its power in confirming research credibility. Additionally, what seems a valid, full response to a person on one day could change and prove less valid to the same person on another day, depending on the circumstances that person finds herself in during a given time. Therefore, validity is not always the best concept for measuring research credibility either.

Charmaz (2014) identifies a number of alternatives to the hard-to-pinpoint concepts of reliability and validity from grounded theory analysis. She points instead to credibility, originality, resonance, and usefulness as key evaluative criteria for grounded theory studies. Creswell (2013) identifies other evaluative criteria for ethnography including specification of cultural themes applied to culture-sharing groups, detailed description, thematic derivatives, reflection on fieldwork-related issues between researcher and participants, sensitivity and reciprocity, an explanation of how the group operates, and reflexivity statements about the researcher’s positionality. The varied evaluative criteria demonstrate that qualitative evaluation has no hard rules by which researchers must abide. Many of Creswell’s and Charmaz’s criteria were built into the fabric of my collection and analysis processes. For example, I conducted a detailed

description during both collection and analysis processes; I reflected on issues, sensitivity, and reciprocity through regular Memoing; and I remained reflexive concerning my own social position as both an insider and outsider at relative locations within the field. That stated, I also found it important to address two other specific evaluative guidelines, trustworthiness and credibility, to ensure the quality of my work despite the complications attending to validity and reliability in interpretive qualitative research.

Because of the fluidity of respondent thoughts and opinions, as well as the breadth and depth of individual experience, I find Richardson and St. Pierre’s (2005) reconceptualization of validity as a three-dimensional crystal to be a better explanation of qualitative credibility standards. According to this postmodern reconceptualized definition, the crystal “combines symmetry and substance with an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach.

Crystals grow, change, and are altered…reflect externalities and refract within themselves…What we see depends on our angle of response—not triangulation, but rather crystallization” (963).

Additionally, I drew from Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba’s (2011) definition of ethic- based validity, in which validity is measured based on the authenticity of the researcher and the ethical relationships the researcher develops in the field. By representing the participants’ views in a well-positioned, honest, and self-reflective manner, these authors argue, participants are encouraged to give detailed and authentic accounts, building trustworthy and credible data based on the trust and credibility participants find in the researcher herself. Lincoln, Lynham, and Guba further suggest that self-reflection

offers the researcher an opportunity to assess any buried assumptions she has about her participants and allows her to turn the metaphorical crystal in many directions to understand the myriad of views and dimensions present in the field she studies. By remaining authentic, kind, nonjudgmental, and reassuring participants of my good intentions and willingness to shift to accommodate their needs and concerns, I attempted to establish the trust necessary for respondents to provide credible, honest responses to interview questions. To continually assess for new crystal angles, so to speak, regular memoing allowed for the consistent self-reflection needed to address the multiple perspectives present in the data.

Further, to support reliable and valid data collection processes on a more fundamental level, I used high quality recording equipment, and I took care in transcribing and checked my transcriptions for errors prior to coding. If there were any phrases or pieces of the data that I could not clarify myself, I followed up with participants to clarify their responses.

Ethics and Political Considerations Statement

To ensure that I handled the recruitment and participation processes of all participants ethically, I made my research agenda known, and I honestly answered any questions that participants had throughout the research process. I willingly listened to concerns and suggestions participants offered, developing trust and reciprocity by listening and allowing them to help guide my research process toward concepts they felt were most in need of research. Moreover, every stage of the research process was passed through the University of Florida Institutional Review Board (IRB). The IRB assessed the project at each collection stage for any ethical or political issues that could have harmed participants.

CHAPTER 4 CULTURAL PROCESSES AND INEQUALITY

Executive Summary

This chapter examines the cultural processes that contribute to the development and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM. The central question motivating the research summarized in this chapter is how do cultural processes contribute to the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM? This question addresses how group-based inequalities emerged within Birmingham’s AFM as well as why they persist today. The answers to this question can inform current literature that fails to address the cultural sources of inequality in the AFM, and this knowledge may help to reduce inequalities already in place and prevent others from developing in the future.

The chapter explores the cultural process of identification, specifically racialization, and its role in differentiating groups within a hierarchy of power in the city, solidifying group boundaries to restrict integration in public and private spaces, and ensuring differential access to important resources. Following a detailed exploration of identification, this chapter details the history of rationalization, occurring in tandem with identification to produce unequal groups, through evaluation and standardization practices.

As noted in the literature review chapter of this dissertation, cultural processes lead to the development of inequality between groups of people. Cultural processes like identification and rationalization work alone and in tandem to produce unequal playing fields. When people identify themselves and others as members of specific groups, they become connected to positions within a hierarchy of power based on that group

identification. Racialization and stigmatization, two specific identification processes, demonstrate such negative effects associated with group identification. Rationalization, or the process of streamlining and applying seemingly neutral rules to human activity, often creates and maintains inequality through the standardization of unfair rules and processes of evaluation that privilege one group over others. This chapter explores the ways in which cultural processes like identification and rationalization contribute to the development and maintenance of inequality in the city of Birmingham, Alabama and its

AFM. As I will describe in the pages to follow, the long history of racialization in the city of Birmingham alongside the history of white-controlled institutions, regulation development, and evaluative criteria construction in the AFM created grounds for persistent racial and class-based inequalities that permeate much of Birmingham’s

AFM.

The city of Birmingham has a lengthy history of harmful identification and rationalization processes that led to persistent segregation of black from white races in the city and its suburbs. In purposeful and incidental ways, this segregation led to differential resource access which contributed greatly to the ability or inability of group members to participate actively in the AFM as well as the level of comfort the group members find in interacting with specific organizations. Further, the long history of inequitable evaluation practices and unfair regulations made it difficult for black

Birminghamians to gain equal footing to whites due to the residual barriers, such as those related to socioeconomic status and neighborhood location, leftover from before the Civil Rights Movement. These processes and their resulting inequalities created an

AFM with two unequal sides, one with many resources and one with fewer, where races

are still largely segregated and values diverge. The following sections detail the development and persistence of inequalities in Birmingham and its AFM.

Introduction

Cultural processes emerge over time as practices and classifications, often institutionalized as they are built into the structure of organizations and institutions, that shape interactions between people. These processes can create stark divisions between groups of people, and, as a result of the institutionalization of these divisions, produce and/or maintain social inequalities. Identification, or the process by which people are classified by others as well as themselves based on specific social or phenotypical characteristics, contributes to the construction of social boundaries. These boundaries create competition between groups, and groups fight, often unknowingly, to consolidate resources and protect their social group’s interests. Rationalization, or the production of rules and assignment of worth and value, generates inequalities through the production of rules and standards that often privilege those with the power to create them.

Specific identification processes include racialization, or the division of people into groups based on phenotypical differences, classification, or the sorting of people into groups based on socioeconomic status, and stigmatization, or the negative labeling of a group based on a particular characteristic or set of characteristics. In Birmingham, these processes often overlap and interact with one another to produce salient, unequal social groups.

Rationalization processes include standardization, or the production of rules that homogenize processes while often falsely claiming neutrality and fairness, and evaluation, or the assignment of worth and the definition and stabilization of value. In

Birmingham, rationalization processes occur in tandem with identification processes, and the history of racial and class-based hierarchical power structures led to the institutionalization of racism and classism, and these power structures created standards and values that privilege white, rich people over the poor and black in the city and its alternative food movement (AFM). This chapter will explore in depth the role of these cultural processes in the production of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM.

Identification Processes and the Production of Inequality

This section explores the role of identification in the development of inequality.

Beginning with a brief history of identification, I examine the process of racialization and how it was employed to generate lasting inequality through segregation of working and living spaces. Following the history, I explore how identification led black and white people to make ongoing assumptions about the other group due to limited interactions, stereotyping, and persistent exclusivity within and outside of the AFM. Next, I look toward Bourdeusian notions of distinction and class in the development of inequality, exploring the ways in which segregation and the culture of separation led to the development of specific class and, as a result of historical trajectories linking the two, race-based habitus distinguishing one group from another in and outside of the AFM realm. Finally, I discuss the burden of inequality related to identification and the realities black Birminghamians currently face with the definitions others attach to their race.

History of Identification

Birmingham’s long history of racial segregation and violence continues to impact the city’s racial context. The identification processes of racialization and stigmatization interacted and attached negative labels to people of color in the city. Black bodies were stigmatized, labeled as not only different but less deserving than whites. These

processes fed into classification based on socioeconomic status when city zoning laws and employment norms privileged whites. Whites were provided the best zones on which to buy property, while blacks were given zones in heavy flood zones and undesirable areas worth much less money (Connerly 2005).

Birmingham’s early city planners designed the city to be racially segregated, implanting literal boundaries based on identification processes to keep social groups, defined phenotypically, apart. Prior to the 1950s, segregation in the city was mostly based on legal zoning laws that ordained where blacks and whites were allowed to live.

In weak defense, racial zoning was the urban norm for the US prior to the middle of the

20th century. Less defensible, Birmingham fought to keep integration illegal long after the Supreme Court deemed racial zoning unconstitutional. This limited the property value of black residents’ homes and “preserved” the value of whites’. In fact, much of the legal argument was built upon protecting white residents’ property value. Little attention was given at the time to the diminishing quality of black neighborhoods nor the glass ceiling under which black property values were held. While the racial zoning laws were eventually lifted, the limited opportunities and subsequent low resource pools kept black residents, with the exception of a token few, between lower middle class and extreme poverty. Here, identification processes led to the production of salient inequalities that persist intergenerationally. In this space, racialization and class-based identification processes converge, and the resulting stigmatization and emergent inequalities become impossible to categorize as strictly race or class related.

With low wealth accumulation and little room for social mobility, many black families continued to live in the same areas in which they were once legally zoned.

Those who branched beyond the zones often stayed nearby, filling the vacancies in adjacent neighborhoods left after white flight took to the suburbs.

The case of the Dynamite Hill-Smithfield neighborhood serves as a perfect example. As Connerly (2005) describes in his book, Smithfield once had a high occupancy of white, working-class homeowners. Black families lived a few streets over and were legally restricted from moving into white zoned areas. As whites began to move out of the city, real estate agents began to sell formerly white properties to middle class black people. While some of these sales were in the name of civil rights (a local lawyer was working with the NAACP to build a case on racial zoning to bring to the

Supreme Court), others were simply market exchanges of property that wouldn’t otherwise sell. As whites felt the pressure of black families moving in on what they perceived to be their territory, racial tensions rose. Publicly, whites professed frustrations due to fears of diminishing property value and rising crime (code words used in racial reactionary politics rather than using overtly racist terminology, a process that still occurs today), privately, some whites used intimidation and violence to try and maintain the bleached demographic of their neighborhood. A small group of whites, affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, threatened and bombed several new homeowners in the area, successfully terrifying several out of their homes. This group of home-bombing white vigilantes were the same group of men who bombed the 16th Street Baptist

Church, murdering four young girls on September 15th, 1963 in what Martin Luther King,

Jr. called “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity”

(King 1963).

While the decades following the bombings in and around Smithfield (nicknamed

Dynamite Hill as a result of the violence) brought greater peace, largely following the lift of illegal racial zoning laws, segregation persisted in Birmingham. Although segregation is not legally mandated, and many white communities have large minority and immigrant populations, those neighborhoods that were primarily black in the 1950s remain primarily black today (with the exception of a gentrifying few). Throughout this more peaceful and slightly more economically mobile time period, working and middle- class black families were able to increase their wealth to a considerable degree. Many who had faced multi-generational poverty climbed to a position in which they were able to obtain mortgages and purchase homes. The mortgages were not the same loans that were afforded to whites however, and when the mortgage crisis of the early 21st century hit, it hit Birmingham hard. As part of the “discrimination tax” that plagues racial minorities, lenders targeted minorities, people of color and low-income people who might not otherwise qualify for a loan, for risky subprime mortgages. These buyers lost their homes, and the wealth they had accumulated over the few decades of so-called equality that following the 1960s (Burton et al. 2010). The city’s motion to sue lending groups for discriminatory lending was unsuccessful due to limited causal connections

(Ropiequet 2009), which is consistent with structural racism’s resistance to modern racial equality legal cases. One respondent (Tatiana, 65 years old, black, female) reported coming close to losing her home after an experience with a subprime loan. She was one of the lucky few who did not have to foreclose. As Rugh, Albright, and Massey

(2015) discussed, race and its associated cumulative disadvantage increased the likelihood that black people would be targeted and suffer the effects of subprime loans.

Beyond the mortgage crisis, segregation continues in 2017. Many respondents described the power dynamic surrounding race and class, forged alongside the birth of the city, as a fixed, even flourishing, and integral component of Birmingham’s current social environment. Kristen stated,

Birmingham's a very complicated city in terms of their racial dynamic overall. And you know I'm saying this as a white person and as a white middle class person. My sense, you know Birmingham's sort of still very caught up in traditional ideologies of power. Very sort of colonial ideologies of power. And when you change, just changing the color of some of the power players doesn't change the structure. So the structures in Birmingham really haven't changed a whole lot, and I think it's just what people are used to.

Despite decades of black leadership, respondents described the city’s primary decision makers as consistently white and rich, driven primarily by corporate interests. As Tristan

(39 years old, white, male) remarked, “If you look at who controls the powerful institutions in Birmingham, UAB white, corporations white, UAB and BSC white, corporations white, hospitals white. Political governance is black nominally, but it's still controlled by white people. If you write down all the major institutions in Birmingham and you look at which ones are controlled by white and black people, overwhelmingly controlled by white people. It wasn't, there was black enfranchisement, black people did get to vote, and I think that's very important, but as far as power? And control of institutions? Didn't a whole lot change.” Some respondents, like Eve, felt this was directly the fault of whites in the city, willfully ignorant of the problems related to power consolidation and segregation. Eve (49 years old, black, female) stated,

there's still a lot of racialization and racist ideology that white people in Birmingham are very comfortable with and don't seem to either care or have a problem with being in environments that are clearly all white in a predominantly black city. They don't see how that's a problem. They're fine with their sort of bubble like existence that they can create for themselves.

Other respondents saw this power dynamic as a natural progression of the system in which no one group can necessarily be faulted. Gavin (34 years old, black, male) stated, “I think the system, the current market is set up as such that it's easier to gravitate towards the side with more power, which tends to be more white.” This system is further strengthened by racial segregation in the city, which renders black problems invisible to white social groups who are physically separated from and unable to witness the lived realities of the black and poor. As Maya (60 years old, black, female) remarked, “if you were to go downtown Birmingham and take a picture, you would think there was more white people in Birmingham than there were black because of the people who work downtown in those office buildings.” Life, work, and play for the rich and white are separated from the black and poor.

The multigenerational, enduring segregation continues to produce stark economic differences, with numerous barriers to success for the poor and black, as well as cultural differences that reinforce the social boundaries identification processes originally produced. Because the rich and white have long lived in largely separate spaces from the poor and black in Birmingham, each group developed distinct cultures and embodied habits that both reinforce group membership and maintain divisions that separate. Here, Birminghamians perform Bourdieu’s concept of habitus by embodying specific cultural mannerisms that serve to identify individuals with specific social groups.

Beyond solidifying identification processes, habitus and other cultural differences create communication difficulties between different social groups.

As one respondent (Shelby, 70 years old, black, female) noted, “That's where the whole gap is in the world today. Lack of communication and understanding of each other's culture.”

With new, expensive white-owned businesses emerging at an increasing rate in some of the predominantly black neighborhoods, many respondents spoke freely about the cultural differences that are hard to ignore during the process of gentrification, or the process of renovating a less conventionally attractive urban neighborhood, often in ways change the area so that it is no longer affordable to those who lived there prior to renovations. Black respondents expressed concern that this in-moving of rich whites would increase rent and property taxes for current locals, pushing long-time residents out of their homes, perhaps into worse situations, and a few stressed that even if displacement did not occur, the influx of new people could change community cultures, warping the local amenities and neighbors into something more foreign than comfortable, permanently changing the concept of home and community to those who have spent decades, even generations, living in these neighborhoods.

As Kevin (45 years old, black, male) described,

It's not like these white folks are leaving whiteness where it was and they've come now to be integrated into the black community, that's not what happened. They bring their friends and their selves and their coffeehouses…and they cannot relate to Miss Melba. They have no idea how that conversation would go.

The distinctly different habitus each social group embodies have little to do with the phenotypical differences on which racialization draws its meaning. Rather, the stigmatization associated with racialization, and the long history of segregation based

on phenotypical differences, weave race and socioeconomic status together so that each identification process is difficult to separate from the other.

As multiple respondents reported (Brooke, Lacey), Birminghamians have a more difficult time relating across class lines than racial lines. Those black Birminghamians that have found upward mobility despite the barriers attached to race much more easily breach the social boundaries between the races. However, those who do breach these boundaries often do so at the expense of losing insider status with the social group to which their phenotypic characteristics would typically assign them. As Kevin described,

“And then, you ever hear white folks say, ‘I have black friends,’ and when they say that, it's a certain type of person. You're like, ‘Really, Chris? Chris is your black friend? No.

No, we don't deal with Chris. He separated himself from us.’” Kevin’s analogy suggests that when black people breach the boundary between racial groups so that whites claim them as a part of their group, they lose their status within the black community. Thus, while class can force a fissure in racial social boundaries, this is not without consequence. Class may allow for greater access to white culture, but assimilation into the white culture associated with higher classes may lead to a disassociation with the black community.

The physical and symbolic separation of races in Birmingham, along with additional barriers, economic, social, and political, contribute greatly to the racial segregation within the AFM, segregation so stark to some respondents that they divide the city’s AFM into two movements: one black and one white. Augmented by place- based cultural peculiarities, these segregated movements serve different groups of people with different needs and desires.

“Currently I think there's two food movements in Alabama,” Ashton (29 years old, white, male) told me in the early stages of my fieldwork, “and currently I think they're not related at all. I'm saying they can't be. As I said earlier, there's a way for them to be connecting, but I don't generally see them as connected at all, and I think the reason is class and race…It's always connected to poverty and land for that matter…and if it’s not related to alleviating poverty and having ownership over land then it doesn’t help the community.” Ashton’s direct linkage of race and class to inequality in the AFM demonstrate the effects of the city’s identification processes, permeating even those inner-city institutions which proclaim progressive values and liberal political associations. Birmingham’s AFM suffers from the same unequal outcomes found elsewhere throughout the city.

Identification and Ongoing Assumptions

As previously mentioned, long-term segregation consequently leads to the emergence of cultural differences between the segregated groups, making it difficult for members of opposing races and classes to communicate and understand one another on the same level that they might understand members of the same group to which they belong. Because of the separation, members of each group may formulate assumptions about the other based on limited interactions and secondhand information. These assumptions bleed into the alternative food movement as conflicting expectations that are sometimes altogether inaccurate portrayals of a social group.

When conflicted, one group’s widespread assumptions about another social group may include two opposing narratives. Ashton demonstrated this phenomenon with his description of the “two-term narrative” whites apply to black communities’ cooking methods:

A lot of middle class white folks who are connected to a lot of these middle class white environmental food organizations in town that will make statements like, ‘Oh yeah, but even if you did give them a tomato they wouldn't know what to do with it.’ Yeah, that was actually a quote we got from someone. On the flip side, there's the soul food. So, on one end you're saying they're great cooks, and on one end you're saying they can't cook at all. They cook with greens all the time. They know how to cook.

Ashton singled out “middle class white folks” connected to environmentally-focused

AFM organizations, identifying the group as simultaneously race and class composed.

The conflicting narratives demonstrate that the middle class white AFM participants rely on assumptions, sometimes contradictory, to explain the food behavior of a social group with which they may have limited contact.

Middle class white assumptions extend beyond those of cooking to explain why poor and black people do not attend the same AFM functions they do. Some respondents, such as Edgar (70 years old, white, male) and his friends, questioned whether or not Birmingham’s black community would find interest in the AFM.

“If you look at like the top 10 things that Caucasian middle class people do, farmers markets is on there,” Edgar said, questioning how to improve farmers market customer diversity. “If you look at the top 10 things that black middle class people do, farmers markets is not on there. And so one of the things that we have tried to work on is how do we get diversity into this market? They've got it over there.” Edgar’s assumption about black interest in farmers markets was echoed, more complexly, by other respondents as well. When considering why the most popular markets in the city are attended by mostly white customers, Bridget asserted,

I think one, they don't know about it. I think two, a lot of people don't have transportation. A lot of them think that, in North and Western part of town, as someone who comes from the Northwestern part of town, is more poverty and probably not as educated population as a whole as say over

the mountain or Crestwood or Southside or something…So I think there's less interest in nutrition and it's get whatever's cheapest, stretch out either your SNAP benefits as much as you can or it's people who work 2 or 3 jobs and they don't have time.

While Bridget’s consideration of black interest in farmers markets took more assumptions into account about the low attendance, she and other white respondents did little to acknowledge the cultural and segregation-influenced reasons that black customers might be uninterested in attending a white-dominated farmers market.

However, as multiple black respondents noted, many black community members are quite interested in farming and the AFM. As Kevin stated, “We are the original farmer. Black folk, black women specifically, are the first farmers.” However, due to a long history of racial and class-based segregation, blacks and whites are estranged from the opposite group’s desires and actions.

In discussing black desires and inclusion in the AFM, Eve stated,

But also just, support wise, there's a very strong urban agriculture community and local food community in Birmingham that doesn't really include people of color with intention. I mean, if we insert ourselves then it's like ‘Sure, yeah!’ but it's not, it's clearly exclusive. And that's really based on race and perpetuated ignorance…There's still a lot of racialization and racist ideology that white people in Birmingham are very comfortable with and don't seem to either care or have a problem with being in environments that are clearly all white in a predominantly black city. They don't see how that's a problem. They're fine with their sort of bubble like existence that they can create for themselves.

Further, when discussing why black people choose not to enter spaces frequented by richer whites, Eve stated,

There's a Trader Joes, which they're very reasonable…[but] a lot of poor people don't feel comfortable in wealthy areas because they will be looked at strangely, and they're not welcome. [Poor people] represent that part of life that wealth doesn't necessarily look at. Because in order for you to be wealthy, a whole lot of people are poor, so it’s better to just kind of look at

people who are like you. But that doesn't mean that we don’t want to go, that we don’t want to eat better.

Eve’s statements demonstrate that 1) the black community makes perhaps incorrect assumptions about the overt lack of hospitability of rich whites, and 2) the assumptions of whites, that black people do not want to participate in the AFM or are uneducated about food, are misguided. While whites may not be outright unwelcoming to blacks entering white-dominated AFM spaces, the fact that Eve feels unwelcomed by rich whites shows that such spaces do little to explicitly invite the poor and black to participate. Because of the violent history between such social groups, this failure to invite other groups translates for some as outright exclusion. Black communities may identify rich whites as distinctively prohibitive or unwelcome to black participation because of the not-so-distant history of de jure and de facto segregation, violence, and ongoing resistance to full integration (Connerly 2005). Therefore, to be welcoming to black people, white communities must do more than simply allow participation for black people to feel comfortable attending.

As Kevin stated,

the only thing that the folks who are living in low income areas don't have is money. They have intellect. They have wisdom. They have ingenuity, they have creativity. They just ain't got no money…if I trip you down a flight of stairs and then say let's go run this marathon, I mean, you're gonna have some difficulties.

The high cost of produce and the difficulty of both getting to and finding the time to attend AFM events like farmers markets are only part of the problem, however. In cases like those mentioned above, both money and the history of racial violence combine to create atmospheres in white-dominant AFM spaces that are unhospitable to

Birmingham’s black community.

However, there are multiple black-led AFM organizations throughout West

Birmingham that often go overlooked by the white-led organizations with greater notoriety and larger bank accounts. While still a part of the AFM fabric in the city, respondents noted that black-led organizations generally operate with smaller budgets and less donor attention than organizations operated by mostly whites. When questioned about this disconnect, Winston (48 years old, black, male) noted that black organizations may lack access to resources, and further, they may lack access to the knowledge of where to find more resources. The city, Winston added, also tends to white and mixed-race areas to a greater degree than predominantly black areas.

“You get more resources on the south side, downtown, Avondale, and now

Norwood,” Winston said, “since Norwood is becoming more diverse you get more resources in the area, but where areas are predominantly black you don’t get that level of resources or help. Even though the face may be black sometimes, but you still get more accessibility to areas that are predominantly white or they’re mixed, but in mostly black neighborhoods, you don't.”

Here, Winston demonstrates that, perhaps as a result of whites’ assumptions, black communities and black-led AFM organizations are excluded from the opportunities and resources that are afforded to whites.

Thus, based on the comments made by black participants in the AFM, the reasons black communities do not participate in the white-dominated AFM are more complex than the assumptions whites make about their absence. Generally, the absence is not the result of disinterest or a lack of education. However, as multiple

black respondents mention, when the interest is not there, it may be the result of the history of racial violence and slavery in agricultural settings.

“There’s still a lot of bad blood associated with black folks and working the land,”

Raven (37 years old, black, female) said. “Very likened to slavery, very likened to sharecropping, so anything that is like this a lot of my people want to stay away from.”

Shannon (60 years old, black, female) also considered the aversion. She stated,

“It's kind of easy to figure that farming or gardening, one is a part of the experience of being people of African American descent, while some people's memory of it as being oppressive, so they're not really interested perhaps for that reason.” For those who truly are uninterested in the AFM, the disinterest may be less about a simple lack of education or apathy toward the AFM and more about an aversion to practices that oppressed and harmed generations of their ancestors.

Not all white AFM participants are inattentive to these issues. As Carrie (27 years old, white, female) noted,

I think urban farming can be super colonialist and oppressive, and it's uh, being conducted by an organization that's predominantly white and college educated and um, those people are often privileged enough to be in AmeriCorps. They're like, privileged enough to be poor…They don't talk about the history of agriculture, and the history of agriculture is slavery…So, I think urban farming is super problematic.

Carries assertions demonstrate that while many whites make incorrect and incomplete assumptions about black participation in the AFM, some whites have deeply considered the problematic nature of racialization and class-based identification processes alongside violent histories in the construction of an unequal AFM. Excluding this history from the AFM’s teachings in effect excludes the experiences of an entire social group

from the AFM lexicon, further associating the AFM with the experience of whites rather than blacks, making AFM spaces less inclusive.

Identification and Exclusion

As discussed above, the assumptions connected to processes of identification can lead to exclusivity when the assumptions abandon the experiences of a social group and make that group feel underrepresented and unwelcome. Many black respondents reported that whites in the AFM do more than assume—they also exclude, look down upon, and actively segregate from black communities.

As Eve stated, “There’s a very strong urban agriculture community and local food community in Birmingham that doesn’t really include people of color with intention…it’s clearly exclusive…[White people won’t see it unless they want to and they actually engage.” For example, multiple respondents commented on the exclusivity of one white- owned restaurant that had recently opened in a predominantly black community. While a few white respondents reported positive feelings about this restaurant that served many locally-sourced produce items prepared in healthy, whole ways, several black respondents felt the restaurant practiced exclusivity with purpose.

Christina (35 years old, black, female), a member of the community in which the restaurant opened, considered her opinion of the place. “I mean, the folks in there are nice,” She noted.

It's not representative of the needs of the community. Do we need a restaurant? Sure, but we need food that's affordable. The prices aren't affordable. The menu really doesn't represent what the typical diet of a [community] resident person is…I have yet to really meet the owner. He's yet to really reach out to neighborhood leadership.

Eve felt the restaurant did cater to the population it was interested in serving—rich whites—but still went there on occasion despite feeling unwelcome and noticing that the

only other black people in the restaurant worked in the kitchen. “I love the sweet potato biscuits, and the tea is really good,” she said. “It's just so white!”

Other respondents noted double standards in the white versus the black AFM.

When discussing the phenomenon of predominantly white churches entering her predominantly black neighborhood to start community gardens and other AFM projects,

Iris (75 years old, black, female) noted how strange it would be if that happened in reverse, with black people entering white neighborhoods unannounced to implant AFM projects meant to “improve” the community for current residents without first asking for permission.

“And I said to them,” Iris told me,

I said to one of their group’s facilitators, ‘If a truck load of black people pulled up at your house, jumped out, and went to digging and planting, the whole neighborhood would be out there wanting to know, what are y’all doing? So, when you're planting, same difference. You can't be offended,’ cause I said to them, ‘If you're gonna come into this community, let me know you're coming. Cause if something happens, we need to know.’

Iris’s consideration of this differential reaction between whites versus blacks entering the other’s community, as well as Eve and Christina’s concerns about the white-owned restaurant, demonstrate that identification processes allow certain privileges to dominant groups but not subordinate groups, such as entering and changing the landscape without considering the desires of the community they are changing.

Respondents had conflicting opinions on the intentionality of segregation in the

AFM. Some felt that segregation was unintentional, a product of comfort-seeking behavior rather than an issue of discrimination. As noted earlier, Eve felt that the poor avoid rich areas because they feel unwelcome, and they aren’t comfortable, while the rich tend to associate with other rich people because confronting the poor makes them

feel uncomfortable, too. As Winston noted, “I don't think it's intentional per se. I think it's just people generally tend to work with the people they're most comfortable with.”

Others saw segregation in the AFM as purposeful. As Brooke and Lacey (28 years old, white, female) recalled, both farmers and customers were afraid to attend a new farmers market in a black neighborhood when it first opened because of the assumptions they made as a result of the identification processes defining the people and the place surrounding that market.

“I hate to say it,” Tatiana told me, “but I believe segregation is going to still be there, because you always have somebody with a mindset that teaches.” The cultural process of identification, as Tatiana’s statement suggests, is in fact taught. Through this teaching, identification finds its salience over time.

When identification teaches fear and difference, segregation persists and social groups remain stuck with limited exposure to others and differential access to resources, perpetuating a cycle of identification and inequality. Subordinate groups, such as the poor and black, face fewer opportunities, limited access to resources, and more frequent barriers to success than richer and whiter groups. While a few AFM organizations have attempted to change this by including programs in inner city public schools, these programs do little to change resource access outside of the classroom.

As Ashton described,

I think as with everything the food in Birmingham is a tale of two worlds. A tale of two cities. There's the rich restaurants which cater mainly to folks in Highland, Crestwood North, and Mountain Brook, and Vestavia…and then there’s poor communities, which the mainstream narrative folks are saying, ‘Oh we just need to teach them what a tomato is. Or we just need to teach them how to plant a tomato, then everything will be better.’ …The people they are teaching are elementary school kids who are gonna go home and have zero resources or support to implement, if even they

wanted to build a garden, have no resources to do that…And for a lot of the older folks, it's like alright, I'd probably go work a labor job and I get home, agriculture is one of the most intense labor jobs there is. So it's like, we're expecting the people who already take the brunt of the hard labor in the city to take more brunt of hard labor. And not get paid for it.

Ashton’s comment demonstrates that not only are white AFM organizations missing opportunities to truly disrupt cycles of inequality, but identification processes tied to race and class create deep food-related inequalities that are difficult to fix by simply educating and exposing people to the AFM. Thus, even if organizations acknowledge the history of racialization and work to overcome it, class-related identification processes and related inequalities will persist.

Identification, Distinction, and the Importance of Class in Inequality

Multiple respondents noted that it is harder to relate across class boundaries than racial boundaries, likely a result of the Bourdieusian notion of class-inflicted distinctions that lead to an embodied habitus that is near impossible to change or shield

(Bourdieu 1984). To Bourdieu, a habitus is a dead giveaway of a person’s class status.

A habitus mismatched to an environment is difficult to both hide and change. Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is a product of social class. However, because race and class are so deeply interwoven in Birmingham, class-based habitus may be used in processes of identification to assign meaning and assumptions to racial groups as well.

The mainstream AFM in Birmingham is composed largely of white, upper and middle class people. To some respondents, the money the people have makes up for their lack of experience or true interest in the AFM. As Carried stated, “lots of like privileged white men getting into farming they don't know what they're doing, they do it poorly. And then there's like people like me who have 10 years of farming experience working in different farms, and like, I can't get land.” Carrie goes on to describe her

experience working for low hourly wages for “privileged white men,” in which she was exploited for her knowledge. In these jobs, Carrie witnessed a great deal of animal neglect by these farmers, causing her to become vegan out of disgust for their husbandry practices.

The privileges that middle and upper class whites experience often cause their efforts to include poor and black neighborhoods in AFM programs to fail. The habitus developed by middle and upper class whites differs from that of poor and black people, and the resource differences that emerged through identification and segregation processes create very different lived realities for each group. While members of the white group may be able to afford to pay for the higher costs associated with living wages for farmers and ethical and healthy growing practices, poor black families often struggle to afford even the cheapest conventionally grown produce. Whites who want to simply increase healthy food access without addressing issues of poverty may see their

AFM programs quickly fail.

As Ashton recalled,

[A local food grocery store] was one of the first businesses that was started in Avondale. Got city subsidies, was supported by [revitalization organizations]. I had a friend who also has a pretty decent non-profit salary, who went there, and it was closing, right? And it had eight dollar bags of collards. This is in a low income black neighborhood. Nobody can buy that. And, of course, it went under, it ended up closing cause it couldn't afford [to stay open]…Anybody who had any sense could have told you that no way this business was gonna survive.

Ashton’s description of this unsuccessful grocery store demonstrates the disconnect between not only resource levels of different social groups, but also the divergent values of people acting on either side of the racially divided AFM. While Ashton describes the white movement’s good intentions as misguided and unproductive, he

notes that the black AFM’s focus on alleviating poverty as a root cause of the lack of

AFM and healthy eating participation could prove more successful.

Ashton stated, “But that is the strategy of a lot of the middle class white food movement. Versus the other movement is how can we use this food movement to eliminate our own poverty?” This attention to divergent approaches connects processes of identification to inequality in the AFM. Each side identifies a specific class-related approach as the appropriate strategy, yet each side’s strategy may not be appropriate for the other because of the differences that emerged over time to create unequal communities with different needs and desires.

These divergent needs and desires may help to explain why, as some respondents reported, white AFM organizations have trouble recruiting black community members into positions of leadership and as program participants, particularly when such positions are unpaid, as in board positions or training programs. For example, one organization that implements a yearly food preparation work training program struggles to recruit and retain participants.

Jessica (28 years old, white, female) described the issues surrounding this program.

The [organization] that was sending us people, they were part of the youthful offenders program, and they were like I don't have a social work degree...And you know it was like the 19-year-old kid…he was like…‘Well why can't y’all pay me?’ And I was like, ‘Well because that's not the point of this program, like. If you were gonna go do this class at [a community college] it would cost you $7000.’…I don't think it's so much of a white thing as like an upper middle class perception of what internships are…The concept of an unpaid internship to [a poor person] is absurd.

As Jessica described, white upper and middle class people have a very different perception of unpaid internships than poor and black people. As Carrie mentioned,

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whites often have the privilege to take on unpaid or low paid work that will help them get a job in the future because they have a safety net of financial support from their families or their savings that allows them to work for little or nothing during training periods.

Poor, black people may face rent payments and other bills without this safety net, making unpaid internships nearly impossible to complete, even if that internship would help them in the long run.

The process of identification based on class status breeds a habitus and distinctive taste that is class-specific. This taste distinguishes people as insiders to certain class groups and outsiders to others. As other researchers have identified

(Warde, Martens, and Olsen 1999, Johnston and Baumann 2007, Warde and Gayo-Cal

2009, Warde, Wright, and Gayo-Cal 2007, Atkinson 2011), middle and upper classes practices cultural omnivorousness while members of lower classes are less afforded the luxury of enjoying cultural practices and experiences that are dominated by the upper classes. For example, while multiple white respondents reported shopping in both white and black-dominated farmers markets, enjoying both expensive dishes at high end restaurants and collard greens at “soul food” restaurants, and comfortably entering black spaces to set up and frequent new businesses, poor and black people may face too many barriers to participate in the cultural experiences claimed by upper and middle class whites.

For example, while whites may have access to both cheap collard greens and expensive avocados in their grocery stores, black communities’ food options may be more limited. Jordan (39 years old, black, female) described the consequences of one

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program inattentive to the process of identification and the resultant lived realities experienced on either side of the social boundary. She noted,

I work with a group. They came and worked with some kids I was working with and they was introducing them to avocados. I love avocados. But my issue was, I said, ‘They can’t access them in this community.’ She's like, ‘What do you mean? Every grocery store sells avocados.’ I said, ‘No they don't. Especially not the one that's in this community.’ And I said, ‘Well where are you shopping?’ and she said, ‘Well I shop at Whole Foods.’ I said, ‘Did you see a Whole Foods when you came over here?’

Jordan’s story demonstrates how the interaction of class and segregation produce environments unequipped to provide some communities the opportunity to practice cultural omnivorousness. In segregated spaces with limited access to healthy options, people may not have the ability to procure and consume higher cost items like avocados or organic kale, even when they are able to pay for them. If foods are unavailable in the community, community members without access to transportation or little time to drive elsewhere for food cannot purchase and prepare those items.

Items like kale and avocados are more than just expensive foods, however.

Many food items, and even organically produced foods in general, are used as status symbols (Guthman 2002). Conspicuous consumption occurs when people purchase luxury or expensive items to demonstrate class status, often as an attempt to appear as though part of a higher-class strata than they are in reality (Veblen 1994, Bourdieu

1984, Corneo and Jeanne 1997). This process allows individuals to attempt to breach the social boundaries implanted by processes of class identification.

Several respondents discussed specific AFM spaces, such as farmers markets, as locations in which conspicuous consumption practices occur. One farmers market heavily attended by middle and upper class whites was described as a social space, a

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place to see and be seen by others in effort to demonstrate one’s belonging to the AFM and one’s ethical purchases of healthy, local goods.

One respondent, a wealthy white man, demonstrated the lofty ethics such conspicuous consumption efforts seek to portray. Gary (60 years old, white, male) stated,

I think that we as a nation need to wake up and change regulations on how livestock is handled and taken care of and processed. And it's going to be a little bit more expensive, and I think that we've got to wake up to wanting not just the cheapest food but you need to get wholesome food. That the farm workers are paid a living wage and farmers can work in environments where they're not poisoning themselves and that the food can be truly nutritious.

Gary suggests here that cheap food is by nature both unwholesome and unethical.

When pressed to discuss how poor families might deal with these standards, Gary simply stated that people are too comfortable paying so little for food, and they need to get used to paying more for food that has a higher nutritional content.

For some, such as those who shop at expensive, white-dominated farmers markets, paying more for food is already integral to their shopping experience. Tanya

(28 years old, white, female), a white farmer, described the farmers market’s clientele in a positive light.

“There's a really, really great customer base at [that market],” Tanya said,

“because at a lot of markets you have people who are angry at you for the price if you're you know, a farm using organic production methods, they don't understand it.” While

Tanya appreciates the depth of what is perhaps conspicuous consumption at the market, other market vendors see through the conspicuousness, and perhaps feel annoyed that the consumption isn’t even more conspicuous to support farmers rather

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than prepared food vendors. Carries describes the shoppers in a less agreeable light than Tanya.

“The people that don't buy from [farmers] are those like mostly are just like drinking their [expensive sweet tea],” Carrie said. “It's like a status symbol. You know they have their sunflowers, that's the one thing they bought from a farmer, and that's like kind of it.” Carrie’s frustration with the failure of consumption patterns to support farmers at the farmers market unveils the conspicuous consumption of market shoppers. In my observations, her frustrations are warranted. While farmer’s stands were certainly frequented by many shoppers, most of the market’s attendees walked around with mason jars of tea, boxes of half eaten donuts, and other prepared food items rather than fresh produce. Thus, even when produce is available and shoppers can afford it, many still fail to purchase it. Yet whites continue to assume that poor and black communities are less interested in healthy food and less likely to consume fresh food if given the opportunity.

While identification processes define insiders and outsiders to produce exclusive boundaries, distinguish class and status, and attach assumptions about behaviors to social groups, these definitions, as previously discussed, may be misguided and altogether incorrect. The notion that poor and black people are more likely to engage in unhealthy eating habits than whites is a misguided assumption, evidenced by the frequency with which wealthier whites purchased sugary processed foods rather than produce at the farmers market.

Further, the concept of what is healthy versus what is not has changed throughout history. What was once defined as unhealthy food and provided to black

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slaves, like ox tails and other once discarded cuts of meat, is often now heralded as gourmet cuisine. Tatiana described how the process of identifying people and the stigmatization of foods can occur in tandem.

With neck bones and potatoes, they're going, ‘I'm not gonna feed my children that. Yeah right.’ …There's a lot of things, I guess you'd say a stigma attached to it. Only poor eat that…Chicken wings used to be a thing that you only ate the breasts. You didn't want the chicken wing. Now what are they? Five pounds you have to pay $12?

Tatiana, a black woman in a black neighborhood, deeply identified with organic growing and gourmet cooking methods. She refused to allow identification processes to define her, and she made sure I knew it.

“I was taught about lamb,” Tatiana explained.

My nutrition teacher was talking to me and she was trying to say without being said that blacks are not healthy and I said, ‘I beg to differ mam.’ Because my mom, she cooked, we had different things. I said, ‘We used olive oil,’ and her eyes got big, and I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ So I said, ‘I was taught about olive oil.’

While Tatiana’s experience mirrored that of what richer whites might claim as their own food culture, Jordan was careful to note that food cultures are inherently different, and this makes them just that—different, not better or worse—and to ignore these differences in an effort to push one brand of healthy on a variety of cultures with different needs and desires is just as much of a disservice as is identifying food culture on hierarchy of healthy and ethical.

“I think it goes back so far in a sense of you have,” Jordan explained.

So when you have black people who are older blacks, who are used to eating certain things where it may be chitlins or pig feet, things like that. So that’s a cultural thing that dates back to slavery. A lot of spices, flavorful food…So I think sometimes not understanding or having somebody at the table that's a part of that culture, to say yeah lets have

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the healthy choices, but you gonna have to have this this and this also. I wouldn't go into an Asian community and not provide rice.

Jordan’s notion of inclusion, bringing someone to the table that can speak for a given culture, responds directly to one of the outcomes of identification processes described previously: exclusion. By intentionally including people who are part of subordinate classes or racial groups in decision making processes that affect their communities, such as when designing AFM programs or healthy eating initiatives, some of the negative outcomes of the identification process might be mitigated. Further, this inclusivity may slowly break down those boundaries which prevent interaction and perpetuate identification as well as those inequalities the processes produce and maintain.

Identification and the Burden of Inequality

Despite the fact that dominant groups have the greatest weight in defining group parameters and assigning characteristics to social groups during the process of identification, it is the subordinate groups who have limited ability to shift dominant narratives that bear the greatest burden. Subordinate groups face more barriers to success, receive fewer opportunities, and get by with less access to the resources that dominant groups regularly have at their disposal. Further, the burden of shifting boundaries and redefining negative group assumptions in their favor falls on the shoulders of subordinate groups.

“The burden of discomfort has fallen on our community,” Alyssa (35 years old, black, female) said. “I mean, we're starting from the discomfort, but if you look at integration. When schools were integrated, we didn't bring little white people to the black schools…I just want to be comfortable in my space.” Alyssa discussed “changing the

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narratives” surrounding race and inequality as one way to combat the negative effects of identification.

“I think we need to work better on those narratives,” Alyssa said. “We use a lot of backwards language. We say the system is broken. It's not broken. It works perfectly. It was created this way. We need a new system. It's working.”

In many cases, combating the identification processes that produce inequality in the city and the AFM means just that: arguing for the humanity and equality of a subordinated group of people. In Birmingham, this group of people is the majority.

Birmingham is 72% black (US Census 2010).

Rationalization and the Production of Inequality

This section details the role of rationalization in the development of inequality.

Setting the scene with a historical orientation to rationalization’s role in inequality, I explain how rationalization processes like standardization and evaluation functioned, and continue to do so, in ways that promote and maintain inequality. Next, I explore evaluation in detail, starting with an overview of evaluation’s role in inequality production, moving on to dissect the differences between white and black racial group evaluations of the AFM itself, extending to black and white evaluations of one another’s groups, and ending on the potential for increased harm as organizations and their evaluations and change or remain stagnant. The chapter ends with attention to the overall process of standardization within the AFM as well as the standardization of specific inequalities that limit the function and cultural relevance of AFM organizations for groups that are not high within the hierarchy of power.

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History of Rationalization

As a result of the long history of identification and the construction of social boundaries that privileged some social groups over others, race and class dynamics were standardized into the structure of the city. The interests of the dominant, albeit numerical minority, group reigned supreme, and the white business class made many decisions throughout the 20th century, even after Birmingham elected its first black mayor in 1979 and continued to elect black mayors through the most recent election of

Randall Woodfin.

As Winston remarked, the city continues to grant white and mixed race neighborhoods more resource than predominantly black neighborhoods, despite the fact that black neighborhoods are often in greater need. With Winston’s testimony, the city’s history of slum clearance and revitalization of only certain ”salvageable” neighborhoods appears largely unchanged (Connerly 2005).

Tristan described the city as more like a feudal state than a democratically governed place. He stated, “Birmingham is a lot like a kingdom with a court…It's a city that is based on who vouches for you where. That's by design cause it makes it easier for people [in power] to control the political and economic apparatus.” Tristan’s comments suggest that despite the political offices shifting in the favor of Birmingham’s black residents, the power remains in the hands of the same group that has held it for over a century.

Christina found the more run-of-the-mill operations of the city government stifling, keeping community initiatives from happen, even when well planned, due to the city’s poor execution processes.

“The plan that we have in place is very well organized,” Christina noted,

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but the execution is not…We have a dedicated department community development, but it's kind of broken, and then each year you deal with whether or not the neighborhoods are gonna get money and then the money is micromanaged. Some of the things that we want to do, such as demolish a home or clear an overgrown lot, just to clean up blight, a lot of that is very hard to work with the paperwork and red tape at city hall.

Christina’s story of frustration with stifled and stymied neighborhood improvement projects demonstrates that the city a) fails to evaluate the improvement of her neighborhood as a priority, and b) uses rationalized standards that make it difficult to clean up the community. Here, we see the negative effects of rationalization when

Christina’s neighborhood is evaluated as unimportant and the “red tape at city hall,” or the standardization of city processes into bureaucratic processes that present barriers, that makes it difficult to get things done and make the community more pleasant for its residents. Christina’s story demonstrates the long-term effects of rationalization. When identification processes mark differences and create social hierarchies, the dominant group is able to standardize, or implement rules and regulations, that uphold whatever the dominant group evaluates as most worthy. In this case, those years of evaluation and standardization may have created a cultural context within city government that sees poor and black neighborhoods as less worthy, thus the city feels less pressure to work with neighborhood organizations to clear blight and improve the neighborhood for its residents.

Iris, who also lives in Christina’s neighborhood, expressed her own frustration with the city’s disinterest in the wellbeing of her neighborhood’s current residents.

Remembering a better, more lively neighborhood in the past, Iris remarked,

We had stores. We had novelty shops. We had restaurants. We had it… but it’s easier to say it's not safe. After a while, and it won't be safe if you don't replace the lights…after a while, no one will go over through that

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area because it's too dark…but some things are intentional to bring the lack.

Iris’s anxiety about the intentionality of the abandonment of her neighborhood reflects a common concern in black communities in Birmingham. Many respondents felt that the city had abandoned their community, a result of the city’s rationalization processes.

When the city does not evaluate a community positively, they may see it as unworthy of investment. Many of the black communities have long felt abandoned, and multiple respondents from these communities expect that the poor evaluation has been standardized into the city’s operations.

Evaluation and Inequality

The AFM’s dual sides evaluate the movement’s most pressing needs and concerns differently. The white AFM holds one set of values, and the black holds another. While some overlap exists, each set of values is distinct, signifying that each group sees Birmingham through a different lens and thusly sees different sorts of problems that require different solutions.

Although whites are the numerical minority in the Birmingham city limits, whites dominate AFM participation and therefore produce the dominant ideology to define the city’s AFM status quo. Like much of the rest of the nation, the mainstream, white- dominant AFM in Birmingham employs middle-to-upper class experiences to define its parameters and values. Because middle and upper class whites were among the first to popularize the AFM as a social movement in the city, white organizations and AFM consumers set the precedent for others as the movement progressed. Thus, even as the AFM grew to encompass people of other class and racial statuses, this precedent

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remained the dominant ideology. Alternative ideologies that challenge the status quo remain subordinate.

The black segment of the AFM, which emerged later than the white segment, largely due to resource inequities, employs a different set of experiences that both employs and challenges the status quo set by white AFM actors.

White Evaluations of the AFM

In the early days of Birmingham’s AFM, circa 2000-2002, AFM participants glorified local produce and family farms, aimed to preserve southern and farm culture, and romanticized values of the past as a nostalgic, but perhaps misguided, ideal.

When discussing the important aspects of the AFM, white respondents frequently discussed the importance of purchasing local produce, often as an even more important concern than buying organic or chemical-free produce. The white-dominant segment of the AFM evaluates local food as superior to food grown from a distance, usually defined as more than 100 miles away from Birmingham. This AFM also identifies local family farms as economically-supportive and, implicitly, morally superior to large, conventional farms and farms further away from the city.

By placing “the local” on a proverbial pedestal, the white AFM identifies a moral hierarchy in which local things are seen as more important than non-local things. The prevalent use of twitter hashtags like “#LocalisBetter” (18.6k+ uses on Instagram) and

“KnowThyFarmer” (4.6k+ on Instagram), popularized by one white-dominant farmers market, demonstrates the widespread evaluation of locality and familiarity as culturally important to the AFM. This same market, attended by over 10,000 participants per week in the busy summer months, describes its vendors as selling “selling the best produce for their family, neighbors and customers,” highlighting that not only are the products

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grown locally, but they are sold locally as well, attending to the small range nature of the family farms that the market aims to support.

Family farms, or farms that are managed by families and perhaps passed between generations, were described as the ideal source of local food by several white respondents. In defining the meaning of local food, Bridget described a local farmer from whom she purchases produce. She stated,

He's the poster child of [local food]. He is your typical Alabama small family farmer. He's worked a regular job and farmed at the same time just because it’s so financially difficult. The other part is he's farming on land that's not his…Because land is so expensive and not everyone can afford it, especially if you're a high school teacher, you know, land's expensive. And you're trying to raise children, you know…They have two daughters who will never farm. And you know, it makes me happy because I know them, but it also makes me feel sad because I know that once he becomes physically unable to farm, they’re not gonna farm anymore.

While Bridget recognized and appreciated the difficulties associated with small scale farming, she continued to evaluate it positively and somewhat nostalgically as an ideal farm form. These small family farms, Bridget claimed, pass their knowledge down to younger generations, sometimes not even of their own bloodline. Speaking about another family farm to which she was connected, Bridget stated,

I'm grateful for them because they are passing along what they know. They're like natural teachers in that regard, and they process through a lot of young people who work on their farm… a lot of young people come through, and [the farmer is] just teaching and pouring into them everything he can about how to grow.

To Bridget, the family farm plays a valuable educational role that larger, more conventional models simply do not: passing the torch of knowledge down to future generations of farmers, even when one’s own blood line does not wish to carry it. The idealization of family farming also shines through on AFM organization websites that

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describe local food producers in language that glorifies family farm models, noting family histories, numbers of generations involved in the production and sale of foods, and picturesque images of idealized agrarian landscapes. One farmers market website employs family values explicitly in its description of a vendor:

Honoring both her parents’ and her grandparents’ heritage, Deborah Stone founded Stone Hollow Farmstead in 1999 with her husband, Russell, and daughters, Fallon and Alexandria. The Stone family comes from a long line of Alabama gardeners and farmers, sharing their history in all facets of the farmstead. Lessons learned from her grandparents, who ran a sustainable farm and grocery store, are evident in the jars of rose petal jam, the hillside of happy goats, the hives of honeybees and the heirloom herb gardens.

In this quote, the identification of family heritage, multiple generations of farmers, happy images of flora and fauna alongside, environmental health concerns, and the preservation of culture all symbolize some of the primary values upheld in the mainstream AFM.

In addition to glorifying localism and family farming, the mainstream AFM attempts to preserve culture, both local and non, relevant to the production, consumption, and sale of food and market products. Discussing the evaluation of food and cooking styles, Gary stated,

I certainly see a popularity of ethnic foods, a diversity of food from Southeast Asian to Latino food. I think that that's there's been a real broad kind of eye opening of different cultures of food, and so I think that's great. You know, there's still an interest in our Southern culture, and now our southern culture's becoming much more diverse, so it's going to be an inclusive of all these different food cultures. But then we will still have fond memories and we'll still love our old fresh blackberry cobbler and um, okra and summer vegetable plates that most of us grew up with.

Phrases such as “Appalachian roots,” “traditional,” and “old-fashioned” (found frequently on AFM organization websites and printed materials), particularly when combined with

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the preservation and revitalization of historical spaces, imply the evaluation of “heritage” and tradition as positive, superior to newer mass-production models. While this evaluation may not directly harken to other “traditional” models, the white AFM’s imagined agrarian ideal of the past fails to account for the historical racial context of

Birmingham and the rest of the South. These idealized “old-fashioned” methods and preferences are inherently connected to antique and persisting power hierarchies between race and class groups. While a bouquet of cotton flowers at a farmers market might be nostalgic and charming for white participants, black participants might feel much differently due to the deep connections between the cotton plant and the South’s history of African American enslavement. This disconnect demonstrates the divergent experiences and histories which separate black from white segments of the AFM.

Further, many early AFM organizations promoted the evaluation of environmental health and “clean eating” as a personal responsibility that truly ethical people should advocate and embody. These values persist as a component of the mainstream AFM status quo.

Gary, a longtime leader in Birmingham’s upper-class white segment of the AFM, spoke about the impact of the AFM-supportive grocery store, Whole Foods. He stated,

I think Whole Foods has really helped Birmingham along into being more conscious and making perhaps better decisions about to source food that they know where it comes from, and that it's farmed by somebody that's taking care of the land, so I think that's a fantastic improvement. And so when, along with Whole Foods and [a large city farmer’s market], more and more people are deciding that they are going to spend a little bit more money for a better quality, fresher local produce.

Gary’s assertion that Whole Foods and the large farmers market, both quite expensive and inaccessible to those without personal transportation, changed the food culture of

Birmingham demonstrates how the upper/middle class, white ideology dominated the

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fabrication of the AFM status quo, particularly in the beginning. Here, Gary demonstrates both the valuation of environmental health, seeking food from “somebody that’s taking care of the land,” and the valuation of food purity despite higher cost, spending “a little bit more money for a better quality, fresher local produce.”

Gary further demonstrates the valuation of environmental health and food purity by stating later,

I think that people are trying to be aware of what they are putting in their body. …Eating things that are full of pesticides and herbicides, you know, there may be some long-term repercussions…I think also just the land and the earth, I think that we can have severe repercussions that are going to be more costly and damaging in the long run had we not just had our primary concern in producing the cheapest possible food…And it's going to be a little bit more expensive, and I think that we've got to wake up to wanting not just the cheapest food but you need to get wholesome food.

With this statement, Gary connects food purity to environmental health. To Gary, food impurity and environmental damage, particularly concerning chemical agriculture additives like herbicide and pesticide, lead to “long-term repercussions” which damage both human and environmental health. Gary suggests that through a shift in the evaluation of food, in which people become more attentive and willingly pay higher prices for pure and sustainable produce, Gary suggests, both human and environmental health can be improved.

Finally, the white AFM promotes the economic health of the farmers and vendors which provide local produce. Multiple respondents discussed the importance of paying higher prices for better produce, supporting farmers livelihoods as they employ more costly methods to produce healthier food. As Carried noted, “Farmers don't make a fair wage… If you're a real farmer, if you're really doing this to like sustain a family, then like, you need people to pay those [higher] prices because you're struggling.”

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Luckily for the farmers who cater to mainstream AFM participants, the customer base largely evaluates this need to pay more as a warranted truth. As Tanya noted, “it seems like the customers we have who come back every week over and over again are like, really committed to supporting what we do and understand why we price things the way that we do.

The mainstream AFM’s positive evaluations of localism, family farming, cultural preservation, romanticized agrarian ideals, environmental sustainability, food purity and personal health responsibility, and the economic health of food producers create the status quo for AFM values in the city of Birmingham. While some of these values are evaluated similarly by black segments of the AFM, black AFM participants’ valuation of these and other AFM benefits does differ from the mainstream due to resonant differences in experiences, needs, and desires between black and white communities in

Birmingham.

White respondents defined the AFM in multiple ways. Several respondents noted that the AFM grew from a collective desire to “save the world,” morphing in a variety of interest-driven directions from there. Many spoke fondly of specific organizations and the movement overall for its forward focus and evolution in the way people treat both their bodies and the environment. Others spoke highly of specific organizations and individuals while maintaining that the movement itself was problematic due to its lack of race and class analysis and its tendency to cater to rich, white populations. Some respondents found the AFM to be “colonialist” and “oppressive,” however, this was mediated by attention to social justice issues. In her experience with an AFM conference, Bridget found the AFM to be reactive, representing one (liberal) political

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voice. Many respondents noted a specific “back to the earth” focus on environmentalism within the AFM which averts conventional food in favor of options perceived as more ethical (Brooke).

When asked to describe the AFM, many respondents focused on one market, the largest, mostly white, weekly farmers market in the city. The market was described by some as partially responsible for changing health culture and for the revitalization of downtown, drawing interest from health and environment-minded suburbanites from the south of the city. Others found the market exclusive and overpowering, with its large, white crowds of rich, inconsiderate people who paid little attention to their accompanying dogs and often bought prepared foods instead of produce from farmers.

Some respondents described shoppers at this market as “great,” understanding and compliant in paying high prices for farmed goods, ultimately supportive of helping to ensure living wages for local farmers. Others found them to be rude, shallow, and more concerned with displaying status than supporting farmers.

Other mostly white markets around the city were described as lacking farmers, support structures, and patience to grow into viable markets. Bridget described her experience at one frustrating farmers market in a local white suburb.

She explained, “Out of 30 vendors, only 4 were farmers. It was all food trucks and food and…[customers] weren't buying anything [from farmers]. That's not a farmers market. That's a street fair.” Bridget also criticized failing start-up markets for their desire to make money. “Cause you're not gonna make money doing a farmers market… and people who think that they're gonna open a market and make some money are crazy and I'll tell them…’if you break even then count yourself as fortunate.’”

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Not only is the farmers market not just about making money, it’s not even just about the food. Bridget stated:

I think it's never just about the food. It's never just about the nutrition. It's also about community building, relationship building, and just there's a lot of value in goodwill towards each other and towards our city…It's more than just a farmers market.

The values exhibited in Bridget’s statement indicate several of the ideals the AFM evaluates as worthy: community, relationships, goodwill. Whether these values are regularly enacted in the field, as I have shown in previous quotations, remains up for debate.

Black Evaluations of the AFM

While the black segments of the AFM uphold several of the values produced by earlier white-led organizations, such as positive evaluation of local produce and the preservation of culture, specifically African and African American culture, black segments also promote values which challenge the status quo, such as using the AFM to build community, improve resource access, and to directly change systemic problems and elements of the status quo which promote inequality in their communities.

For example, while local food is evaluated as positive in black segments of the

AFM, local is evaluated as less important than community building and challenging systemic inequalities.

“When you tell me that you couldn't afford the food education component,” Alyssa stated, “and so you stop doing the food education component in order to help build up stores that are in the community, I feel like you're failing my community.” While Alyssa feels local food access is important, she suggests that it is more important to shift the

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structural inequalities, such as the lack of nutritional education and healthy food experiences, than to simply provide access to local produce.

Like the white segments of the AFM, black segments attend to the preservation of culture and appreciation of history, however this cultural attention differs from whites due to the historical differences in racialized life experiences. Several respondents discussed slavery’s impact on both food culture and black perceptions of agricultural career paths.

` Several respondents connected soul food with slave food, considering how those dense, rich foods that may have once nourished hardworking bodies now do more to nourish a person’s mental wellbeing than physical health.

“Soul food,” Shannon said,

is a way of cooking, a way of expressing care and love, in the African American community. It's a way of taking certain food items that were common to our heritage and common to our environment and just pouring a lot of care and love into it. It's very compelling taste experience. Our take on it is that, because traditionally, the soul foods, it might feel good to the spirit but it's killing the body. So our take on it is to prepare those foods so they're life giving. They, emotionally the feel good, but physically there not harming people. So it is authentic soul food.

To Shannon, soul food is a cultural expression and offers a rich, emotive connection to her heritage. The modification of soul food that Shannon practices allows her to both celebrate her culture and reimagine it in a way that allows her to facilitate health, improving the wellbeing of her community, without sacrificing comfort and tradition.

More generally, black respondents more readily connected agriculture with a history of racial violence than did whites. Several respondents noted the hesitancy with which black people approach gardening and agricultural careers. Raven told me,

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I think the reason is the nature that’s associated with this type of lifestyle. Very likened to slavery, very likened to sharecropping, so anything that is like this, a lot of my people want to stay away from…and still there's a lot of bad blood associated with black folks and working the land.

Shannon echoed Raven’s sentiment:

It's kind of easy to figure that farming or gardening, one, is a part of the experience of being people of African American descent, while some people's memory of it as being oppressive, so they're not really interested perhaps for that reason.

Eve extended this cultural recognition to explain why two racially divided movements emerged, as well as why the black segments trail behind white AFM segments. It is not a lack of ability which puts black AFM participants at a disadvantage, she explained, because agriculture is an important component of black American history.

The barrier is the turn of mind that needs to happen with younger generations to not look at agriculture as a poor man’s work or having its ties to a painful past of enslavement…And to look at it as a viable and necessary career or vocation and to go back to the earth with pride, and so because there's a disconnect between the older generations and the younger generation, where the younger people don't even know where the food necessarily comes from or how it's grown, there's a huge disconnect.

These respondents’ points suggest that while white memories of agriculture are filled with nostalgic visions of a simpler, more natural time, black memories include images of oppression, violence, and pain that lasted many generations and continues to plague the black community, despite great strides and much time between then and now. Thus, although both black and white segments of the movement attend to cultural appreciation and preservation, each segment attends to that culture in different ways due to divergent racial experiences.

While, like the white segments, black segments of the AFM often report a commitment to environmental health, black organizations refer to health as a systemic

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concern more often than whites, extending the black AFM’s evaluation of health concerns beyond the concepts of purity and individual health responsibility that is more heavily promoted by the mainstream AFM.

Multiple black respondents evaluated the natural environment as something to respect and “revere” (Kevin). Respondents sometimes identified as “earthworkers”

(Shannon) with a desire and responsibility to protect and enhance “Mama Earth”

(Raven) through agriculture. By “going back to the earth” (Winston), employing organic growing methods, and considering human relationships with plants and other animals, some respondents felt that they could mitigate the negative impacts humans have already had on the planet. To Raven, human disinterest in the earth and its non-human inhabitants results from the widespread evaluation of money as more important than the natural environment. Raven stated,

So if we don’t even have the best interests of our children, then you know the creatures aren't part of our interests. and the earth isn't part of our interest, and it's a synergistic relationship that we really have to get our minds around. But because we are so driven financially, and we are a capitalist society, then it's not really gonna go anywhere.

Society’s evaluation of money as more valuable than the earth, Raven argued, causes people to fail care for one another with compassion, fueling inequalities through purposeful maintenance of power hierarchies.

Black respondents were quicker to consider the systemic aspects of food-related health concerns than white respondents, and few related food choice to a matter of personal responsibility without a consideration of the reasons why such choices might not be possible for people without money and other dominant social statuses. Multiple respondents critiqued fast food for negatively affecting community health. Raven rose

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concerns for the addictive, disease-promoting, poisonous qualities of fast and processed foods:

Where fast food used to be kind of like a luxury and a treat, it's now the norm…So now we have high instances of diabetes in young children, we have obesity, we have attention issues, we have behavioral issues, and not just with fast food but with processed food in general… So we're giving these things to our children and basically poisoning our children, poisoning our families. But who is really the one in power of doing that? Is it the community? Or is it the business owners that are bringing these businesses in the community?

Raven’s dismal perspective shines light on one rather interesting, health-related question: Who is to blame? She felt unsure on whether individuals or the system shouldered the burden of responsibility. When fresh food is hard to access, people have to opt for what is available.

As Maya discussed, “fast foods…are so much easier and cheaper and quicker for families to buy for their kids when they're trying to feed them as opposed to having to leave here and go 12 miles to go get fresh fruits and vegetables.” To these respondents, food choices were evaluated as more than choices which people were individually responsible for making. Limited by unequal structures, people did not always have the ability or motivation to choose healthy, much less organic or local, foods. Overall, black respondents were more sensitive to the restricted options available to poor and black communities than white respondents.

For the black AFM, economic health is evaluated differently than the white AFM.

While the white AFM is primarily concerned with the financial stability of farmers and vendors, the black AFM expresses concern for the economic stability and viability of farmers, consumers, and entire communities. Black respondents often referred to the economic benefits AFM organizations and participation could bring to members of poor

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and black communities. Black respondents spoke of community gardens and farmers markets as options for healthy food access where other options, such as full-service grocery stores, were limited.

Evaluations of the economic impact of specific AFM programs like community gardens differed between white and black respondents. Community gardens, when created and maintained by the community they intend to benefit, generate food access and mitigate economic barriers that produce food insecurity. However, as multiple respondents discussed, when these gardens are not desired and generated by the communities for which they are intended, the gardens may go unused or even build resentment. White evaluations of community gardens typically involve notions of personal responsibility, suggesting that by using the gardens, community members can take control of their own health. To do this, however, one must not only have the time, energy, and knowledge of gardening—one must also have the desire to garden. As

Ashton, a white respondent active in black AFM organizations, discussed, this expectation that the poor and black can or should participate in gardening places additional labor responsibilities on the people who already outnumber richer, whiter people in manual labor fields and holding multiple jobs. To expect these people to garden, another form of manual labor, is to expect them to work even longer hours for free.

“We're expecting the people who already take the brunt of the hard labor in the city to take more brunt of hard labor,” Ashton summarized, “and not get paid for it… And again, to do that they'll still need a tiller and shovels.” Not only is this expectation relegating additional, unpaid, work to poor and black people, it is also expecting these

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communities to work without the proper resources to do so. In the black segments of the

AFM, there is greater attentiveness to deep systemic economic inequalities than white

AFM participants typically discussed.

While white respondents focused on the economic impact of AFM programs on farmers and entrepreneurs, black respondents typically evaluated AFM program success based on their impact on local community members. When discussing one local AFM program which catered to local convenience store owners and local farmers,

Alyssa expressed her frustration that this program failed to attend to needs of the community members themselves. To Alyssa, this program failed her community, despite its good intentions, because it focused solely on the economic wellbeing of store owners and food producers rather than that of the consumer.

In order to truly help community members, several respondents active in black

AFM segments argued, programs must address the root cause of inequality. Poverty, these respondents evaluated, is the root cause of inequality in the AFM and the city.

“There's studies that even say that,” Ashton said.

They've put a grocery store in a low income black community and buying habits in the community only change by 10%. Of course, they only change by 10% because they still couldn't afford any of the nice stuff in the grocery store. So it's looked at as a geographic issue….But it's actually an issue of poverty.

To Ashton and others, AFM programs that fail to address poverty ultimately fail to help communities overcome barriers and succeed.

Thus, while black segments of the AFM uphold some of the same values as white segments, such as localism, cultural preservation, and environmental protection, black segments evaluate these concepts differently than whites. Black segments also

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attempt to challenge the status quo, improve economic health of community members, and attend to systemic sources of inequalities more explicitly than whites. These evaluative differences between black and white segments contribute to the persistent segregation seen overall in the AFM. Further, the process of evaluation contributes directly and indirectly to the production and maintenance of inequalities within the AFM.

The following subsection discusses examples of how evaluation leads to inequality.

Evaluation and Inequality

Whites evaluation of the black community

Evaluation and identification processes work reciprocally. To evaluate social groups, those groups must first emerge through processes of identification. In order for identification processes to lead to power hierarchies, people must evaluate the worth of certain identities as more or less valuable than others. The assumptions people make when assigning people to identity groups are simultaneously involved in both evaluation and identification processes. In the AFM, both black and white segments make assumptions about the other that affect program designs, trust, and decision making processes for individuals and organizations.

While a number of white respondents were considerate of those structural and systemic issues related to poor and black people’s unhealthy food choices and absence from the AFM, a number of people I encountered in the field evaluated poor and black people using stereotypes. Related to identification, the evaluation of entire social groups as good or bad, responsible or irresponsible, and/or smart or uneducated 1) relies on the categorization of people into groups based on perceived characteristics like skin color or income, and 2) risks stigmatization of these categorized groups in ways that

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can increase the likelihood of inequality as groups are deemed less worthy and therefore excluded from the activities of unstigmatized groups.

Organization programs, for example, often helped others as their primary mission, however, this sort of help was sometimes evaluated by black respondents as a problematic “white savior” approach. Kevin discussed the white savior approach with disgust and frustration. When considering health and food in his community, Kevin recalled an event in which white people came into his predominantly black community to attempt to teach residents how to ride bikes. Kevin told me, laughing:

They were teaching older folks how to ride bikes. Hah! How the hell you teaching?...Like black people had never seen a bicycle before, we ain't got a bike in all of the black community…Like you come down from your mountain, and I mean mountain, to bestow bicycles upon the negro civilization.

Kevin’s mention of both physical separation, whites from “over the mountain” suburbs versus blacks in the valley, and psychological separation, misguided assumptions about a need for bike education, demonstrate one source and one outcome, respectively, of evaluation processes related to white saviorism. Due to segregation, whites have little understanding of the needs and desires of the black community, and the identification processes they employ can lead to wrong evaluations of needs. These misguided evaluations sometimes lead whites to attempt to rescue black communities from some perceived affliction, such as the inability to ride bikes, that may not even be an issue.

In the AFM, these misguided evaluations can lead to ineffective program designs, like the installation of a community garden that no community members desire to use, stereotyping, and distrust. As Gavin explained,

Some people who are involved in [AFM] work are doing it out of necessity, like they really are looking for sustainable food options and like looking for

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affordable housing and trying to find good jobs because they have to [in order] to survive. So they have a different perspective and they’re sometimes looked down upon as not having enough intelligence to be able to do for themselves, you know? And they need to be saved. I would describe it as people, the nonprofit industrial complex, mixed with white savior, and the other group being more like this is about survival, doing what we need to do so that we can improve ourselves and our whole lifestyle.

Gavin identifies two groups in the AFM: 1) those who attempt to save others through non-profit organizations and 2) those who participate in an effort to improve their wellbeing and survive. The first camp, made of richer white people, illustrates a “white savior” mentality, in which whites attempt to rescue black communities from poor health, often without asking for the input or participation of the community they seek to save.

Those operating within this camp, as Gavin described, see their ideas and approaches as better and more intelligent than those of the community in question. This camp’s approach was illustrated by a white respondent who worked in a black community.

Reflecting on her reasons for working in the AFM, this respondent stated,

“Because people ask me all the time…Why are you going through all of this if you're not getting paid? I'm like, eventually this community needs it. They don't know they need it.”

The respondent’s statement “They don’t know they need it,” in reference to the black community and nutritious, garden fresh food, reflects her white savior mentality that other respondents warned against. Still, several respondents reported overt and implicit feelings of responsibility for the privileges their whiteness and higher incomes afforded them.

Charity models and assumptions

While many respondents rode a thin line straddling just community development and the white savior ethos, many felt that the help they did provide was best received if

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the community had a say and a hand in the programs development. Carol (60 years old, white, female) discussed the negative ramifications of “toxic charity,” in which individuals become dependent on “handouts” rather than find a permanent path out of poverty. Instead of helping with “handouts,” Carol trades money, food, and other resources for labor and effort, or she and other organizations in her network provide the resources the community needs, and the community does the work to change. As Carol described,

I think seeing the same people over and over and over, and just the frustration of look, okay. I helped you last month, what in the world? You're back again. And realizing, I didn't help you. All I did was made it easy for you to stay where you are…basically the way we have it set up, we leave people with little option other than just to receive.

Later in the interview, Carol continued,

Really we want the neighborhood to have the win. So what we would rather do is resource people from the community and let them have that win. It's their neighborhood, it's their community, and they're the ones who did the time and the energy.

Through mentorships, community gardens, hiring community members, and listening to community needs, Carol’s organization attempted to ensure that her efforts permanently help the community she serves. Carol and Brooke both noted that if they were truly effective in their work, they would eventually be worked out of a job.

Black evaluations of white intentions

Perhaps maintained in part through misguided white savior missions, black communities distrust white outsiders due to a long history of mistreatment and problematic relations. A number of black respondents directly addressed my own role as a research as at risk of instigating fear and distrust because other researchers had been seen as exploitative, dismissive, or disruptive in the past. As Shelby explained,

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People have a fear. You'd be surprised how frightened they are of getting involved because they've been misused and lied to so much. They don't want to become involved. They think, well here go another one now, they come and lie again in the community. Come and promise you in the community and then they don't follow through. Start a program and then, boom. Gone.

As Shelby and others described, the history of mistreatment, distant and recent, led black communities to evaluate intruding whites as unworthy of trust. In the AFM, this distrust can lead to disinterest and complete avoidance of organizations and programs.

This distrust is exacerbated by commensuration tendencies, or the trend to evaluate different situations based on the same standards. For example, when whites evaluate poor and black people as irresponsible eaters due to an assumed higher rate of processed food consumption, they fail to consider what sorts of foods are available and unavailable in each community. As Kevin aptly illustrated, “If I trip you down a flight of stairs and then say let's go run this marathon, I mean, you're gonna have some difficulties.”

Beyond the assessment of social groups, the process of evaluation plays a reciprocal role in the generation of inequality when people make choices about what food to eat. Choices do not occur in a vacuum. Choices are motivated by evaluations.

These evaluations may take many forms, from cost-benefit analyses considerate of long-term consequences to a desire for instant gratification. As Jordan noted, “It’s a reason behind [choices]. Whether it’s good motivation or bad motivation, something motivated you to make those choices.” These motivations may differ depending on the social positions and circumstances of the person evaluating the choice. When large social groups share social positions and circumstances, values and evaluation

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processes, along with the choices that follow, become cultural, shared among the group.

Inequality restricts the choices at the disposal of evaluators, and evaluation processes, particularly when they are constrained by inequalities, can exacerbate inequality when evaluations lead to short-term benefits with long-term repercussions.

Sometimes, even when actors evaluate a choice as unhealthy, the inequalities they face force them to make that choice anyway.

For example, many respondents noted that everyone knows what it means to eat healthily, but many people still choose unhealthy options on a regular basis. While these unhealthy choices span race and class groups, those with fewer options and resources than others lack the breadth of food choices that may be abundant in other areas.

Further, when budgets are tight and money comes infrequently throughout the month, people may have a hard time purchasing fresh food consistently, much less fresh food from a farmers market.

“Processed food,” Christina explained, “the mindset of someone who's impoverished is to buy food, processed food that lasts longer. They don't understand how can I eat fresh and yet survive and have enough to make it until my next money or whatever comes around.” The shelf-life of processed items makes them more desirable in food insecure communities, despite knowledge of the health consequences. If people under these circumstances can’t make fresh food last for a whole month, processed food is evaluated as better. In these situations, shelf life means survival and fresh food means starvation.

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Further, in food insecure communities, convincing others to evaluate expensive, organic produce as worth more than other foods is a difficult task. When people aren’t even accustomed to spending most of their money on fresh, perishable foods, asking them to spend great deals of money on local produce as AFM participants would likely seem like a joke. To Alyssa, this disconnect is a large part of the reason the AFM has two divergent directions separated by race and class.

“I'm not doing that.,” Alyssa stated, imitating a member of a food insecure community, “I'm not going from spending 99 cents and having a whole meal to I pay 5 dollars and I have some lettuce. Like I ate dinner for 99 cents, and now I've got lettuce.

For 5 times the amount.” She went on to explain how this affects segregation in the

AFM:

I feel like that's why the movement is moving in two different directions because you have a set of people that were already eating a certain way and now I'm telling you to eat better. Just move a little bit, add an extra 20, 30, maybe 50 dollars, maybe, 50 dollars to your grocery bill, you get to eat better, you get to live longer, and you get to leave these things behind. And I'm telling a set of people that were barely spending 50 dollars to now spend 200 dollars. We fall short.

Thus, while inequality restricts choices and evaluations, evaluations also lead to intensified inequality. For instance, the financial and place-based inequalities that lead to low access and lack of affordability of fresh, local food restrict choices and lead to evaluations which favor processed foods with longer shelf lives over perishable and difficult to access foods. This inequality-restricted evaluations and choices eventually lead to exacerbated inequalities when poor diets lead to poor health over time. This reciprocal relationship between inequality and evaluation demonstrates the

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pervasiveness of cultural evaluation processes in the production, maintenance, and intensification of inequality over time.

Evaluation and Change

Evaluation leads to choices that maintain and exacerbate inequalities, and evaluation can also fuel changes that mitigate or intensify inequality. When evaluation processes diminish the perceived worth of social groups, places, or sense of self, this process causes changes that intensify inequality. For example, if poor and black people evaluate their own voices as insignificant and choose not to vote in local elections, as

Jessica described, they diminish their ability to change their community for their benefit.

Instead, richer whites serve decision makers for black community members, and changes may occur that do not serve poor and black residents. Further, when city administrations change, so do the evaluations of what is important. Winston described the shift after mayoral administration changed several years prior, leading to the closing of one public housing facility’s community garden and community programs.

“The housing authority went through a lot of changes,” Winston told me.

Changed administration, and then so the director at that time, she shut down a lot of activity in the housing authority…So we had a couple of things going. Martial arts was one, it was like every week. And worked with a lot of inner city youth, and then the community garden…but that got shut down…I think that there's a surge in violence in a lot of the housing communities. And part of that's because a lot of the activities, resources, were taken out of there, so there's gonna be an increase in crime cause there's nothing for people to do.

In the case Winston described, the removal of community resources increases inequality directly, through the removal of those resources, and indirectly, as crime increases as a result of the loss of resources.

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When evaluation processes are used to improve programs or increase the assignment of worth of otherwise devalued social groups and places, evaluation can help to reverse inequalities. Some respondents assert that AFM organizations play a role in reversing negative evaluations. One farmers market, a few respondents argued, facilitated positive evaluations of an area of Birmingham that was once avoided and seen as an eyesore. This positive evaluation led to increased investment and better amenities, turning what was once an abandoned warehouse district into an exciting place to live, work, and play. As Sabrina (50 years old, white, female) recalled,

Nobody really lived downtown in this whole area…It was really just, it was very crappy and dirty and according to my dad, a little bit dangerous…So [local real estate developers] started working on making that, creating this neighborhood. Turning it into a neighborhood. Literally. Really creating it out of nothing…The [farmers] market was vibrant and alive…And as it has grown more and more, it actually became a small safe place to come and now it's become this big safe place to come.

To people like Sabrina, the AFM sparked positive changes that can shift evaluation processes related to place. However, this shift does not benefit everyone equally. As

Shannon and others described, sometimes a positive evaluation of a place that was once negatively evaluated can lead to additional inequality. In the last decade, certain areas of Birmingham have seen a change in foot traffic. Some evaluate this change as positive revitalization while others understand it as negative gentrification. Those who see the change as gentrification see new white in-movers, former outsiders to communities, developing neighborhoods, purchasing new construction homes, and establishing businesses that are often unaffordable and/or unwelcoming to the poor and black communities in which they set up shop. Those concerned with the negative ramifications argued that these in-movers would drive up rents and property taxes,

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pushing longtime residents out of the communities, often into worse situations with fewer resources than before.

While few AFM organizations would claim they intended to shift evaluation processes in ways that harmed one group for the benefit of others, some organizations practice reflexivity in the face of criticism and reevaluate themselves and their practices to improve their impact in the city. Hailey (40 years old, white, female) explained,

I mean, [my organization] always receives criticism and always has received criticism…I think there's been a lot of questions about predominantly white organizations working at a predominantly black school system…And I think that we as an organization are growing there and are asking those questions as well.

These evaluation processes, and their changes over time, can lead to the standardization of evaluative criteria into organizational processes. For example, when organizations evaluate processes that work and don’t work through trial and error, as

Vanessa (38 years old, white, female) described, the working processes get standardized into organizational operations and culture.

“When we first launched this program,” Vanessa told me, “we weren't in the time, space, place, or position to be requiring anything of anybody. We were learning. And now, we're kind of coming to a place where we have criteria. We know what we're looking for. We know what's gonna make the store successful.” Through evaluation,

Vanessa and her organization arrived at a set of criteria which they then standardized into the operations of the organization in an effort to improve success. Evaluation feeds into processes of standardization as people decide what elements are worthy enough to become a prevailing part of organizational and social processes. The following sections discuss standardization in the AFM and its relationship to inequality.

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Standardization in the AFM

Standardization concerns the establishment of rules and regulations that are institutionalized in effort to regulate processes and equalize opportunities.

Standardization efforts generally have good intentions. For example, Bridget wanted to start an organization to set standards that would make things easier for farmers market managers.

We were just talking about trying to get together an organization in the city for all the market managers so that we can share information, support each other. Because if there's a bad farmer, that's passing himself off as a farmer or whatever, I want them to know, hey if this guy applies to your market, don't let him come because he's xyz…Also, the other thing is, kind of rules and guidelines, there's kind of a standard that the farmers market authority sets, but having one with the city would be great.

Bridget’s desire to create a standard-setting organization demonstrates that many standardization processes do not begin with the intent to create and/or maintain social inequalities. Bridget’s proposed organization would bring AFM leaders together to create standards that promote efficiency and effectiveness for markets, and the group would be better able to ask the city for assistance than Bridget was alone. The standardization of rules and practices, to Bridget, would only help the AFM to function better.

However, while standardization is often meant to promote equality through regulation and neutral rules, standards can create and maintain inequalities. For instance, as discussed in the previous section, when values are chosen based on the preferences of a dominant group, these preferences may not be shared by a subordinate group. Evaluation processes can thus benefit some groups and not others.

In some cases, the subordinate group can even be harmed in the process. When evaluation processes are used to inform standardization processes, rules and

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regulations believed to be neutral may actually favor the dominant group while neglecting the subordinate group.

In Birmingham’s AFM, as previously discussed, whites were the first to establish large AFM organizations and programs, establishing white preferences as the movement’s status quo. As Kevin stated, “you still have certain folks controlling that whole process. No matter how small the farm to plate it is. I see in that movement only young white people. I don't see anybody else doing that.”

With little ability to relate between race and class strata, the established white spaces so prevalent in Birmingham’s AFM create spaces that feel inaccessible to outsiders and, at times, make life harder for the poor and black. Such consequences are intensified when evaluations are standardized into the AFM. For instance, when white-led AFM organizations headed the creation and establishment of an agricultural ordinance meant to regulate urban agriculture in the city, they failed to include an adequate number of poor and black people to represent the needs and values of those who make up the majority of Birmingham’s residents. The resulting agricultural ordinance thus favored the dominant groups in the AFM and neglected the needs of the poor and black. The standardization of white needs and values, while generated in an effort to provide equal rights and responsibilities, failed to consider the needs of others, and ultimately made agricultural business ventures, which could have provided upward mobility to agricultural entrepreneurs in the black community, more difficult. In this case, however unintended, standardization ensured the maintenance of inequality in the AFM.

“This is the way shit gets done in Birmingham,” Tristan told me, exasperated.

Tristan blamed the white AFM organizations and the city for their ineffectiveness in

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creating truly neutral, fair, citizen-supportive standards. To Tristan, this standardization process maintained the inequalities already present in the city and made barriers to agricultural business ventures even more difficult to overcome.

Further, Tristan pointed out that many of Birmingham’s AFM organizational boards are made up of primarily white people. Boards play a major role in the standardization process, creating, vetoing, and revising rules and regulations that structure organizations and, subsequently, the AFM. Tristan’s comments suggest that the once standardization of the AFM leans in favor of white preferences, establishing white board leadership, it is very difficult to shift the cultural tides to favor other social groups. Thus, standardization creates pervasive inequalities that maintain themselves once in motion. These inequalities are difficult to change and require deliberate, thoughtful action to do so.

Other respondents identified the government’s standardization processes as a key component of inequality production and maintenance. Like the agricultural ordinance, the city’s bureaucratic operations made it difficult for community members to start agricultural endeavors. Christina noted that the city’s “red tape” kept her community from making improvements to food access and starting a community garden, and Autumn (45 years old, white, female) expressed concern that the city’s recent restriction on city chicken coops would lead to the city charging for community garden permits. Autumn recalled the city contacting her about spreading word about regulations and permitting processes:

They wanted [our organization] to promote [that] you have to go to the courthouse to get all this, to have a garden. And then we had to tell everybody all the rules of the chickens, and also with honeybees, there has to be like a 10-feet fly barrier. So they wanted us to break it to people

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if they had to have a permit to have a garden. So eventually my question was, aren't you setting this up to make money? Cause now it's free. Or are you getting it because you want to know where are these gardens are so you can police them, but you don't have the money to do that. But the potential is there. If you do that, then they can [charge people money].

While the city was not charging for community gardens at the time of the interview,

Autumn’s concern that they could and might in the future demonstrates the power of standardization in the enforcement of regulations, such as charging fees, that may be disproportionately costly to the poor.

Beyond the city, federal standardization processes also affect inequality in the

AFM. Kevin expressed his bewilderment at the cost of organic certification for the small, front yard farm he managed:

I have learned that you can label something as organic. Then there is something called certified organic. I really don't care about going through that process of certifying our farm as an urban farm that's organic. So stupid. I know it's organic…Now you gotta pay a couple thousand dollars to get this, but we're gonna approve it, some ludicrous price for that 800 or something…Hell with you, that's silly. My people already know that I don't put stuff on my swiss chard or tomatoes that we're growing.

Kevin’s frustration with the standardization of organic food processes caused him to opt out entirely, both by choice and by necessity. Kevin’s farm, like many small farms run by those with fewer resources, would have struggled to pay for the certification at the time of the interview. The standardization of the organic growing process is exclusionary to the poor because it is expensive, and this exclusion can make it harder to market products. In Kevin’s case, his customer base comes from his neighborhood, and these customers know him and know that he does use organic growing methods. If Kevin were to market beyond his immediate community, however, he could have a difficult time convincing others of his food’s quality without the federal stamp of approval. Thus,

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this expensive standardization, while an effort to ensure producers adhere to a baseline of principles, contributes to the maintenance of inequality. Those larger, better funded, longer running organizations can afford funding to pay for certification, allowing them to use the certification to charge more for their produce and sell it far beyond the confines of their communities to organic-seeking consumers.

The Standardization of Inequality in the AFM

While some might argue for the standardization of the AFM into everyday life, others would counter by asking how everyone could, affordably, buy into the movement.

As Victoria (38 years old, white, female) noted, “the same people who've always had access to good food still have access to good food and people who haven't still don't.”

Victoria’s comment suggests that food-related inequality in Birmingham is a pervasive, relatively unchanging phenomenon that affects certain social groups consistently.

Several respondents blamed the “broken system” for inequality, suggesting that the standardization of inequality-producing ways of doing things emerged from a system that did not work the way it was supposed to work, ensuring equality and fairness for all groups. A few respondents noted that this “broken system” was not actually broken but working just the way it was designed to work—privileging some more than others.

“We say the system is broken,” Alyssa said. “It's not broken. It works perfectly. It was created this way. We need a new system.”

Gavin described how he understood the system’s production of inequality: “I think the system…is set up as such that it's easier to gravitate towards the side with more power. Which tends to be more white, but I don't think it's intentional…but it's like a gravitational pull based on it just being a larger object.” Gavin’s image of a gravitationally biased system, where resources and power pool around those who

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already have them, mirrors the way standardization leads to inequality. When those with power create standards, they will have their interests at the forefront of their minds during the planning processes. These planners will likely not have a clear understanding of the needs and desires of those who are unlike them, and therefore they, unintentionally, create standards that are unequally representative of social groups.

Thus, because the planning groups already have the power and resources with which to create standards, the gravity pulls in their favor. When the planning process only includes social groups with power and resources, the planning group creates standards that privilege them while ignoring the needs of others simply because they are not present and able to voice these needs during planning processes.

The standardization of cultural practices that were put in place hundreds of years ago can have lasting effects. Several black respondents discussed the culture surrounding soul food as beginning centuries ago when African slaves and poor whites needed high calorie subsistence foods in order to fuel long days of manual labor and frequent food insecurity (Raven, Shannon, Alyssa). While many black and white respondents spoke fondly of soul food, other respondents evaluated soul food as a harmful cultural artifact leftover from centuries of agricultural slavery. Respondents’ negative evaluation of soul food’s shifting impact on health demonstrates the long-term impact of standardization on inequality. The historical roots of soul food, high calorie sustenance for hard manual laborers with much food insecurity, persist in modern, much more sedentary society where high calorie diets no longer provide much needed sustenance after long days in the fields. Now, diets like those that gain cultural prominence in the 19th and even 20th centuries reduce quality of life by increasing risk

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for diet-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, both prevalent among low-income and black communities (Liburd 2003, James 2004, Rankins et al. 2007,

Freeman 2007).

In order to create an organization in the AFM, such as an agricultural business or a nonprofit, individuals must have access to resources. Ashton considered the difficulty of establishing an agricultural business in the city. To grow food, he argued, you have to have access to land.

“How do you get land?” Ashton asked. “The best way to get land is you need capital. Well to get capital, you need land cause you can use land as collateral for getting capital...So it's like a chicken or the egg type thing.” Ashton’s consideration of the standard ways of paying for business start-ups—either using capital directly or providing land or another resource as collateral—demonstrate how standardization impacts groups with low resource pools. While richer people might have an easy time getting a loan from a bank by putting up their homes, cars, or pieces of land as collateral, those without such resources to use as collateral would be less able to get a loan. Thus, the standard practice of getting a loan to start a business favors those who already have some money. In other words, like the well-known adage states, you need money to make money. The standardized practice of providing collateral for the loans needed to begin agricultural business ventures privilege those with capital while excluding those without capital.

In sum, standards emerge based on the evaluations of those with power. This means that the process of rationalization favors dominant groups while neglecting and/or harming subordinate groups. Over time, the rationalization of dominant group

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needs and desires creates intergenerational inequalities that build upon one another exponentially. In the case Ashton described above, lacking the ability to purchase land or start businesses prevents those without resources from building resources to succeed. Thus, dominant groups can more easily build wealth over time, allowing wealth to accumulate more and more over generations, while subordinate groups must work hard each generation with less likelihood of upward mobility. This discrepancy explains in part why the AFM has two seemingly separate movements, divided by race and class. Rich whites and poor blacks have two different starting points with unequal resource access.

Conclusion

The cultural processes that lead to inequality themselves stem from long time periods of perpetual inequality. Identification processes and rationalization processes are simultaneously causes of and caused by inequalities. The inequalities which these cultural processes create in turn ensure that these processes continue, maintaining the very inequalities that created them. Thus, these processes offer a cyclical relationship with inequality. They create inequality, and inequality creates and maintains these processes.

Identification processes create social boundaries with differential resource access. The differential resource access solidifies the boundary, and people interact little with groups unlike themselves. Through this absence of interaction, the boundary grows stronger, and identification processes offer more and more salient perceptions of difference between groups. Thus, dominant groups and subordinate groups develop, often misguided, assumptions about one another, and groups with the most resources tend to hoard them for themselves (Tilly 2005). The cycle of identification and inequality

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continues across generations to produce more and more significant boundaries with inequalities so deeply entrenched that dominant groups often fail to see how identification processes may create, maintain, and exacerbate the inequalities that dominant, as well as subordinate, groups may have come to view as natural or a product of individual responsibility.

Rationalization and inequality also operate cyclically, with rationalization both creating and being created by inequalities. As described in previous sections, rationalization processes favor the powerful groups which define and respond to standards. However, inequalities also define who has the right to create the standards in the first place. In this particular scenario, rationalization, identification, and inequality all interact and influence one another, over and over across time, to produce and maintain both inequalities which produce cultural processes and the persistent inequality-producing cultural processes themselves.

Should the AFM wish to mitigate the production of inequality, the AFM should take care to attend to both the inequalities themselves and the cultural processes which produce and are produced by those inequalities. By addressing the history of cultural and inequality production, the AFM might become a more accepting, inclusive, and equal movement for all of Birmingham’s residents. Through attention to these issues, the AFM could provide an avenue by which both community revitalization and upward mobility could take place, benefitting poor, middle class, and economically elite

Birminghamians in ways deemed equitable for all.

While the city and its AFM’s history is wrought with inequality-producing cultural processes, many organizations profess explicit goals to improve upward mobility for

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poor residents through food. While inconsistently successful, several organizations do address the cultural causes of inequality and do what they can with limited resources to address them. The next chapter discusses the role of cultural processes in the production of upward mobility through the AFM.

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CHAPTER 5 UPWARD MOBILITY IN THE AFM

Executive Summary

This chapter examines the ways in which cultural processes may be purposefully employed in ways that generate upward mobility for some individuals. In this examination, this chapter addresses the following research question:

• How does Birmingham’s AFM use cultural processes to generate upward mobility for its participants?

This research question examines ways in which people have employed otherwise inequality-producing cultural processes in ways that promote upward rather than downward or stagnant mobility. Such information could be used to promote upward mobility within and outside of the AFM in a variety of contexts where cultural processes generate inequalities among social groups. The chapter explores the ways in which identification and rationalization have been employed within AFM organizations in

Birmingham in efforts to reduce inequalities and promote upward mobility for the organization’s participants.

As previously noted, cultural processes like identification and rationalization lead to the development and maintenance of inequality. However, under specific circumstances, these processes may also be meaningfully employed in attempts to create upward mobility. While when left to their own volition cultural processes may more easily construct unequal fields, these processes may be consciously employed to reverse inequality and generate upward mobility for subordinated groups of people. This chapter explores the ways in which AFM organizations in Birmingham, Alabama have consciously employed cultural processes in efforts to increase upward mobility.

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As you will read, this chapter finds that the positive evaluation of social justice has increased efforts to increase upward mobility, including mobility focused programming at a number of organizations. Further, this valuation of social justice efforts has created more demand for subordinated groups in organizational workforces to demonstrate adherence to justice values. The positive evaluation of groups that were once negatively evaluated made formerly subordinated people popular in the AFM job market, leading to upward mobility. This chapter closes with three case studies of specific organizations within Birmingham’s AFM which demonstrate the organizational use of cultural processes in the promotion of upward mobility.

Introduction

As detailed in the previous chapter, cultural processes like identification and rationalization contributed to the development of inequality in Birmingham, Alabama’s alternative food movement (AFM). However, these same processes can also lead to the reduction of inequality and, eventually, upward mobility for those who occupy lower class strata. In fact, many of the organizations which occupy Birmingham’s AFM specifically seek to reduce inequality, even though doing so would render those organizations useless.

“I guess to be really effective,” Brooke told me, “we would have worked ourselves out of a job.”

Despite these attempts to reduce inequality, even when programs are immediately successful, upward mobility is slow to realize. Thus, those inequality- reducing programs happening now, just emergent within the last decade or so, may have yet to display their full potential in improving upward mobility in poor and black urban communities. Just because these organizations have been unsuccessful thus far

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does not mean that they will never generate equality and upward mobility. However, many programs’ current operations remain unsuccessful due to cultural differences and oversights between the organization and the people they seek to assist. Would these organizations’ unsuccessful programs improve with greater attention to cultural processes in their program designs and revisions?

This chapter will explore the ways that AFM organizations have employed cultural processes in ways that 1) foster equality and upward mobility and 2) failed to improve mobility and inequality conditions due to cultural differences in an attempt to answer this question.

Upward Mobility in the Alternative Food Movement

The organizations that make up Birmingham’s AFM are largely non-profit organizations or combination non-profit/private companies with missions that directly seek to improve the food access, economic strength, and health of low income, underserved urban communities. Because of the historical circumstances that have plagued Birmingham’s black communities, many of these poor neighborhoods are primarily black. Thus, many AFM organizations with missions to promote equality and economic improvement focus on assisting black communities. While white and black people are employed by AFM organizations in the city, the AFM as a whole presents itself as white. Thus, many of these organizations appear as white organizations helping, perhaps unwelcomely, black communities.

When the AFM set its roots in Birmingham, much of the focus was on the economic wellbeing of (mostly white) farmers, environmental health, and “voting with your dollars” (Lacey). These foci still exist within the mainstream AFM, but the movement’s values shifted over time toward a more critical standpoint. The AFM now

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attends to a few issues of food and social justice, in which organizations attend to both farmers’ and community members’ economic strength, the health of local people in addition to the environment, and direct political participation instead of simply using money to bring your political desires into action. Social justice, as the name suggests, concerns equitable, or just, treatment, allocation of resources, and opportunity structures for people occupying various social statuses, such as races, class strata, genders, sexualities, etc.

Identification and rationalization play an important role in this shift and the subsequent increase in attention to equality and upward mobility. Of particular importance for the generation of equality and upward mobility are the rationalization process of evaluation and its interplay with identification processes related to race and class statuses.

When evaluation processes made social justice foci an important goal in the

AFM, organizations shifted to accommodate this value. Through this accommodation and subsequent reorientation of value judgements, certain social statuses that may have previously been stigmatized or ignored in the AFM became valuable assets when included in leadership and/or programming to demonstrate both a commitment to social justice and organizational success. Thus, the foundation for the generation of upward mobility begins with evaluation processes, extends into identification processes, and leads, however inconsistently, to upward mobility.

Social Justice Valuation

Several years after the AFM’s establishment in Birmingham, arguably well behind other AFM cities like Oakland and New York who led the national trend, the movements primary values began to shift to incorporate issues of social justice into many, but not

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all, AFM organizational programs and mission statements. This shift followed an increasingly critical social justice front sweeping other politically progressive movements in the US (Sbicca 2012, Guthman 2008, DuPuis and Goodman 2005). Like other movements, Birmingham’s white-dominant AFM moved from focusing on individual responsibility for health and environment to a concern for the structural barriers and inequalities which prevent some groups from accessing fresh foods as well as those which encourage all groups of people to eat less healthy and opt for convenience over quality. The black-led AFM organizations, most more recent arrivals, began with a stronger focus on social justice than did white-led organizations.

As Ashton stated, “Black folks are gonna be more apt to support racial justice, and poor folks are more apt to support issues of poverty. And most of Birmingham is poor black folks.” Those white-led organizations which previously dealt with such issues less directly, lacking firsthand experience in racial discrimination or poverty, had to make more sweeping organizational changes in order to embody the social justice values of the changing AFM.

For example, while Brooke referred to the early days of the white-dominant movement as a “back to the earth movement,” she discussed the ways organizations now attend to structural inequalities.

“It's just our society of convenience,” Brooke said, “and we aren't used to the time it takes. And the chopping and the doing and so, what's the answer to that? Do you create a slow food movement?” Here, Brooke attends largely to the values of the early

AFM, when little attention was given to the graded plights of high and low income communities. However, her next question demonstrated that Brooke had indeed

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considered those graded plights: “And how do you do that when you have people that work swing shifts?” Brooke’s concern for the intensified difficulty of swing shift workers in acquiring and preparing healthy, AFM-procured foods exhibits her attention to social justice. The evaluation of social justice as a primary consideration of the AFM did not eliminate other values entirely, but it did cause AFM participants and leaders examine old concerns with different, more complex perspectives that respected divergent opportunities and identities.

Structural inequalities, those inequalities that persist through unequal structures that privilege dominant groups over others, were frequently mentioned by numerous respondents, several directly mentioning associated organizational missions which incorporate social justice goals as measures to overcome and/or compensate for those structural inequalities.

“I'm starting to see more…grassroots standpoints and what it means to sustain communities social justice-wise,” Hailey told me. Hailey noticed the shift toward social justice and saw smaller, more community-centric organizations emerging within the

AFM placing social justice values at the forefront of their operations. She also noticed other, larger organizations taking notes and following suit to keep up with these more critical values. When reflecting on her choice to work with one specific AFM organization that teaches agriculture in schools, Hailey reflected:

Just knowing how to grow your own food is something that comes from a long-standing belief of how do you provide for your family without having to be reliant on the very things we were just talking about? It’s a huge social justice piece of what we do as an organization and why I'm drawn to [this organization] specifically is how we influence students.

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Hailey considered the element of sovereignty that the organization provided to communities by teaching kids to grow food attended to social justice endeavors by freeing families of the need to rely on expensive stores or charities to eat. By teaching kids to grow food, Hailey felt the organization attended to structural, food-related inequalities which emerged from unequal resource access, thus she felt the organization valued and embodied social justice.

Beyond a simple valuation of social justice, many organizations now implement programs to directly address the issues that social injustices create, such as low to no access of fresh, local food. One organization enabled small neighborhood cornerstores to carry fresh produce grown by local farmers. Vanessa discussed the organization’s successes in building a network of local farmers and bringing produce to cornerstore owners:

And so since 2012 we've really bolstered a pretty significant farmer network. We have about 40 farmers in our farmer network from across the state, a really, really diverse group of farmers….But when we began to look at [cornerstores], we realized that the distribution infrastructure wasn't there to support those stores…There was a real need for technical assistance to teach them how to merchandise it, display it, price it, all of that, maintain their displays, care for the produce, and they really didn't have the mind power or the customer base to justify using a traditional distributor, and we realized that that distribution infrastructure was gonna have to be built for them.

Vanessa’s organization addressed specific structural injustices, food access, by developing a program that allowed small convenience stores to carry fresh produce for their local communities.

However, despite this organization’s efforts to embody the social justice narrative now held dear by the AFM, several respondents critiqued Vanessa’s organization for failing to attend to the low-income community members directly. Alyssa expressed her

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frustration with the program’s lack of consumer education. To Alyssa, helping farmers and cornerstore owners without helping the community members themselves fails to embody the social justice values of the AFM. Social justice, in Birmingham’s AFM, means directly attending to the needs of community members facing hardships resulting from structural inequalities.

Other respondents expressed frustrations with AFM organizations they felt didn’t do enough to embody social justice with their programs. Carrie discussed one organization as “colonial” and “dangerous” due to its lack of explicit discussions on race in agriculture. She and others used terms like “culturally exclusive,” “whiteness,” and

“expensive” to demonstrate the failure of organizations to embody social justice, often even for those with specific social justice missions. These harsh criticisms, perhaps unfairly so, show the strong commitment many, but not all, AFM participants have to social justice values.

Bridget, who arrived as a participant in the AFM only a few years ago, after the social justice values had taken hold at a national level, was “shocked” by the political context of her first farming-focused conference. She described feeling “shocked” by the homogenous political voice at the conference, where everyone seemed solely concerned with social justice issues. Bridget was not alone in her shock or relative obliviousness to the political, social justice context of the AFM. Bridget estimated that about 85% of the shoppers that frequent one large, mostly white farmers market in

Birmingham are unconcerned with politics and social justice. Further, she described the farmers themselves as mostly unaware of the social justice values that the AFM had adopted.

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“I would say 85% of the people, who shop at our farmers market, they just come because they like it.” Bridget told me. “It's outside. They like to buy peaches from this guy, tomatoes from this guy. They don't think about it. We've got about 15% of the people who are very aware of it and that's why they come, and it's a choice they make.”

The customer base at the farmers market Bridget described hardly typify the AFM. The fact that Bridget’s estimated 15% of its shoppers, who are primarily middle-to-upper class and white, concern themselves with social justice demonstrates the pervasiveness of this value. Because this farmers market has garnered local and national attention as one of the city’s Saturday entertainment jewels, those who attend this market may or may not be involved in the AFM as a whole. With this in mind, Bridget’s 15% estimate of social justice-interested shoppers is much more significant.

Because social justice is so strongly valued, many AFM organizations, even the farmers market attended by largely apolitical shoppers, attempt to demonstrate their commitment to social justice through mission statements, program offerings, and organizational operations. Further, since positive social justice evaluations lead organizations to demonstrate their commitment to key AFM social justice values, many organizations explicitly design programs and organizational operations so they attempt to address structural inequalities in ways that prove they embody social justice responsibilities. In many cases, this commitment is demonstrated by addressing social justice through mission statements and program offerings that attend to social structures that produce and maintain inequalities between social groups. These demonstrations further the potential for upward mobility through the AFM. Mission statements, for example, solidify the positive evaluation of social justice and

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commitment to the facilitation of upward mobility, and programming efforts help to directly address and mitigate the effects of the structural inequalities that produce social injustices. Both of these efforts promote social justice by attending, indirectly and directly, to the structural concerns of social justice.

Those organizations that use organizational operations to prove their social justice concern, to their funders, consumers, or others who might doubt the organization’s commitment to social justice, may seek not only to address structural issues in ways that promote upward mobility and equality, but they may also attempt to hire those with oppressed identities, such as black and poor people, to verify their deep commitment to social justice. In these cases, those identities that, in cases outside of the social justice-valuing AFM, may be disadvantages that contribute to low mobility can become advantageous.

The Interplay of Evaluation and Identification

When specific identities are evaluated positively in a given work culture, those identities are more competitive in the job market (Streib 2017). While employers often hire those of their own social group, i.e., others who occupy dominant social groups

(Rivera 2011, 2012), when an organization benefits from the perspectives, skill sets, or presence of people from subordinate social groups, the employer is more likely to hire someone outside of her own social group (Streib 2017, Stuber 2005). In other words, when a person matches an institution’s needs, regardless of whether or not that person occupies a specific social status, that person is more likely to be hired. As Streib (2017) states, “The idea of person-institution matches, however, suggests that some institutions routinely reward individuals who grew up in poverty or the working-class due to a match between their cultural frames, strategies, and skills and an organization’s

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needs” (27). When identities that would otherwise be undervalued or viewed negatively in a cultural context are reevaluated positively in a given subcultural context, these identities gain advantages within the subculture that they might not experience in the larger culture.

In the context of Birmingham, black and poor social groups have long been undervalued, evaluated with negative stereotypes, and relegated to low resource and low opportunity areas of the city. Because of the AFM’s positive evaluation of social justice, however, these groups are reevaluated in the AFM subculture as positive statuses. Not only does the AFM seek to assist these groups rather than ignore or mistreat them, but AFM organizations also use the presence of subordinate identities to demonstrate a commitment to social justice values in ways that appeal to AFM participants and strengthen support for individual organizations.

Here, the dual processes of identification, or the classification of people into groups, and evaluation, or the assignment of worth, interact to produce a context that supports the upward mobility of subordinate people whose identities match those organizations need to prove their social justice commitment. Not only are identities changing as a result of shifting evaluations of these identities—they are also changing through indirect organizational motivations to fit consumer, funder, and other AFM organizations’ demands.

These “person-institution matches” (Streib 2017) uphold organizational missions, proving hiring organizations’ commitment to social justice, and lead to economic improvement and upward mobility when the new hires gain a consistent paycheck and, in some cases, benefits that other jobs in their communities may not offer.

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In Birmingham’s AFM, this means hiring from the communities in which the organization is located and/or to which the organization provides assistance. When communities, particularly communities made of marginalized social groups, are included in organizational operations, the organization is more likely to be seen as ethical and inclusive, embodying social justice values. In these cases, organizations and businesses may value certain identities such as “poor” and/or “black” for reasons other than a true reevaluation of the people within the marginalized social groups. These organizations and businesses may see such groups for the additional value their presence could grant them. Regardless of intent, hiring from marginalized groups provides a reciprocal benefit to the employer and new hire. The employing party gains credentials that demonstrate a social justice commitment and the new hire obtains upward mobility.

Carol discussed hiring her organization’s community garden manager from the surrounding community, who she pays to maintain the garden, and hiring local electricians to support the community’s economy. While Amelia expressed happy excitement concerning the potential for her own business’s success with the advancement of additional white-owned businesses into the black community in which she opened her own food-related business, Amelia was quick to note that her business employed several local community members. Carol, Amelia, and other white respondents signaled their commitment to social justice endeavors by noting their facilitation of upward mobility through the hiring of marginalized identities.

However, it is not just white-led organizations that simultaneously facilitate upward mobility and capitalize on the social justice demonstration of hiring oppressed social

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groups. Perhaps more keen to the issues of marginalized groups, several black-led

AFM organizations seek, specifically, to hire otherwise not hirable people. These organizations do not always simply hire from local marginalized communities; they may also hire people who are further marginalized within a marginalized community—people with low educations, who may have trouble making it to work, or who might have a history of criminal behavior that would lead other organizations to ignore their applications. These AFM organizations provide upward mobility opportunities to people who might otherwise only see their economic circumstances get worse.

Shannon, a black AFM organization leader, hires community members with more problems than others because her organization values upward mobility and community evolution. She stated:

And the cornerstone of how we do things is the training of young people to run the cafe. And our commitment is not to bring polished young persons, but that person that I was That young person who really extraordinarily good people, creative, um, talented, but with challenges. That you try to figure out. And ordinarily, people would not necessarily be inclined to work with you as you're working it out because it can impede so called progress. But those are the type of young people that we are, you know. They are not the straight A students. They are not even necessarily clear on what they want to do and how they want to do it. And typically, they have challenges such as transportation, housing, and a whole lot of other stuff.

Shannon explains that this requires an “understanding that these people might not have the skill level. It's just an investment of time and energy… it does require that you value more than the bottom line.”

For organizations like the one Shannon leads, people with identities and issues that other places might see as detriments are seen as assets, integral to the organization’s mission to have deep impacts in “abandoned” and underserved

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communities. This person-institution match allows organizations to receive funding for impactful, social justice-focused programs and to provide opportunities for upward mobility to people who might not otherwise have them. Thus, the processes of evaluation and identification within this social justice context can generate opportunities for upward mobility.

While many organizations strive to offer opportunities for upward mobility, organizations are not always able to achieve the person-institution matches which lead toward upward mobility. Sometimes, even when organizations seek these matches with valued identities, matches are hard to recruit and retain. Multiple white respondents discussed issues recruiting black community members as leaders and participants in their AFM organizations and programs. Sabrina discussed issues finding farmers of color to sell produce at her farmers market:

Some really, really proactively [went] after African American farmers and tried to find some Latino farmers. Apparently, there are none in Alabama that are small family farmers, but we're working on it all the time. So proactively going after diversity, just to set the stage for a diverse audience. And I think we don't advertise very much, but we try to promote what we're doing in as many different areas and neighborhoods as possible.

Despite Sabrina and her team’s efforts to bring diversity to the white-dominant market through hosting vendors of color, her inability to locate vendors of color persisted.

When asked about the white-dominant board of one AFM non-profit that serves a black community, Kristen echoed Sabrina’s futile efforts. Kristen described the non-profit as small, concentrated effort that succeeds primarily on the part of a small handful of dedicated volunteers who do actively recruit black board members. Kristen defended

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the organization’s efforts, fully disclosing the organization’s difficulty retaining both black and white board members.

“There have been black people on the board,” Kristen told me, “but they have passed on and off, as have white folks. There's a small core, slightly rotating, who endure. People on board, though, are not white [and rich] outsiders, but people who live in or have genuine ties to the community.” Kristen emphasized the difficulty of keeping anyone involved in the organizational leadership, not just black community members.

Even when organizations find person-institution matches that benefit them and provide upward mobility opportunities, these matches are not always free from anxiety.

When considering how to demonstrate a commitment to diversity, Brooke discussed her concern with adding marginalized people to her organization haphazardly, in fear that they would feel or be perceived as a token rather than a true organizational asset.

These concerns made it all the more challenging for her organization to responsibly and successfully hire from the community it served.

Because of these difficult issues related to person-institution matches, AFM organizations that adhere to social justice values and seek to provide opportunities for upward mobility to the communities they serve often end up with a mixed bag of successes and failures concerning upward mobility for community members. The next subsection explores the successes and failures of three organizations’ attempts to facilitate upward mobility and equal participation in the AFM.

Striving Toward Upward Mobility in Birmingham’s AFM

Many AFM organizations make an effort to promote equality and generate opportunities for upward mobility through their organizational operations. Hiring community members to demonstrate social justice commitments certainly benefits a few

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who might otherwise not have many opportunities for upward mobility, but this is just one small aspect of the organizations’ operations that intend to generate upward mobility. A large number of AFM organizations in Birmingham host programs which aim explicitly or implicitly to promote equality and upward mobility for Birmingham’s poor and black population. These programs have unequal strengths and weaknesses, but they do, perhaps unknowingly, employ the evaluation and identification cultural processes previously discussed to procedures used in program planning and execution. The depth with which organizations consider such cultural processes affects programming choices and outcomes. Programs that think critically about culture and history, for example, create programs that address issues much differently than those who do not. Programs cognizant of the historical and cultural roots may address structural inequalities more directly, and their missions to promote upward mobility and equal opportunity may prove more impactful.

The subsections to follow will discuss three specific programs hosted by three different organizations, explicating the successes and failures of these programs’ attempts to address structural inequalities and foster upward mobility: a culinary training program, a SNAP-accepting farmers market, and an agricultural education program in inner-city public schools.

Culinary Training Program

One organization hosted a culinary training program which recruited under- and unemployed community members for a free, but unpaid, three-month internship in which participants gained culinary skills marketable to a range of food industry jobs.

Participants who committed to the program, remained reliable, and worked hard could expect to receive a good recommendation by a local chef with a vast network of

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employers in the industry. Many of the former participants were described as having little formal education beyond high school, and, perhaps as a result, they struggled to find jobs that could consistently pay them a living wage for their labor. This program directly addressed equal opportunities by acknowledging the structural limitations that community members’ low socioeconomic statuses created throughout their lives. In order to promote upward mobility, the program offered local residents who struggled to find work the opportunity to receive free technical training and a large employer network.

When asked how the program helped participants, Joelle (40 years old, black, female), a former participant herself, said, “It depends on the person…[The program] gives you the opportunity to learn new stuff, and you can either branch off and do your own thing or you can take what you've learned and go somewhere else.” Joelle herself found a job with the hosting organization rather than a restaurant, but others who completed the program have found careers in catering, restaurant kitchens, even managing fast food establishments.

However, despite the program’s good intentions and some individual successes, the culinary program struggled to recruit and retain participants. One of the hosting organization’s employees, Jessica, considered the many reasons for this difficulty. To start, the program required that, for three months, participants work and learn in the kitchen, five days per week, for seven hours each day, unpaid. This large time requirement with no pay, Jessica explained, was quite difficult for people who already deal with financial insecurity to both handle and to relate to culturally.

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“You get a stipend for transportation,” Jessica told me, “and you get fed lunch.

That's it. So, if you don't have a place to live and you need money, it's like, working on the weekends or?” These requirements kept people who might benefit from the program from signing up, and it also made it difficult for many who began the program to follow through until graduation. When participants quit early, the program leaders did not provide them with the same level of support as those who graduated successfully.

Jessica explained, “If you go through the whole program, people do well…people who slack off aren't gonna get recommendations… Like, if we can vouch for you, we can get you a job, but if we can't vouch for you, we can't get you a job.” Jessica explained her concern for getting participants “to understand the commitment” they would need to make for success through examples of experiences she had with former participants. As noted in the previous chapter, one participant even expressed that they felt they would do better selling drugs than participating in an unpaid internship to gain marketable skills.

The cultural disconnect in the understanding of unpaid internships that Jessica describes stems from the structural inequalities that allow some people financial support and safety nets while others are forced to do without them. Multiple white respondents discussed the concept of being “rich enough to be poor” in the context of unpaid and low-paid internships and service in programs like AmeriCorps. Such programs are largely white, not because black people are uninterested or don’t know about them. The programs are mostly white, these respondents argued, because white people are more likely than black people to be rich enough to have financial support and safety nets that allow them to survive with little or no pay. Thus, while such training programs and

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experiences can do much to enrich lives and provide opportunities to both rich whites and poor blacks, rich whites are better equipped to take the time to have those experiences and trainings while poor blacks (whites, and others) may struggle to survive with such few resources, making such opportunities, at best, far less enticing or, at worst, impossible.

Kristen, considerate of the structural issues that create inequality and prevent upward mobility, recognized both the value of the program and the reasons the program struggled.

“It's been complicated to recruit people for the chef training” Kristen said. “The people who are interested are not always the people who can participate for various reasons.” This complexity stemmed from a disconnect between priorities and possibilities. While the program attempts to foster upward mobility, the program does so

1) within the confines of limited funding, and 2) using terminology and cultural norms that may be less relevant in black culture. Limited funding prevents the organization from paying interns, and funding is notoriously scarce among small AFM non-profits in

Birmingham, an issue voiced by numerous respondents.

Funding is not the only issue limiting program success, however. Cultural inconsistencies between program leaders and participants also limits the program’s success in recruiting and retaining participants. The concept of the unpaid internship, particularly when the internship drastically limits potential paid working hours for three consistent months, is simultaneously foreign and, virtually, impossible. As one of the organization’s leaders explained, however, the culinary program’s hours function to uphold other programs in which neighborhood kids eat for free. Also limited by funding,

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the culinary program’s day labor allows the other feeding programs to persist and help ensure neighborhood kids have consistent meals through the summer.

Thus, the cultural inconsistencies, when combined with funding limitations and other programming needs, become increasingly difficult to shift and overcome. No matter how committed to social justice values an organization may be, the limits of funding create constraints, and when these constraints restrict the organization’s capacity to bend to the needs of those identities it seeks to include, less can be done to accommodate these needs than might be possible had the funding been available. In this case, funding was needed to either pay the participants, pay employees who could work the hours needed to feed kids in other programs, or both. Without this additional funding, the culinary program cannot pay participants and cannot change its time requirements. Nonetheless, this program, when successfully completed does offer the potential for upward mobility, primarily through technical kitchen training and networking opportunities with food industry employers in the area.

White-Dominant Farmers Market, Seeking Diversity

Many of the most popular farmers markets around the city are dominated by white vendors and white shoppers, and they tend cater to richer crowds where customers can pay farmers higher prices for produce. Following the mainstream AFM’s original cultural values, these markets have long privileged the economic wellbeing of the farmers over that of the consumers, who are typically assumed, if they are shopping at the market, to be already financially secure. During the AFM’s early years, there was little critical analysis of the whiteness or the richness of these large farmers markets.

The efforts of one large market was, and to a great degree continues to be, to increase

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the profit margins of farmers and vendors who might otherwise see far less return on their products.

Bridget reflected on the economic impact of this large market for the community of farmers who participated in it:

I think you've got farmers who make anywhere from 20k a year at this market or 15k. I've got one farmer who I know for sure makes about 15k a year at our market. I have a peach farmer who probably makes 50k a year. So, I think it's anywhere from 15k to 50…Which is good.

This market, Sabrina explained, had economic benefits which reached beyond the farmers alone:

[The market] literally creates jobs for people. It literally creates work for [the man who puts up the vendor tents] and his whole team throwing everything up, for our team…Took all the farmers and the vendors who created all these products for people. There's all the people that are creating all the signage and the banners and the t-shirts. So, there's a lot of human resources and a lot of dollars that go into just putting on an event that size. you think about an event that is attracting 10,000 people every single week, and there's all the cleaning and all the residual stuff that goes out to restaurants. people go out to eat afterward, or they use gasoline, well most people, to drive there.

Sabrina mentioned a number of people who the market helps: the farmers and vendors, the market employees, the subcontractors and their teams who constructed the tents each week, even the gas companies, restaurants, and cleaning companies that received residual economic benefits as customers filed in from outside the city to visit the market. What Sabrina did not directly mention in this assessment of economic benefits were the benefits to the black and poor majority in the city—and this absence of discussion was not a result of explicit, intentional exclusion. There are few benefits to this group of people because they have not had the opportunity to be included in the market for some time. The market is far from bus routes, the products are expensive,

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the demographics are overwhelmingly white, and the largest markets only began to accept SNAP benefits in 2017. Thus, as Chapter 4 detailed, the AFM has not enabled equitable participation.

While the economic wellbeing of farmers is certainly not far out of reach of the newfound social justice values of Birmingham’s AFM, the newer evaluations of social justice have privileged those beyond the farm owners who occupy the market tents on

Saturday mornings. Now, farm workers, who are rarely seen at the market, and, more commonly in Birmingham, the marginalized community members, who may or may not have access to healthy or local food because of their social statuses, lay at the center of social justice foci.

Because of this shift in focus, those white-dominant farmers markets who did not wish to be seen as underserving of the majority of Birmingham’s residents, the poor and black, incorporated efforts to increase diversity and offered opportunities for those who might not be able to afford to support farmers to attend the market and pay for produce.

However, as noted earlier in this chapter, recruiting vendors of color, an effort one market assumed would increase diversity within its customer base resultantly, was a struggle. Despite the claims of respondents who worked with large, white-dominant farmers markets that diversity was on the rise, my fieldwork between December 2015-

August 2017 showed an overwhelmingly white presence with very little diversity compared to some of the smaller farmers markets with more moderate prices and proximity to public transportation.

Thus, despite some program advancements that showed the markets understood and responded to social justice values (i.e., accepting SNAP benefits and attempting to

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locate more farmers of color), the large markets were less responsive to the structural issues and their historical, cultural roots than other AFM organizations. Because of the lack of attention to these issues, the markets did little to directly solve social injustices or change market processes to accommodate a variety of needs, other than simply accepting SNAP, another form of currency that helps to increase farmers profit margins.

These markets did little to demonstrate a true reevaluation or celebration of the identities they traditionally, albeit unintentionally, excluded.

Educational Pipelines to Agricultural Careers

A few AFM organizations in Birmingham focus their efforts on educating school age children about sustainable agriculture and healthy eating. Most of these organizations focus on inner city public schools, working with kids of a variety of ages, some even following kids all the way from elementary school to high school graduation.

These organizations seek to empower kids with the knowledge and abilities necessary to grow their own food and pursue agricultural careers as a path toward stability and upward mobility as they grow into adulthood. Many organizations refer to the process of training these kids for agricultural careers a “pipeline” in which students are trained over the course of their primary and secondary educations to operate agricultural businesses. In these pipelines, kids begin by learning how to cultivate and harvest, and as they grow and learn more, they receive training on food preparation, sales and marketing, and entrepreneurship. Through these programs, kids learn how to make money from agricultural production. These AFM organizations assert that, because many of the kids who participate in these programs come from inner city communities with high percentages of food insecure and financially unstable households, the agricultural pipeline program offers students an opportunity to learn about food

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production and health education that they can immediately use, and they also provide the potential for upward mobility should students put their knowledge to action later in life and start agricultural businesses or use the trades they learn to find employment.

Hailey described the efforts of one of these organizations:

We work with teachers and principals to deliver the program…so that students are receiving instruction out of the [gardens] everyday across all grade levels. But we also have afterschool programs where…a very select number of students maintain the space and learn how to harvest and get way more engaged than just through curriculum and instruction during the day. We also have a student market club where students take on different roles in different entrepreneurial activities. Like, one's an accountant, one's a quality control person, and one is the communications and marketing person, so that they're learning business skills and selling produce directly to their school community and the community surrounding the school. Um, so there's many different components.

Some organizations even facilitate pipelines into higher education. As Shelby discussed:

That's setting up pipelines. You can go directly from [a high school with an agricultural program] to [a community college]. Then you can get your two- year [degree] there at [that college] in culinary, then you go to [a four-year college] and get that business part you need. That's your other two years, a business degree. The whole gamut, the whole business and the, uh. Cause you can open a restaurant, but if you don't know the business side, you gonna fail.

The extension into higher education that Shelby described demonstrates the impact these AFM organizations have had on local educational institutions. Not only have they infiltrated the public education system in the city of Birmingham to include and value agricultural education, they have also connected other skill sets, like culinary and business, to agricultural endeavors, encouraging former participants to use and cultivate their agriculture skills as they advance through college.

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These organizations also maintain that the agricultural skills they teach are useful beyond agricultural work. Hailey discussed the positive effects the program had for students’ performance in other subjects at school:

We are also interested in basic knowledge as it relates to standard space curriculum, so you know, science, English, social studies, all of those we're able to tie in curriculum directly related to those subjects. Um, and we also are interested in the social, emotional development of students, so that's often seen as, you know, are we building courage? Are we building leadership skills? Are students experiencing that at different levels of our program? And again, we're finding that they are.

These programs operate using a social justice value system, in which they seek to provide, over time, opportunities for students to gain skills and experiences necessary to succeed in agricultural and non-agricultural careers that will foster upward mobility for them as they age into adulthood, breaking the cycles of poverty that Birmingham’s low- income, inner city families have experienced for generations. Through this valuation, these programs evaluate black and poor schools, the majority of the city of

Birmingham’s public school systems, as ideal candidates for the pipeline programs. The combined valuation of social justice and the simultaneous identification and evaluation processes that cause organizations to focus on specific schools generate a context in which Birmingham’s inner-city children participate in agricultural education opportunities which could eventually lead to upward mobility.

Because these organizations have only been in operation for around 10 years, the true potential for upward mobility has yet to be observed. However, these organizations have conducted assessments to gauge the success of their programs.

Hailey told me:

We are finding a high percentage of students who are experiencing food for the first time, so a lot of vegetables and produce for the very first time.

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We're also finding just what I said, that courage, leadership, and all of those social and emotional pieces are developing in students through their relationship with physical food. And we're also doing pre- and post assessments on knowledge gains on, you know, and through our programming we're finding significant percentages there, too.

Despite the good intentions of these pipeline-promoting AFM organizations and the positive impacts they have already measured, several respondents levied harsh critiques of these organizations. Some felt the organization failed to adhere closely enough to concerns of social justice. These respondents described the organization as misguided and lacking reflexivity, even using words like “dangerous” and “colonial,” because the organization failed to address the issues of race that run deep in both the city and in agriculture as a whole. Some of the largest pipeline-promoting organizations are made up of primarily white leadership, and they are teaching agricultural practices to primarily black students. Carrie expressed her concerns:

I just think if you don't have the educational basis to talk about like, slavery and migrant labor when you talk about farming and you're going into schools in Birmingham that are not even predominantly black, like all black, I think that's super violent to those students, and it's also, it's not forced, like, I don't know that I can use the word forced, but it's definitely not a choice to do gardening…Like, my, one of my friends had a student that said like, ‘Oh, we're your slaves aren't we?’ …And I don't think she had the proper training to respond to that… And then she comes to me and she said like, ‘We should be moving past this, and kids should be moving, like that's history. Of course they're not my slaves.’ And I'm just like, ‘No, that's not sensitive. That's not a sensitive response.’ And so, I think that that's what makes it dangerous because I think gardens have the potential to be super healing and therapeutic spaces, but I think that you have to have the right intentions and it shouldn't be to just like teach students how to eat healthy.

Carrie and others like her worried that these pipeline-promoting organizations failed to fully embody the social justice values of the AFM, producing harmful outcomes and

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problematic power hierarchies that mimicked those which had plagued both agriculture and Birmingham across history.

These critiques did not always go unnoticed by the organizations they were levied against. In response to the public’s concerns about her organization’s approach to race and sensitivity, Hailey discussed the conversations her organization had behind closed doors:

I think that what's great about [this organization]…is that we're small enough and nimble enough to pivot and respond to criticism, and we do that very authentically and we do it very thoughtfully as an organization, and we ask those questions internally, and it's not for other people to be, no one knows the things that happen in our organizations, but we as a group do…So, if somebody comes to us with a question or doesn't appreciate something about what we are delivering or whatever it could be, we ask the larger questions. How do we fix it then, how do we strengthen it? It doesn't even need to be about fixing, it can be about strengthening.

Hailey’s comment demonstrates that these organizations do attend to the cultural processes that generate inequalities, and they seek answers to disrupt and overcome the ways their organizations might contribute to the maintenance of such processes.

Thus, while others might expect the pipeline-promoting AFM organizations to fail to foster upward mobility through their problematic efforts, the impact measures and the reflexivity present in these organizations demonstrate that the potential for upward mobility is, in fact, there. As the years pass and students successfully complete the pipelines from elementary school on to high school and college, and the organizations shift to accommodate the critiques and improve upon their approaches, the potential for upward mobility through such organizations will materialize.

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Conclusion

The relative successes of promoting upward mobility and disrupting unequal access to the AFM presented in the various organizations described above suggests that attention to those inequality-producing cultural processes may generate program outcomes with more success than those which fail to address cultural processes entirely. If organizations explicitly and consistently attended to cultural processes in the planning and revision processes of their programming, these programs could see more consistent upward mobility for the populations they serve.

The culinary training and agricultural pipeline programs each specifically sought to increase knowledge and improve employment prospects for some of Birmingham’s lowest-resourced citizens. These programs reflected upon important structural inequalities and created programs which aimed to help residents escape poverty. These programs adhere closely to the social justice values held dear by the more recent evolutions of the AFM, placing less emphasis on the AFM’s earlier value iterations such as environmental health and personal health responsibility. Rather, these organizations focus specifically on the economic and physical health of community members, seeking to generate upward mobility by helping community members to overcome the structural barriers, like poor education, underemployment, and low income levels, which keep families in poverty across generations.

The famers markets discussed earlier, while evolving to some degree to incorporate social justice values and a reevaluation of identification processes, continued to adhere more closely to the earlier values of Birmingham’s AFM. Populated primarily by richer, white people, many of whom do not even reside in Birmingham’s city limits, the shoppers at these markets have more, expendable, income and can afford to

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pay higher prices and make purchasing decisions that demonstrate their commitment to older AFM values like supporting local agriculture, environmental protection, and personal health responsibilities. Despite some small measures taken to demonstrate a commitment to the new social justice values of the AFM, these markets’ failed to attend to the plight of the average Birminghamian—financial insecurity. These markets did not account for the deep structural inequalities, generated by decades of cultural processes, and therefore failed to create equal opportunities for all Birmingham residents to enjoy the market and experience the upward mobility that could have been found in steady consumption of fresh produce and networking with the well-resourced community who already attended the market. These markets, when taking any measures to incorporate diversity as a value, relied on more archaic identification processes, assuming that simply offering SNAP and attracting vendors of color, would lead black and poor

Birminghamians to attend the market. If these markets had considered the various cultural processes which led to AFM inequalities, as discussed in Chapter 4, these markets could have more successfully welcomed a diverse consumer base more reflective of Birmingham’s population. While offering SNAP and incorporating diverse vendors is a step in the right direction, offering alternative payment methods and a few faces of color to a sea of white is not enough to overcome the divide and create a comfortable space for “outsiders” to enter. The deep histories of mistreatment, assumptions, and cultural differences between rich whites and poor black people, all of which rely on identification and evaluation to persist, must be considered and accounted for in order for these farmers markets to become truly inclusive with equal opportunities for all social groups.

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To create truly inclusive spaces in the AFM that consistently create opportunities for upward mobility, and, more importantly, foster equality between all social groups,

AFM organizations must transform to deeply and reflexively address the cultural processes which produce and maintain inequalities. Once addressed, these cultural processes themselves can be transformed in ways that do more than disrupt the production of inequality—organizations can generate new iterations of cultural processes which produce and maintain equal opportunities and upward mobility for all of Birmingham’s residents. The following chapter discusses these transformative processes and how they have and can be incorporated into Birmingham’s AFM.

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CHAPTER 6 TOWARD A TRANSFORMATIVE ALTERNATIVE FOOD MOVEMENT

Executive Summary

This chapter explores the ways in which cultural processes might be employed to deconstruct inequalities in ways that impact social groups, beyond those involved with

Birmingham’s AFM, in lasting ways. This chapter addresses the following research question:

• How can cultural processes be employed through Birmingham’s AFM to disrupt and reverse inequalities?

This question examines the far-reaching ability cultural processes possess in not only promoting upward mobility, but also in transformative approaches to inequality. Through these transformative cultural processes, groups can deconstruct inequalities in meaningful ways that affect large groups of people over long periods of time.

As noted in earlier chapters, cultural processes, such as identification and rationalization, lead to the development and maintenance of inequality. However, when consciously employed, these processes may also be meaningfully employed in attempts to deconstruct inequality. Chapter 5 explored cases of upward mobility that resulted from the positive employment of cultural processes. The conscious employment of identification, for example, may seek changes to narratives and definitions, actively redefining groups on new, fairer terms. Rationalization can be actively employed to manage unfair rules and evaluations as new standards and judgements are put into play to reflect truly equitable distributions of power and ideology. This chapter examines the ways that cultural processes may be employed in ways that deconstruct inequality more broadly. By enacting transformative cultural processes, groups can actively

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combat inequalities and seek lasting, equitable changes that permanently disrupt hierarchies of power.

This chapter examines cultural processes related to both revisionist approaches, or tweaking what is already in place, and revolutionary approaches, or creating something wholly new, in transforming inequality both within and outside of the AFM.

Using strategies related to community and food sovereignty, re-identification and narrative change, relationship building, revision of biased rules and regulations, and radical organizational transformation, cultural processes can, respondents argue, drastically shift culture to promote equality for all. This chapter closes with three case studies of organizations attempting to deconstruct inequality through the conscious employment of such transformative cultural processes.

Introduction

As the previous two analytical chapters explained, cultural processes can contribute to both the development and disruption of inequality within Birmingham’s

AFM. While processes of identification and rationalization have, over time, produced and maintained structural inequalities which deeply divide the resources and opportunities afforded to segregated social groups, these same processes, when employed with intentionality and critical consideration, can disrupt the cycles of inequality’s production. However, as noted in Chapter 5, intent and consideration are not always enough to make lasting impacts that foster positive changes for subordinate groups. The structural inequalities created by many decades of imbalanced cultural processes require much more complex solutions to create equality. These complex solutions may take the form of radically different approaches to social justice, food access, and the alternative food movement itself.

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For instance, just as identification processes can generate social boundaries that encourage inequality, revising the identities through additional identification processes can also shift, disrupt, and deteriorate social boundaries in ways that change perspectives and redistribute resources in more equitable ways. Further, while rationalization processes solidify the structural inequalities that make lasting, impactful impressions on hierarchies of power and the relative positions of various social groups within these hierarchies, rationalization can also be employed to redirect resource distribution and opportunities in ways that benefit subordinate groups and dominant groups more equally.

Chapter 5 explored the mixed success of upward mobility through the AFM and found that, despite some organizations’ limited attention to cultural processes, most organizations faced great difficulty in their efforts to promote upward mobility and equal opportunities. This final analytical chapter explores transformative processes in the AFM as well as a few other organizations, most of which are still in their infancy in the city, that have been described by others or themselves as transformative organizations, or organizations that seek to drastically alter the ways the AFM operates in order to directly generate equality and upward mobility for the city’s poor and black population.

For a few of these transformative organizations, community sovereignty, or the ability for the community members themselves to make decisions which strengthen and grow their communities and their members, is of highest importance. Through this ability to choose the who, how, what, and why of food production and economic growth, these organizations felt sovereignty was the key to true disruption and reversal of the inequalities produced by years of biased cultural processes.

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Transformative Processes

Community sovereignty in Birmingham is not a new idea. As Connerly (2005) described, black Birminghamians in the 1950s and 60s took local matters into their own hands. They formed groups to pool resources and overcome the multitudinous barriers to quality of life that the city erected in their way. These ideas, while perhaps fresh in recent decades, are not new. However, the recent iterations of such collective action,

Eve explained, have been more about change than true transformation for the city of

Birmingham.

“It's changed,” Eve said, “but not for the transformation, the deep transformation and true fair play. And it's sad, cause it's like, we've had a black mayor since Arrington.

That doesn't mean anything. And people think that means something.” These sentiments were shared by several other respondents who reflected on the years of black mayoral leadership alongside the persistent racial and class-based inequalities that continue to plague many inner-city communities, education systems, and opportunity structures for black Birminghamians in ways they feel are not a far stretch from the realities of the 1950s. When asked how to overcome and transform these inequalities in the city and its AFM, respondents reported a number of actions relevant to shifting cultural processes, related to both identification and rationalization. The following subsections detail these actions by cultural process category.

Identification

Respondents indirectly discussed processes of identification when suggesting that in order to overcome inequality, people need to listen to others, especially those who are different than them, and work to build relationships with one another. By interacting and listening to those who come from other social groups, these respondents

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widely argued, people could change their perspectives and stop making unfair assumptions about others. These actions could effectively re-identify people as less markedly different than one another through additional, revised identification processes.

Several respondents discussed the importance of listening and building relationships with others to change perspectives in ways that reverse the harmful aspects of identification. If people are exposed to one another and work to understand each other, these respondents argued, people from opposing social groups will be less inclined to attach negative stereotypes and assumptions of difference in ways that promote inequality between groups. For example, while decades of biased identification processes led to inequalities and distrust between racial groups in Birmingham, one respondent argued that this distrust could be reversed through dialog.

“It's taking time,” Raven said, “and it's alleviating the mistrust that we have about white people and as well as white people have about us. And the only way to do that is through dialog. And though it may be painful, it may be tearful, it may be rageful, but again it's the other side. It’s the brand new day.” Raven acknowledges the difficulty of creating this dialog, but because communication is “the only way,” she finds the distress worth the end result: a “brand new day” in which people understand one another instead of making incorrect, harmful assumptions that end in real consequences of inequality over time.

In order to communicate effectively and breach the current social boundaries forged through previous identification processes, Alyssa argued that we need to locate one another’s’ “common denominators” at which people can relate to one another:

Sometimes, you have to really get on their level. It’s like all things. If I can’t have a conversation with you from our common denominators, I don't

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argue people's beliefs with them…I believe these things because these are what my experiences have taught me. This is the life that I have lived. My paradigm is created based upon that all you can do is broaden my perspective and add to that, and I'm open to that…I can't tell you that everything you've seen or done or known is wrong. Because experience tells you that that is false. And then I just become a liar, and then I'm useless.

Alyssa’s care to avoid negating the experiences of others demonstrates her willingness to have an open dialog that moves toward trust and mutual understanding, using communication strategies that can empower and respect both sides, no matter how different their experiences may be.

To Jordan, the act of “breaking bread” with others can facilitate effective listening and relationship building:

It's like, normally, unless you're just an extrovert, you typically take the time to eat dinner with people you care about and who you have a relationship with. You don't just say, hey come on sit down and eat. Usually. But when you take that time to break bread, some people really take that as being something sacred. So why wouldn't a community feel the same way?

By taking the time and making the effort to connect with others over food, Jordan argues, people can create space to show each other that they care and are willing to listen and understand.

In the AFM specifically, respondents argued that listening and building relationships between groups could lead to overall more effective programming. Iris and others argued that by listening and building relationships with the community prior to coming in and making changes based on assumptions, gardens and food programs could more effectively serve the community. When discussing the relative success of one AFM program in her community, Iris explained to me that she gave them some important tips:

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And I just remind them, just remember that everybody don't eat radishes. So, you don't need four beds of radishes. you still need to know what's needed and what's most desirable in the community. So, another thing is if we don't plant it well, it'll just be a field of overgrown, no use, cause no one wants to eat it.

To Iris, a little communication and understanding would help the AFM organization to stop wasting its own resources and better serve her community. Through effective communication and the resulting, more accurate, identification processes, everybody stands to gain.

Communication and relationship building between different social groups can help to shift the perceptions of difference which grew out of a history of biased identification processes. However, these changes may not automatically occur with a simple shift in communication between individuals. Because many of the inequalities present in the AFM stem from structural inequalities, truly transformative identification processes must change the processes on a much deeper level. Alyssa and others argued that thoughtfulness about identification processes, specifically “changing the narrative” about race and poverty in the city, could help to generate new identification processes that deconstruct those inequalities produced by the identification processes of the past. As quoted in Chapter 4, Alyssa stated:

I think when we get like definitions of things, like that basic understanding of it's not racism it's because I don't want to come and be beat up by you, for you to understand I'm a person. I just want to be a person. Like and when I'm a person, then maybe you will see that I'm a person and that, like that to me. So if anything I think we need to work better on those narratives…I think the narratives are broken. We use a lot of backwards language, we say the system is broken, it's not broken. It works perfectly. It was created this way. We need a new system.

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Alyssa argued that new narratives and system transformation could help rectify the structural inequalities that communication and relationships would not be able to address.

Rationalization

The changed perspectives generated through these new identifications would generate new evaluation processes in which people are valued more equally. Following these processes of identification and evaluation, rules and regulations which are found to be biased against some social group can be carefully redesigned to reflect standards which better promote equality. When old, unfair evaluations are transformed to reflect equality-producing values, such as the social justice value described in Chapter 5, rationalization processes can disrupt the inequality cycle.

“I don't think that is complicated to understand,” Shannon said, “but it does require that you value more than the bottom line.” In order to overcome biased evaluation processes, such as those that create hierarchies of power based on the amount of money and other resources a social group has, additional values must be created to take the place of the problematic values.

Further, the unfair rules and regulations put into place by the process of standardization must be, at minimum, revised to create a transformation of the structural inequalities that unfair standards put into place. While a few respondents, like Cecilia

(40 years old, white, female), felt the system could only change as time passed and the power to shift standards made it to the hands of younger future generations, others saw standardization processes as something that should be attended to immediately. To these action-demanding respondents, transformation of standardization meant either a)

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finding a way to shift structures within the current system or b) transforming the system into something entirely different.

Revisionist approaches to transformation

Gavin hoped that equity could be found through revisions to the current standards and structures. Gavin described his vision for a more equitable AFM and city as a whole:

I just want to see a just allocation of public resources…And I think we first, we call that issue out, and then second we have the wherewithal to know that how that is created. And when we see that, we can look at restoring the justice in a way that doesn't require us to take from one person and give to another.

Gavin’s vision incorporated revision, not radical restructuring, of the current system in ways that he felt would generate equitable opportunities and repair the damage that previous processes had caused. Gavin used words like “restoring,” “creating,” and

“rectify” to communicate his revisionist approach. However, just because Gavin felt drawn to revision rather than a radical revolution did not mean he did not plan to use transformative cultural processes in his actions. In describing his vision for agriculture in the city, Gavin explained:

Yeah, so agriculture itself…from a metaphorical standpoint, we are planting seeds, and we're cultivating the ground, and laying the proper foundation, changing the culture, changing the ideas, and so that we create new institutions, planting seeds to create new institutions that replace some of the institutions that have not been just in the way the allocate resources.

Here, Gavin directly responds to the institutional, structural inequalities put into place by previous and ongoing cultural processes, and he describes addressing culture directly, changing the way people think about agriculture and other people, so that new institutions, as well as the new standards for equitable practices that would accompany

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those institutions, may take the place of the old. In this way, Gavin’s revisionist approach displays a commitment to transformative cultural processes. He saw agriculture as one way communities could disrupt inequality by transforming cultural processes. He addressed the advent of agribusiness in Birmingham’s urban black communities as one option for transformative standardization in which farming could become an integral part of communities providing both food and economic security for themselves, generating community sovereignty. He discussed transformative evaluation through the process of “creating value for [the black] community,” and he contemplated transformative identification. Gavin suggested that equality might be achieved when people were ready “to step outside the bounds of what they felt was safe, or what they felt was acceptable, or what was allowed within the world.”

“Like, what do I need to do right now to improve my position?” Gavin asked, “And

I want to ask myself that question. I'm not allowing somebody else to define me. I'm certainly not gonna allow the system to define me as being less than just because I've always been in an inferior economic position.” By rejecting incorrect identification processes and directly shifting them by creating value and revising opportunities and institutions, Gavin felt the AFM could transform into a more equitable space that could directly grant disempowered people the power they deserved.

Others shared Gavin’s commitment to revision. Alyssa shared an analogy about creating a better world:

I had a thing a couple years ago, it's like you guys are, you have a raft in the middle of the ocean, you have a piece of wood. And you are like, a whole bunch of people are in this water drowning, dying, and they are swimming for the dream, and you are standing on this piece of raft like, begging them to get on the raft with you. They don't want to be on your raft. Your raft looks like crap. It doesn't look safe, and even if they all did,

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we would all die. So, while you are standing on the edge, begging for people to get on your raft with you, I am back here adding on to the raft. And I think that all of those things are necessary. Now if anybody taps me on my shoulder and says, hey can I get on the raft? Absolutely. Here's a hammer and some nails, join. But I think it's a waste of time to have nothing and beg people to join nothing. it's very hard to argue from a position of no power. Make power moves from power positions. If you're not in a power position, figure out how to create that.

To Alyssa, radical approaches to the disruption of inequality, particularly when coming from voices without much support, can be off putting. Alyssa felt that it was more important to work using real actions rather than transformative ideology in order to create the changes necessary to bring people to transformative causes. These actions, she implied, can be transformative processes themselves without outwardly demonstrating revolutionary transformation.

While Alyssa approached change and equality from a within-system approach, she maintained an appreciation for those who do use more radical approaches to transformation:

And I think you need rage against the system people, absolutely. I think you needed Malcoms as much as you needed Martins. Historically, the reasons that Martin was able to open the doors that he was is [more radical approaches were] really unappealing. There were real life, documented conversations that were, ‘Hey what can we give you to make him stop?’ If he wasn't doing anything, you wouldn't be having this conversation. So yeah. I got the agenda, let's do these things and it'll get him to not do that as much. Then when he starts too much, let's talk again. Let's do something else. So, you need all of those people.

Riding the line between revisionist and revolutionary in this quote, Alyssa reported a value shared by others in the AFM: radical organizations are necessary to demand the large concepts in order for more moderate progressive organizations to make smaller demands and achieve within-system goals that inch the AFM closer toward equality.

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Revolutionary approaches to transformation

While a few other respondents shared Alyssa and Gavin’s revisionist approach, several others discussed the importance of radical, revolutionary change in bringing true transformation to the AFM. To these respondents, radical transformation would be the only option—the current system left no room for change.

“We can't really work with the system here,” Eve told me. “We have to be creative and work around it.”

Like Gavin, several respondents felt community sovereignty was an ideal route toward transformation in the AFM, however other respondents did not feel the current system could grant the opportunity for equality. These respondents desired a revolutionary approach to change that deeply and drastically shifted culture. Some respondents directly rejected the mainstream AFM in the process.

“I really don't need to be a part of [a mainstream AFM],” Kevin stated. “I can create that on my own, and it'll be something that is down to earth and with people and people will control it…People must control their food from the seed all the way to putting it in your mouth. People must control every aspect of it.” Kevin directly rejected the mainstream AFM in favor of his own construction of a new, radical AFM—which he termed “the Cooperative Food Movement”—which put the power of all decisions into the hands of community members. Allowing community members to not only participate in all aspects of food production but fully control every motion as well is not a practice employed by many AFM organizations, black or white. Kevin’s transformative approach to the AFM, in which he gave his approach to the AFM an entirely new name to mark the radical difference, sought to create a new standard of operation in which marginalized communities could incorporate their own values into food production

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operations, halting the cycle of inequality which prevented many of them from participating in the mainstream AFM or accessing healthy foods at all. Kevin emphasized that he would not bend to the standards of others outside of his community who wished to maintain control over him and his people:

We're not just gonna make a deal. You're not gonna present us with a contract and we're just gonna sign on the dotted line. No. We're gonna have a conversation and Memaw and Big Mama, and T Bone and them, they gonna be in that conversation, too…So, these conversations have to be had, because I said this alternative food movement relates to white supremacy, white supremacy doesn't have give. Give is not a part of its dynamic. It doesn't have anything to do with sharing and love. No. So, I've already concluded that I'm going to have to fight that aspect of it when it comes to that food thing.

Kevin associated the mainstream white-dominated AFM with white supremacy, and asserted that he would fight to maintain control over his community so that they could maintain sovereignty over the food spaces so often controlled by whites. Through the production and preservation of a sovereign space with his Cooperative Food Movement,

Kevin felt he could transform his community for the better.

While many AFM organizations in Birmingham had missions to help communities and individuals in ways that aimed to help people overcome the barriers related to structural inequalities connected to decades of problematic cultural processes, only a few organizations sought to radically change the AFM with transformative practices, stimulating equity and deconstructing the structural inequalities at their sources. The next section of this chapter examines three organizations’ approaches to the transformation of Birmingham’s AFM.

The Transformative Food Movement

Although few of Birmingham’s AFM organizations approach inequality with transformation in mind, those that do operate quite differently from one another. Like the

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broader AFM, these organizations attack different issues using different methods in order to seek lasting changes in both the AFM itself and Birmingham’s communities of color. These organizations operate on a gradient, from low transformation to high transformation, and they work either within the current system or seek to create new systems entirely. The organizations within this subsect of the AFM, what I will call the transformative food movement, are bound by their efforts to bring the AFM to the people on the people’s terms rather than on the terms of the AFM’s leaders, who are often middle or upper-class and white. This section will explore three such organizations and the transformative processes they employ in their efforts to create lasting positive changes in the AFM.

A Café for the People

When people in Birmingham describe the city as “a good place for foodies,” as many of my respondents did, they are speaking to a distinct demographic of people.

Most of the “foodie” restaurants in the city are financially exclusive, charging between

$15 and $40 for a meal for one person, and the restaurants themselves are usually located in primarily white entertainment spaces, visually exclusive to people of color who seek others like them to feel comfortable, and culturally exclusive, requiring distinctive styles of dress, speech, and behavior in order for eaters to blend in with the crowd. The farm-to-table, fusion cuisine, and fine dining experiences are, for many reasons, not inclusive to Birmingham’s majority low-income, black population. Thus, most Birminghamians miss out on the “foodie” experience and, further, miss out on the opportunity to eat healthy, local food prepared in a restaurant setting.

One café changed this reality for those living on the West side of Birmingham.

One visionary organization established first a community garden and then a pay-as-you-

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can café in which patrons pay what they can in order to dine on healthy, local, delicious food in a quaint café. If a patron was unable to afford to pay for their meal, they did not have to pay. Those who were able to afford more than the suggested cost of one meal were able to pay for multiple meals to make up for the costs of feeding those who cannot pay for themselves.

While this organization operated within the larger AFM system as a typical non- profit, connected, as many are in Birmingham, to a church with a variety of other programs as well, the café and its associated community garden can be classified as transformative programs. Though a large number of the restaurant’s patrons came from outside of the community that housed the café, the café’s leadership met regularly with local community members to ensure that the café met their needs and remained a community asset of which community members could claim ownership and pride.

Combined, the café and community garden employ multiple people from the community, serve the community that houses them, and consult the community about their program operations. These programs address the cultural processes that generate inequality from a revisionist perspective, transforming the cultural processes so they help to reverse structural and interpersonal inequalities.

Identification. At this café, black and white, rich and poor, old and young people all sit together and enjoy the same meal, rotated weekly, often at shared tables where they can “break bread,” as Jordan described, communicate, and build the relationships necessary to overcome the problematic identification processes that result from prolonged segregation. Jordan considered the relationship building aspect of identification:

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So it's, it goes back to relationships and taking the time. I think anything can happen. I think we could have healthy food at a lot of different places. I love what [the café] is doing…But I know that took time for them to build relationships. And yeah, other people outside the community gets the benefit from it, of getting good food, but you got people who live in the community that's a part of that change. So now they're gonna affect their friends and families.

Like Jordan, other respondents noted the café’s ability to spark conversations and stimulate relationship building between people of drastically different social positions. At this café, people could communicate and connect with others who they may never otherwise encounter. Thus, the café provides a space in which to transform identification processes and break down the social boundaries which produce and maintain inequalities.

Evaluation. The café leadership also uses transformative evaluation processes which value individuals with problems that other places of employment might see as a hindrance, such as low education and a lack of transportation, transforming identification-related evaluations to privilege those who would otherwise be at a disadvantage. Shannon described this transformative evaluation process:

Our commitment is not to bring polished young persons, but that person that I was, that young person who’s really extraordinarily good people, creative, talented, but with challenges that you try to figure out…They are not the straight A students; they are not even necessarily clear on what they want to do and how they want to do it. And typically, they have challenges such as transportation, housing, and a whole lot of other stuff.

Shannon goes on to explain how this evaluation process can positively impact communities, but only when businesses and organizations value more than the money they take home at the end of the day:

We are very intentional about hiring people from the community, and it is why we continue to think about a way to evolve as an economy where you don't have the community as spectators…At least that should be 50% of

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your workforce. But what that will require is that understanding that these people might not have the skill level. It's just an investment of time and energy. I don't think that is complicated to understand but it does require that you value more than the bottom line.

If businesses evaluate the community as more important than their profits, Shannon argued, then communities may see true transformation as members are given opportunities for upward mobility consistently and despite those barriers which make them less employable in the eyes of profit-motivated employers.

Standardization. Finally, the café’s steady incorporation of community members’ feedback into the café’s operations transforms the processes of standardization within that program to consistently account for the needs and desires of people who would otherwise go unheard. Shannon explained:

We wanted to make sure that we involved the community in the whole process of the structuring of this cafe. So, they would come every Wednesday, just the community folk, and would eat and we would talk about how we wanted this space to be. And it's an ongoing conversation and very much a part of how we method for it... I wanted to create a space where everybody feels welcome. In that the community that is indigenous to the cafe does not feel unwelcome.

The inclusion of community members in the standardization of café practices allowed the community to ensure that the café does not become a space that generated the same inequality found in other healthy restaurants across town. This transformative standardization practice allowed community members to remain attentive to the structural inequalities they experienced and help the café to address them appropriately. Overall, despite the revisionist within-system approach, the café’s transformative identification, evaluation, standardization processes offer an exemplar for other non-profits interested in the transformation of the AFM to successfully follow without appearing too radical to garner support from more moderate funders.

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Agribusiness for the People

A few AFM organizations in Birmingham focused their programs on generating viable agricultural businesses in and/or for low-income communities of color. These organizations attempted to transform both the city and the AFM itself by offering opportunities for upward mobility for individuals and economic advancement for communities as a whole. One particular organization, the most radical version of these sorts of organizations, sought to place these businesses directly into ownership by the low-income community members themselves, rather than simply employing or serving these people. This organization claimed radicalism as both a political strategy and the only viable option that would put an end to poverty. Thus, this organizations operated largely outside of the typical AFM system, and they attempted to create great transformation in black communities and the AFM itself by shifting conversations and bringing to light root causes of inequality such as racism and the persistent poverty which accompanies it in the city.

Identification. Like the café described above, this organization employed transformative processes, hoping to disrupt cycles of inequality and promote racial and economic justice that extended beyond the AFM. By directly acknowledging and seeking to overcome racism and the racialization processes that generate it, the organization broke down inequality-producing identification processes and presented instead a philosophy of anti-racism which directly opposed racism and harmful racialization processes. When asked to explain how the organization differed from other agribusiness organizations, Gavin explained:

The way we deal with racism. The way we do is call it out and say exactly what it is, and me personally and especially [my colleague], really don't mind if it offends someone because it's not about the personality as much

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as it is about the policy, and I'd like to see people get along and hold hands and sing kumbaya, but that's not really my goal as much as I just want to see a just allocation of public resources.

By both acknowledging and seeking to change racist perspectives, Gavin and his colleague sought to change identification processes in ways that would benefit black people and disrupt inequality.

Evaluation. This organization embodies transformative evaluation by valuing the black and poor as owners and controllers of their own destinies, and in its efforts to establish important conversation topics, such as those on racism and gentrification in the AFM, which could, and did, shift AFM participants’ values. As several involved in this organization mentioned to me, they began the conversations on gentrification, or the unfair development and subsequent displacement in predominantly black and low- income communities. As Ashton described:

We're helping lead a conversation in Birmingham about racism and gentrification…I think we also have, at least in the beginning, I know some folks, some of their main leaders looked at us as crazy. Some of them now are supporters of [us], but for a long time in the beginning, I know my name specifically was mentioned as like, he's crazy. And I know that person who said that now seems to support me and [the organization], but I guess because we're pushing, we're a little more radical than them.

Prior to the organization’s establishment, few news articles or informal conversations discussed gentrification in the city, but shortly after its establishment, gentrification was a hot conversation topic. Tristan noted that the topic of gentrification had rarely been addressed by other AFM organizations or non-profits in Birmingham. He and others created an organization to criticize urban development and gentrification. They strived for a loud voice on social media, discrediting gentrification for half a decade before the city listened. In 2017, the city created an entire gentrification task force meant to combat

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the negative effects of development before they start. Here, the transformative evaluation processes of this one radical AFM organization led the city to standardize the new values into its governing and city planning processes.

Standardization. The organizations practices have led to the standardization of transformative processes in ways that combat inequality in the AFM and the city as a whole. As described earlier, employing alternative standards that value diversity when establishing an executive board for an organization helps to ensure that the board remains diverse. While those organizations described in Chapter 5 had trouble finding board members of color, Tristan explained that a commitment to a diverse board at the board’s creation can ensure the board remains so. Changing the demographic profile of an executive board after the fact, Tristan explained, is much harder than creating it with social justice values in mind. To Tristan and his organization, the simultaneous valuation of diversity and the standardization of these values into organizational practices could generate the transformation necessary to promote equality in the AFM.

With people of color in executive positions, the needs and desires of people of color would be better represented in AFM organizations and in the AFM as a whole, leading to greater opportunities to break down the barriers which prevent equal participation in

AFM programs and events. Further, Gavin’s desire to use the organization to reallocate resources in ways that correct for the “historical and ongoing wrongs” that have plagued the poor and black for a long time, his hope for “restoring justice” through agricultural opportunities, and his motivation for “planting seeds to create new institutions that replace some of the institutions that have not been just in the way the allocate

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resources” demonstrate his vision to use the organization to re-standardize AFM operations in ways that address inequality in transformative, impactful ways.

Additionally, the organization’s desire to mentor smaller, newer organizations demonstrates their desire to further standardize their practices into the operations of other AFM organizations, encouraging the movement as a whole to incorporate similar transformative approaches to inequality. When asked about the future of the organization, Gavin told me, “I also see [the organization] still serving as a…mentor to some other organizations, smaller organizations and helping them develop their expertise.” This desire to mentor other likeminded organizations demonstrates Gavin and his organization’s desire to impact the direction of the AFM and help other organizations down the path of transformation more efficiently, using the knowledge developed through the years of trials as one of the few radical groups in the city’s AFM.

Community Land Trusts for the People

Spawning from the work of the organization previously described, another radical, high-transformation potential AFM organization sought to disrupt and reverse inequality through generating community sovereignty through agriculture-centric community land trusts. Still in its infancy, the community land trust organization (CLT), at the time of writing, had yet to fully materialize. Beginning with a small front yard farm, the CLT grew over the course of my research to include several lots centered in a historically-significant, predominantly black community in Birmingham’s city limits.

Located in one of the battle grounds of the Civil Rights Movement, the CLT aimed to do more than provide the black community with a black-owned and operated agribusiness—the CLT planned to create a sovereign space in which community members would make decisions about how and what to grow, who could buy the

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produce, and, further, the cost and inclusivity of the housing and other businesses that the CLT would eventually construct on the property.

In an area often described as abandoned by the city and avoided by developers and business investors, residents lack access to necessary resources, such as healthy food, and have little power or government support to improve community conditions.

Through a community-owned land trust, community members would participate in the development and decision making processes about their community without asking for permission or waiting for city officials to come to their rescue. The CLT hoped to provide the basic resources necessary to generate a community that could eventually be self- sufficient, able to provide for itself through viable agribusinesses that would bring plenty of food and economic security to its inhabitants. As Kevin explained:

if you invest moneys and resources in black women farmers, and women farmers specifically, you can raise up an entire community. So, that's one of the goals of the community land trust for us is to do that. Really invest in women farmers. The farm that we have is owned by [a woman]. it's her house anyway, but she owns the farm. I am her farm manager. And the successes that we have are because of her ideas. I just want to give her some more money and some more money and some more money. And that's what we have to do. Those are the kinds of things we can do. And then we can have our own movement, and I don't even know if it's a movement as much as it's kind of a, it's not even a push back. And it's not survival. It's thriving. We are surviving now. We want to thrive. But around that idea of food, we can have the food hub. We intend, or our thought is to have them as cooperatives. So, we're producing jobs for folk. And when I started thinking about that, or we started thinking about these things…and these ideas about forming these cooperatives around food, and then we have now the community land trust…but the idea is the stuff comes from the platform, the original platform of [a radical ideology- focused agribusiness organization], but it takes community members. Cause [radical ideology] doesn't start it for you. It's like, presenting an idea and then providing some assistance and resources where it can. But the community defines that themselves. So, that's what makes this thing so powerful is they can keep repeating that. That's the idea. We want this thing to repeat. But the community land trust, you know, the community is running the land. They are managing the land and they are producing

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whatever that looks like for them as a collective. And to me, we can make a boatload of income with cooperative agribusiness. Sustainable cooperative agribusiness. We can make a boatload. I mean, jobs after jobs. Distribution, packaging. We have people that can do the packaging. Every aspect of food, you look at this food we're selling, coffeehouse here, and knowing the food, we can like, package the food and get refrigeration trucks and stuff. Like, massive amounts of money can be made with this. We just need people to believe in it, believe in themselves, and they can do it. I actually kind of don't know why it hasn't been done before.

Kevin described the CLT as having great potential to radically transform both the AFM and ways of life for the people in his community, and he and others involved in the CLT focused much of their planning to account for those cultural processes which could generate inequality within and outside of their organization, opting instead to use transformative processes that would disrupt and reverse the disparities the community already experienced.

Identification. Kevin and others involved in the CLT acknowledge black people, specifically black women, as the original farmers, directly rejecting the negative identifications of these social groups that mainstream society often upholds and the mainstream AFM fails to address. This transformative identification process destabilizes the power hierarchy which places white men into the position of farm owner with people of color positioned as farm workers.

“We're not lower,” Kevin argued. “We are the original farmer. Black folk, black women specifically are the first farmers.” In Kevin’s depiction, black women were the original agricultural planners and managers, and his vision for the CLT places these women back into agricultural power positions.

Evaluation. While many of the CLT’s values are not radical in and of themselves, such as sharing between neighbors and helping local community members,

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the transformative evaluations of the community members’ role in CLT processes demonstrates a commitment to overcoming the structural inequalities that emerge when the people on the ground are undervalued and, as a result, unheard.

“I won't say that it is a communist organization,” Kevin said, “definitely not saying that.

But there are some socialist leanings to organizations like [these]. The nature of cooperative, for some folks, is socialist.” Kevin and his colleagues positively evaluated the concept of socialism for its strengths in controlling and circumventing the poverty found so frequently in spaces run primarily by the market. However, Kevin was careful to note that despite these socialist leanings, cooperatives should be viewed positively across political lines.

“Really anybody can have a cooperative,” he said. “Conservatives can have a cooperative. It's nothing complex, it's just sharing.” To Kevin and his colleagues, it was because the CLT embodied the values that their communities, once invested, could thrive instead of survive.

Standardization. By defining and planning the CLT through community output,

CLT organizers argued, the organization could be standardized to avoid the pitfalls of other organizations and truly transform communities on the community members’ terms.

This process would help the CLT to avoid creating rules and regulations that might privilege some while ignoring the needs and desires of others—the very process that created the structural inequalities the CLT sought to correct.

The CLT, Eve told me, “has three aims to it, permanently affordable housing, urban agriculture cooperatives, and emancipatory popular education.” By offering affordable housing, her community would be able to remain in place without worry over

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increasing rents or property taxes. Through urban agriculture cooperatives, those living within and employed by the CLT would be able to maintain a viable income that would generate upward mobility for families and economic security for the community as a whole. With emancipatory popular education, the CLT would cooperatively teach community members and outsiders, using their collective experiences to drive the education process, about structural inequalities and the actions that could be taken to transform structures to promote equity and opportunity for all. The processes, standardized into the operations of the CLT, work to directly transform inequality through actual opportunities and the education needed to advance these opportunities within and outside of the CLT itself.

Beyond the creation of jobs, food hubs, housing, and opportunities for oppressed people, the CLT hoped to use their education component to inspire and teach others how to operate in a similarly transformative manner.

“So that's what makes this thing so powerful,” Kevin explained. “They can keep repeating that. That's the idea. We want this thing to repeat.”

Ultimately, the CLT’s incorporation of transformative processes alongside its overt mission to transform structural inequalities through collective landownership, shared decision making, and vast agriculture and food-related business focus make the

CLT a radical organization with great potential to transform the local economy for CLT participants and to impact the AFM through education and organizational modeling for others who wish to transform their own communities. However, as Kevin noted, the realization of this transformative vision requires the buy in of the community members themselves. Other respondents echoed Kevin’s concern with guarded optimism.

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“I think it's gonna be a hard journey,” Ashton told me, considering the future of the CLT, “but yes, I think there's the potential to change Birmingham's food culture for the better.”

Discussion and Conclusion

Each of the three organizations described in the previous section approached transformative processes from a different direction. The café sought to provide healthy, local food to an otherwise “abandoned” (Shannon) community of people, employing the community’s input into all café operations to ensure that, no matter how many outsiders the café happens to draw, the café remained for and by the people. The agribusiness organization provided low-income and black communities with the knowledge resources needed to open and operate businesses for food production with the hope that such endeavors would facilitate upward mobility for these communities. The CLT dreamed of offering affordable housing and a successful, somewhat closed, economy based on agricultural and food production to communities that had long been abandoned and left to struggle alone with few resources or opportunities to improve their circumstances.

While each organization approaches transformation from a different angle, these organizations are unified in their use of cultural processes, those same processes which generated and maintained social inequalities within and outside of the AFM, to bring equity and opportunity to people on the ground. These organizations turned cultural processes into transformative processes by directly acknowledging and challenging the harms the cultural processes had created in the past. Attending carefully to these harms, the organizations all took care to positively identify and evaluate the community and include its members in the standardizations of their organizational processes.

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Through these broad transformational processes, the organizations disrupted inequality’s production on a micro-level, and they set the foundation for other AFM organizations to follow suit, granting the potential for more city-wide transformations as more employ transformational processes over time.

Still in their relative infancy, the organizations’ full impact has yet to be seen. The

CLT in particular has not enacted much of their plans due to limited funding and a slow recruitment process of the surrounding neighborhood. While the organization did grow substantially during my fieldwork, they have much work to do before the CLT is working in the manner they envisioned it to operate. These things, these transformative processes, take time to create lasting effects, particularly when inequality-producing cultural processes have dominated for a much longer time.

Other programs and organizations, tangentially related to the AFM, have also attempted transformative processes in Birmingham. One organization plans small dinner parties which host people from a variety of races and social statuses to break down harmful identification processes and stimulate productive conversations in which dinner guests present a variety of viewpoints. Kara (39 years old, black, female) described these dinners:

It's mostly black folk and white folk at somebody's house over a meal, talking about the realities of being a black person in Birmingham, in America, and the realities of being a white person in Birmingham. And that's a bright spot that the city needs horribly. And there are different organizations in the city trying to do the work of racial reconciliation who are making strides.

Kara’s acknowledgement of those organizations working toward “racial reconciliation” after decades of negative relations shines a hopeful light on the city of Birmingham.

Through “breaking bread” together, black and white people worked to overcome

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generations of segregation and the resultant inequality. However, Kara was careful to note that overcoming inequality didn’t necessarily stem strictly from integration.

“I think a perfect Birmingham is equitable,” Kara reflected. “If people want to live segregated, fine. Be equitable. If you want to live together, be equitable.”

The important thing to Kara was not integration—it was equity. Integration does not necessarily stimulate equality. Transformative processes in the AFM generate equity through intentional means. Integration, particularly for those organizations described in the previous section, is not a key focus. Transformational processes may incorporate integration in context, such as eating together in the café, but these transformative processes seek equity above all else. Integration is but a byproduct on the road toward equity. Equity transforms lives and communities. Should other AFM organizations adopt transformative processes similar to those described above, the AFM would itself transform into a powerful producer of justice.

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CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

Overview

While a simple glimpse in history clearly shows that cultural processes impact the development and maintenance of social inequalities, the slow nature of cultural changes, and the even slower to form impacts of these changes, make it more difficult to observe the impacts transformative cultural processes have had on Birmingham’s

AFM. As noted in Chapter 6, many of Birmingham’s transformation-focused AFM organizations are still in their relative infancy, either still in the planning stages or conducting programs only a few years old. The youth of these organizations, coupled with the naturally slow processes of cultural and social change, makes it difficult to measure these programs’ levels of success in disrupting and reversing inequalities.

However, as evidenced in Chapter 6, the approaches these organizations employ offer great transformative potential by directly addressing the root causes of inequality in AFM participation, leadership, and definition. Thus, should other organizations adopt approaches which seek to disrupt inequality and reorganize AFM structure to generate equitability and justice, currently existing organizations like those mentioned in Chapter 6 serve as exemplars by which others could learn to purposefully employ cultural processes in ways that destabilize the AFM’s status quo and transform the movement for the better.

As Tristan noted, “You can have idealism and still be practical. The two aren't mutually exclusive. And I think we should be idealistic. I think we should be positive about the future. And I think we should be inspired by what we can do.”

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Summary of Key Findings

This dissertation examined the cultural processes contributing to the production, maintenance, and disruption of inequality in Birmingham, Alabama’s racially divided

AFM. In this work, I explained how collectively achieved cultural processes, such as identification and rationalization, can create lasting inequalities that affect different social groups in unbalanced ways.

Each analytical chapter (Chapters 4, 5, and 6) addressed one of the key questions posed in Chapter 1. Chapter 4 addressed the first question (How do cultural processes contribute to the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s

AFM?) and explored the role cultural processes played in the production and maintenance of inequality in Birmingham’s AFM. The city’s history of segregation and racial violence, arguably persistent today, developed as a result of centuries old cultural processes that racialized and stigmatized black people, marking them as subjectively inferior to lighter skinned races. This cultural process, known broadly as identification, persisted through the 19th and 20th centuries, and rationalization, another broad cultural process, organized society in ways that privileged the dominant white racial group, producing structural inequalities that led to unjust resource distribution and symbolic inequalities which persisted into the 21st century. City planners designed the city to protect segregation in the early and mid 20th century, which was positively evaluated by white homeowners who often claimed that segregation protected property values. Planners zoned black families in less desirable areas, such as in flood zones and near industrial areas. Even after segregation was deemed illegal, black and white families continued to live apart from one another, in part because many black families had been unable to amass the wealth needed to live in other, whiter areas of the city

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where property values were higher due to privileges in zoning and the higher cultural evaluations of white spaces. Beyond the integration period, black families continued to face barriers to wealth accumulation, such as subprime loans and neighborhood abandonment, which left them with fewer resources, more barriers to success, and persistent segregation, later as a result of the close relationship socioeconomic status shared with race in the city.

The historical and ongoing segregation solidified social boundaries separating black from white people, and members of each group made assumptions, often erroneously, about the opposite group. These assumptions contributed to the divisive identification processes which kept groups separated, in the AFM and the larger city.

Additionally, the AFM’s exclusive practices, however unintended, exacerbated black assumptions that they were unwanted in white spaces, leading several respondents to avoid those spaces entirely. Further, the history of rationalization built upon identification processes to create inequality in the city, and, as a result, the AFM as well.

While, due to the well-resourced and high powered nature of white AFM organizations and participants, white needs and preferences created the AFM status quo, this status quo did not always match that of black needs and desires. Thus, many black AFM organizations’ ideologies and programs operated in direct opposition to that of the white

AFM, creating in effect two separate and unequal, racially segregated, approaches to the city’s AFM. Because of the history of racial inequality in the city, cultural processes produced an unequal AFM in which white organizations had access to more resources with which to support themselves and their programming needs, white participants had more resources with which to participate in expensive markets and events, and whites

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in general had more power with which to define the values and structure the institutional culture of the AFM overall. As Chapter 4 details, cultural processes had an extensive impact on the development and maintenance of inequality within Birmingham’s AFM.

Chapter 5 addressed the second question (How does Birmingham’s AFM use cultural processes to generate upward mobility for its participants?) and extended

Chapter 4 by exploring how the AFM has attempted to disrupt inequality by creating opportunities for upward mobility in ways that directly address or circumvent inequality- producing cultural processes. Somewhat lagging behind the AFMs of other large US cities, Birmingham’s recent incorporation of social justice as a key value in the AFM led many organizations to directly promote equality and upward mobility in their programming and mission statements. Participants, both black and white, have become

Increasingly more critical of those organizations who fail to embody social justice standards like inclusivity and equitable community development. Further, social justice efforts have included direct and indirect measures to re-identify stigmatized social groups in a more positive light. One way in which AFM organizations demonstrate their commitment to social justice, for example, includes hiring employees from the communities they serve. This imparts direct value on formerly undervalued people through paid employment, and the between-group exposure these new hires provide allows for the slow dissolution of the social boundaries which maintain segregation and its associated inequalities. However, while these intentions are well and good, not all attempts to create upward mobility end successfully. Many organizations attempting to work within the system to reverse inequality have failed to do so, in part a result of

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inattention to the full array of cultural processes which created the inequalities at the start.

Chapter 6 addressed the third question (How can cultural processes be employed through Birmingham’s AFM to disrupt and reverse inequalities?) and extended Chapters 4 and 5 by exploring transformative cultural processes overall. This chapter also delved into the programs of three AFM organizations in Birmingham who employed transformative approaches in their planning processes, directly addressing cultural processes in their efforts to not only disrupt but dissolve and reverse the structural inequalities the cultural processes created. Just as cultural processes can produce lasting inequalities through unjust identification and rationalization processes, cultural processes can also produce equitable, just outcomes when attended with intention and critical thought. Respondents discussed their efforts to break down boundaries and change harmful identification processes by building relationships across group lines and working to change the narratives associated with social group definitions. Others considered the intentionality needed to redirect evaluation and standardization processes to reflect equitable processes using community input to shift structures already in place and to create new structures when new organizations emerged. Respondents considered radical, revolutionary approaches as well as more revisionist strategies in their considerations of transformative rationalization processes, but all agreed that structures needed changing to create an equal playing field in both the city and its AFM.

The organizations discussed in Chapter 6 sought to drastically alter the AFM’s operation through innovative approaches that promoted sovereignty, egalitarianism, and

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redistribution of resources in equitable, just ways. While the three organizations discussed in Chapter 6 had different missions and programs, these organizations had in common their community-based approaches in which local community members were considered important to the decision-making processes, and organization leaders employed transformative cultural processes with intent to bring a just allocation of resources and opportunities to people on the ground. By acknowledging and challenging the history of unjust cultural processes, these organizations turned harmful processes into transformative processes with the potential to overhaul inequalities.

These organizations practiced transformative identification through the care they took to positively identify and evaluate the community and include them in the designation of values and standards as the organizations and their respective programs took shape.

Through broad transformative processes like these, these organizations planted the seeds for a larger shift in the AFM, one that valued community and food sovereignty over vegetable fads and charity missions, creating the potential for a deep, transformative change in the AFM and the city over time.

Implications

This dissertation’s results carry multiple intellectual and social contributions. This section proceeds with two subsections, one on intellectual merit and the other on the broader social impacts of this work.

Intellectual Merit

This study poses several intellectual contributions. First, current research fails to adequately examine the agency of low resource AFM participants and organizations in the US South. The use of ethnography allows for investigation of both barriers and solutions, providing a full depiction of low resource communities and the AFM programs

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and organizations they create without portraying them as helpless. Second, the examination of transformative cultural processes, rarely addressed in considerations of culture and social stratification, challenges the powerless representation of low resource areas, and the application of specific transformative practices in the AFM, such as the food and community sovereignty approaches employed by organizations in Chapter 6, alongside considerations of embodied cultural differences and the role of place contributes to theories on why individuals do or do not participate in the AFM or eat healthy foods. Third, the interdisciplinary study of food as it relates to socio-spatial realities in urban communities connects sociology to geography, urban planning, and public health.

The project’s emphasis on lived reality provided a needed corrective to the field of sociology’s understanding of Southern food security and health-related behaviors, such as AFM participation, which often provides quantitative, researcher-defined depictions of community needs, often without regard for the opinions and desires of the community members themselves. In such studies, researchers often employ reductionist foci on problems associated with food access while ignoring the strategies communities use to overcome such problems on their own. This study acknowledged the potential for community agency and successful self-governance through projects like the AFM endeavors examined throughout this dissertation. Additionally, much of the current research on urban AFMs pools in large metropolitan areas such as Oakland,

CA, Seattle, WA, and New York City. Fewer studies examine the AFM in the

Southeastern US. Few studies of this area’s AFM, grounded in considerations of its agricultural history, have been conducted. This study adds to the richness of information

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about the AFM, food behaviors, and social justice by contributing data that allows for historical and regional comparison.

The study of the AFM, stratification, culture, and place bridges disciplines and generates information relevant to a variety of fields both within and outside of academia.

The interdisciplinary approach linked research from sociology, history, geography, urban planning, and public health. Therefore, should the data collected during this research project lead to manuscripts other than this dissertation, this study’s results hold the potential to capture larger audiences of academics and non-academics alike.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this work explored cultural processes as both 1) central causes of the structural inequalities that keep people in the margins and

2) processes which can be molded to disrupt and reverse the very inequalities they would have created if left to their own devices. This fresh approach to the connections between cultural processes and inequality leaves in its wake a more optimistic view of culture. With intent and criticality, this work suggests that people and organizations can use cultural processes in their efforts to promote a just and egalitarian AFM, city, and world.

Broad Social Impacts

This study benefitted community members, policy makers, and academic researchers. First, direct community benefits included empowering resident-participants with research training and tools to build knowledge and resources beyond the study’s capacity. Second, this study sought to provide a comprehensive rather than reductionist depiction of barriers and strategies surrounding AFM participation through examination of the cultural processes which generate and maintain them. While recent policies have focused on food deserts and nutritional education, many such policies remain

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ineffective. Policy improvements that account for complex cultural processes will likely prove more effective in promoting equitable participation in the AFM as well as healthy food access and consumption more broadly.

Exploration of the cultural processes which generate, maintain, and disrupt inequality in the AFM may prove useful to policy makers concerned about public health inequalities. By considering the root causes of inequalities and addressing the cultural foundations of such problems may lead policymakers toward equitable, healthy food security initiatives that reduce the rates of diet-related diseases in low income, urban areas. The physical health of such communities generally falls below the average, and many residents of these communities are either uninsured or using government assisted health insurance. Thus, the cost burden of diet-related diseases in these communities falls on tax payers. Rates of disease can be reduced by ensuring access to and desire for healthy food. While access refers to the proximity and affordability of healthy food, desire refers to how much the community members want to purchase and eat healthy food. Without a consideration of what, how, and where individuals want to eat, i.e., food culture, healthy eating initiatives prove less successful. Employing transformative cultural processes in ways that promote community and food sovereignty, alongside community control and cultural protection, better ensures that people have access to the foods that they desire, not just access to foods deemed healthy by governing bodies (Alkon et al. 2013), increasing the likelihood the people will benefit from the health initiatives.

The use of participant stories and descriptions provide the information needed to draft policies and initiatives that meet the true needs and desires of communities. By

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meeting these actual needs, policy makers and organizations can avoid wasting time and money on ineffective ideas reliant on assumptions ungrounded in experience.

Participants’ participation in the research process, from collection to analysis, fosters partnerships between academia, AFM organizations, and community members. Such partnerships establish trust in academic research through the acknowledgement and use of community knowledge. Such trust leads to more impactful community engagement and ready employment of results in AFM program reforms.

This direct assessment of black versus white AFM organizations and projects recognized the exclusionary cultural processes that barred black participation in white

AFM spaces. White AFM projects that desire diverse involvement will benefit from an awareness of what prevents minority participation. Although this research is based in one specific city, racially-segregated AFMs in other cities may find the attention to complex cultural processes useful in understanding and reversing social inequalities.

As mentioned in earlier chapters, culture and materialism operate reciprocally.

While cultural processes play a large role in the distribution of resources, the resulting inequalities also shape and constrain culture. Thus, it is no surprise that oppressed groups seeking to overcome the injustices inflicted upon them must work within the cultural confines created by dominant groups. For instance, while whites in Birmingham may quite easily co-opt the methods of food production and cultural recipes of oppressed groups, even crafting restaurants and food spaces which mimic the

“authentic” atmospheres of rural Mexico, oppressed groups constrained by inequalities often have trouble recreating spaces on par with the cultural standards of the dominant.

Further, even when oppressed groups seek to escape such constraints through vigilant

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effort, they must often work within the very system that disadvantages them in attempts to establish justice.

While the efforts of community land trusts and other motions toward community sovereignty can provide promising improvements for those who reap their benefits, the concept of sovereignty in these contexts is not a true escape from the confining nature of identification and rationalization processes. In fact, these efforts operate within the same oppressive culture, and the very need for the practice of community sovereignty stems from the seemingly inescapable cycles of injustice that cultural processes tend to produce. When efforts to overcome culture-driven inequality involve a partial surrender to the status quo (as seen in those efforts which diverge attention and assume all responsibility for citizen wellbeing themselves rather than continuously demanding and achieving equal resource allocation from governing bodies), one must question the ability of such efforts true transformation potential. However, when used as a stepping stone, or perhaps an immediate survival mechanism, while working long-term to transform culture and justice, such efforts can play an important intermediary role in the true redistribution of symbolic and material resources. Through immediate attention to community sovereignty alongside a long-term commitment to shifting cultural processes toward lasting redistributive justice, those often ignored in Birmingham may find both immediate relief and, eventually, durable change which levels the playing field of the city and its AFM. Through a new conceptual lens which addresses the cultural and material inequalities associated with both race and class combined, such as intersectionality, and consistent collaborative efforts with a responsive and concerned city government,

AFM organizations could more appropriately address and reverse inequality in ways

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that more permanently redistribute resources to create a just, prolific AFM for all. Time and additional years of research will tell if the organizations described in this work can offer these long-term structural changes in addition to the immediate sovereignty and solutions needed within the communities they serve.

Limitations and Future Directions

While great care was taken to produce the highest quality research project possible, all data collection and analysis strategies come with their own sets of limitations. Qualitative methods rely heavily on researcher interpretations of the words, actions, and symbols of people in the field. Because of the researcher’s interpretive role, results from qualitative studies have been described as more biased than quantitative work. However, all researchers, quantitative and qualitative, risk implanting biases in their work, from the design of the research questions to the choice of method to the analytical decisions. By taking measures to ensure the quality of research, as described in Chapter 3, I limited the biases in my data collection and analysis strategies to the best of my ability.

Further, the qualitative approach employed here was restricted by time and space, manpower, and the shifting nature of the field. As the sole researcher for this project, I often had to choose between events and places during participant observation, thus my lack of omnipresence restricted my full knowledge of the happenings in

Birmingham’s AFM. Further, social movements and places are ever in flux, changing constantly as people change and new ideas shift organizational operations and programming decisions. Thus, my limited time in the field (a total of 2.5 years) leaves much unnoticed, unconsidered, and yet to happen. The limits of time and space

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restricted my results, thus I remain aware that these results are subject to changes in applicability over time and in other contexts outside of Birmingham’s AFM.

Relatedly, while these results could be considered by other cities wishing to use their own AFMs to combat inequalities, the cultural processes relevant in Birmingham may not be relevant in other places. Cultural processes can be as broad as the national- level, but city, even community, specific processes generate distinct contexts that are not universally generalizable. Thus, others wishing to understand the role of cultural processes in the production of inequality should draft other studies which assess for location-specific processes should they hope to comprehensively understand and respond to inequality-producing cultural processes.

Beyond this dissertation, I plan to continue to observe both inequality-producing and transformative cultural processes as they shape Birmingham’s AFM. As noted before, little research has been conducted to date on the ways specific cultural processes can disrupt and reverse inequalities within and outside of the AFM, in micro or macro-level contexts. More extensive and expansive knowledge of these processes and their outcomes can be used to construct more egalitarian and just structures to replace those which have produced structural inequalities across history. Attention to these processes will help us to better understand the specific mechanisms which link culture to the production of both inequality and equality, and this understanding will point us toward answers in a variety of academic, activist, and political circles which aim to combat inequity. By attending directly to these processes in a variety of contexts and magnitudes, a coherent and optimistic macro-level theory on the transformative potential of cultural processes may emerge.

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APPENDIX A LIST OF RESPONDENTS

A-1 List of Respondents in Ethnography Stage Name Race Gender Shannon Black F Eve Black F Kevin Black M Grant Black M Christina Black F Winston Black M Gavin Black M Leslie Black F Shelby Black F Raven Black F Joe Black M Derrick Black M Kara Black F Alyssa Black F Iris Black F Miriam Black F Jordan Black F Maya Black F Joelle Black F Tatiana Black F Edgar White M Brooke White F Juliana White F Vanessa White F Kristin White F Hailey White F Carrie White F Gary White M Tanya White F Jessica White F Felicity White F Autumn White F Tristan White M Anita White F Cecilia White F

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A-1 Continued Name Race Gender Ashton White M Lacey White F Sabrina White F Victoria White F Carol White F

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APPENDIX B INFORMED CONSENT FORMS

B-1 Ethnographic Interview Informed Consent

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Heather Covington’s research interests include health and environment with an emphasis on food, bodies, and social stratification. In 2013, Covington graduated from

East Tennessee State University with a Bachelor of Science in sociology. Covington received her Master of Arts in sociology in 2015 from the University of Florida. She received her Ph.D. in sociology in the spring of 2018, and she plans to continue to document the inequalities examined in this dissertation as a central component of her life’s work.

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