Monica M. White
Dr. Monica M. White is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies (2021-25), associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and past president of the board of directors for the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure in both the College of Agricultural Life Sciences (established 1889) and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies (established 1970), to which she is jointly appointed. As the founding director of the Office of Environmental Justice and Engagement (OEJ) at UW-Madison, Dr. White works toward bridging the gap between the university and the broader community by connecting faculty and students to community-based organizations that are working in areas of environmental/food/land justice toward their mutual benefit. She is also an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2022-2024.
Dr. White’s research investigates Black grassroots organizations that are engaged in the development of sustainable, community-based food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility in both contemporary times and the twentieth century. The Carnegie Fellowship she holds puts Dr. White in an exceptional group of established and emerging humanities scholars who are strengthening U.S. democracy, driving technological and cultural creativity, exploring global connections and global ruptures, and improving natural and human environments.
Dr. White’s first book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) received the First Book Award from the Association of Association for the Study of Food in Society, the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Race and Ethnic Minorities Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and an Honored Book Award from the Gendered Perspectives section of the Association of American Geographers.
Dr. White is currently working on her second book project, We Stayed: Agriculture, Activism and the Black Southern Rural Families Who Kept the Land, which tells the story of three generations of the Paris family and their experiences and resistance under racism’s evil boot. The family patriarch, G.H. Paris, was an early Farm and Home Administration (later the USDA) loan agent based in Tuskegee, AL. He and his wife Fannie taught their sons, George, Wendell (now Reverend Paris), and Nimrod, the importance of the relationship between self-provisioning and self-determined political options both through their agricultural work and through the boys’ accompanying their father on the farm site visits he conducted as a loan agent.
As college students, George and Wendell became unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, organizing Black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and landowners in the Alabama Black Belt, the same region their father had served as a loan agent.
In addition to her service on the Board of Directors of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, she has served on the advisory board of the Southeast African American Farmers Organic Network and on the advisory board of New Communities, Inc., under community organizer and civil rights activists Reverend Charles and Ms. Shirley Sherrod.
In collaboration with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, Dr. White serves as the National Director of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) AgroEcology Center Project (https://www.agroecology-center.org/), where she is actively engaged in developing centers for sustainable agriculture at HBCUs. The project has received more than $6 million in funding to support new centers as well as the establishment of a peer-reviewed journal and a Black agricultural archive that will include Black rural farm family oral histories, accounts of farm site visits, and interviews with Black farmers on agricultural and environmental knowledge.
In addition to the Carnegie Fellowship, Dr. White has received a multi-year, multi-million dollar USDA research grant to study food insecurity in Michigan. She served as the community engagement leader for the Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine, which received $5,000,000 in funding from the Mellon Foundation.
She has also received several teaching and service awards, including the Honored Instructor, UW-Madison Division of Housing, the Michigan Sociological Association Marvin Olsen Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Sociology in Michigan, the Outstanding Woman of Color at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Vilas Early Career Investigator Award from the Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, which consists of $100,000 in support for her work on We Stayed.
Dr. White’s research investigates Black grassroots organizations that are engaged in the development of sustainable, community-based food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility in both contemporary times and the twentieth century. The Carnegie Fellowship she holds puts Dr. White in an exceptional group of established and emerging humanities scholars who are strengthening U.S. democracy, driving technological and cultural creativity, exploring global connections and global ruptures, and improving natural and human environments.
Dr. White’s first book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) received the First Book Award from the Association of Association for the Study of Food in Society, the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Race and Ethnic Minorities Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and an Honored Book Award from the Gendered Perspectives section of the Association of American Geographers.
Dr. White is currently working on her second book project, We Stayed: Agriculture, Activism and the Black Southern Rural Families Who Kept the Land, which tells the story of three generations of the Paris family and their experiences and resistance under racism’s evil boot. The family patriarch, G.H. Paris, was an early Farm and Home Administration (later the USDA) loan agent based in Tuskegee, AL. He and his wife Fannie taught their sons, George, Wendell (now Reverend Paris), and Nimrod, the importance of the relationship between self-provisioning and self-determined political options both through their agricultural work and through the boys’ accompanying their father on the farm site visits he conducted as a loan agent.
As college students, George and Wendell became unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, organizing Black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and landowners in the Alabama Black Belt, the same region their father had served as a loan agent.
In addition to her service on the Board of Directors of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, she has served on the advisory board of the Southeast African American Farmers Organic Network and on the advisory board of New Communities, Inc., under community organizer and civil rights activists Reverend Charles and Ms. Shirley Sherrod.
In collaboration with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, Dr. White serves as the National Director of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) AgroEcology Center Project (https://www.agroecology-center.org/), where she is actively engaged in developing centers for sustainable agriculture at HBCUs. The project has received more than $6 million in funding to support new centers as well as the establishment of a peer-reviewed journal and a Black agricultural archive that will include Black rural farm family oral histories, accounts of farm site visits, and interviews with Black farmers on agricultural and environmental knowledge.
In addition to the Carnegie Fellowship, Dr. White has received a multi-year, multi-million dollar USDA research grant to study food insecurity in Michigan. She served as the community engagement leader for the Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy (HEAL) in the Sciences and Medicine, which received $5,000,000 in funding from the Mellon Foundation.
She has also received several teaching and service awards, including the Honored Instructor, UW-Madison Division of Housing, the Michigan Sociological Association Marvin Olsen Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Sociology in Michigan, the Outstanding Woman of Color at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Vilas Early Career Investigator Award from the Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, which consists of $100,000 in support for her work on We Stayed.
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Papers by Monica M. White
gardening, the article broadens the de!nition to include less formal, but no less important, forms of resistance.
The article is divided into two parts. The !rst deals with the implementation of the project launched by the members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). Government statistics and secondary research provide the backdrop to the economic problems in the City of Detroit that triggered the community response. The second part presents women farmers’ attempts to transform vacant land to create
a community-based food system. These activists construct the farm as a community safe space, which operates as a creative, public outdoor classroom where they nurture activism and challenge the racial and class based barriers to accessing healthy food. In addition to improving access to healthy food by repurposing vacant land, they are transforming their communities into safe and green spaces.
agency through an investigation of the Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network (DBCFSN). By using farming
as a strategy of resistance against the structural factors
that have left much of Detroit in a condition of food
insecurity, DBCFSN not only meets citizens’ needs for
fresh produce, but also builds community by transforming
the social, economic, and physical environment. In so
doing, it creates new community spaces on vacant land.
DBCFSN uses the farm (a) as a community center, (b) as
a means to articulate culturally relevant language about
healthy food and healthy lifestyles, and (c) as a tangible
model of collective work, self-reliance, and political agency.
These farmers adopt a community-based model for increasing
access to healthy food for the mostly African
American citizens of Detroit. By focusing on improving
the daily existence of citizens rather than mobilizing against
the power structures, D-Town, a seven-acre model urban
farm project of DBCFSN, activists participate in the revival
of a city mired in racism and poverty, and all but
abandoned by politicians, the automobile industry, and
the merchants and supermarkets who once served Detroit’s
residents.
individuals themselves are responsible. The issue of race complicates the delivery issue even further. Discourses that assign responsibility to governments typically fail to acknowledge that those governments often have constructed some races as subordinate. Discourses that assign responsibility to individuals,
however, sometimes fail to acknowledge that racially marginalized groups often have been so colonized that they see themselves as inherently inferior and thus lacking the capacity to act. This case study of the D-Town farmers of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network provides an examination
of a group that responds to the issue of delivery of human rights by enacting an agentic perspective. D-Town farmers challenge the government’s capacity to provide a safe and clean food supply and provide it themselves, challenge the government’s capacity to provide culturally relevant information about healthy food, and offer that information to their community, assuming
control of their food-security movement.
discussion of the teaching-learning process, especially around educating students to critically analyze their social reality in ways that are empowering and liberatory. The components of the model, specific social theory course assignments, and student
reactions are discussed. This model encourages the creation of an emancipatory educational environment that allows students to become active participants in their own learning experience.
gardening, the article broadens the de!nition to include less formal, but no less important, forms of resistance.
The article is divided into two parts. The !rst deals with the implementation of the project launched by the members of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN). Government statistics and secondary research provide the backdrop to the economic problems in the City of Detroit that triggered the community response. The second part presents women farmers’ attempts to transform vacant land to create
a community-based food system. These activists construct the farm as a community safe space, which operates as a creative, public outdoor classroom where they nurture activism and challenge the racial and class based barriers to accessing healthy food. In addition to improving access to healthy food by repurposing vacant land, they are transforming their communities into safe and green spaces.
agency through an investigation of the Detroit Black Community
Food Security Network (DBCFSN). By using farming
as a strategy of resistance against the structural factors
that have left much of Detroit in a condition of food
insecurity, DBCFSN not only meets citizens’ needs for
fresh produce, but also builds community by transforming
the social, economic, and physical environment. In so
doing, it creates new community spaces on vacant land.
DBCFSN uses the farm (a) as a community center, (b) as
a means to articulate culturally relevant language about
healthy food and healthy lifestyles, and (c) as a tangible
model of collective work, self-reliance, and political agency.
These farmers adopt a community-based model for increasing
access to healthy food for the mostly African
American citizens of Detroit. By focusing on improving
the daily existence of citizens rather than mobilizing against
the power structures, D-Town, a seven-acre model urban
farm project of DBCFSN, activists participate in the revival
of a city mired in racism and poverty, and all but
abandoned by politicians, the automobile industry, and
the merchants and supermarkets who once served Detroit’s
residents.
individuals themselves are responsible. The issue of race complicates the delivery issue even further. Discourses that assign responsibility to governments typically fail to acknowledge that those governments often have constructed some races as subordinate. Discourses that assign responsibility to individuals,
however, sometimes fail to acknowledge that racially marginalized groups often have been so colonized that they see themselves as inherently inferior and thus lacking the capacity to act. This case study of the D-Town farmers of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network provides an examination
of a group that responds to the issue of delivery of human rights by enacting an agentic perspective. D-Town farmers challenge the government’s capacity to provide a safe and clean food supply and provide it themselves, challenge the government’s capacity to provide culturally relevant information about healthy food, and offer that information to their community, assuming
control of their food-security movement.
discussion of the teaching-learning process, especially around educating students to critically analyze their social reality in ways that are empowering and liberatory. The components of the model, specific social theory course assignments, and student
reactions are discussed. This model encourages the creation of an emancipatory educational environment that allows students to become active participants in their own learning experience.