On April 10, author and activist Jonathan Wilson-Wilson-Hartgrove spoke at a Come to the Table event on the topic of ‘Food and Myths that Divide’. Last year Wilson-Hartgrove co-authored White Poverty with Rev. William Barber, which explores and exposes the numerous myths about race and poverty in the United States. Wilson-Hartgrove facilitated a discussion about the stories that are told and perpetuated in the U.S., and how those stories are maintained to establish certain economic, racial, and political structures. Through the understanding that stories have allowed certain groups to remain in power and others to have their rights compromised, Wilson-Hartgrove asks, “What sort of people is any story claiming us to be? And how are these stories being read to either push back against the way power is used and abused in the world, or to offer an alternative?”
Stories are told to remind us who we are and to also push back against other myths. “This contestation of myths is wrestling with what is the story that tells us who we are and who we want to be?”
In uncovering the stories (read: myths) about race and class that were told and retold throughout the 18th century, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow South, we can see how those stories functioned. These stories changed over time, but they were always aimed at accomplishing the same thing. “It was simply the myth of that moment, the main sense of the division that had been created in order to maintain a social hierarchy and economic arrangement that the people in power wanted,” Wilson-Hartgrove maintained. What does that mean for us today? Where do we see those stories, those myths that perpetuate an economic system that harms more than it benefits? As Wilson-Hartgrove asks, “What are the myths that are dividing us now, and how can we interrupt those stories?”
In conversations about food access and food insecurity, it is critical to pay attention to who is telling the story. For those who maintain power and financial security, the stories that are often told put responsibility on the individual and away from the systems that are keeping people poor and therefore in need of food. Such as: poverty is the fault of the individual, who will not work hard enough nor take advantage of every opportunity allotted to them. And also: people are hungry in the United States today not because people are poor but because there is not enough food.
These narratives, as Wilson-Hartgrove points out, seek to divide. Because “everybody’s got to eat, and yet, in so many ways, the ways we eat and where we eat are based on our divisions.” One attendee emphasized these divisions when discussing school meals. There is often a stigma around students who receive school lunch and have to wait in lines to access food, while other students bring packed lunches with them to the cafeteria. However, just as food can divide, food also has the power to interrupt stories of division and create belonging.
The food pantry can be a space where people who differ in class, race, gender, religion and more are proximate with one another. But as Wilson-Hartgrove stated, “I’ve spent my whole life in the South, so I recognize that there is always the possibility of deep intimacy, or at least real proximity without justice.” What, then, is needed in emergency food assistance spaces, wherein the roles of giver and receiver are so well established that it can be difficult to interrupt that binary? Perhaps it is, as Wilson-Hartgrove commented, “proximity plus a commitment to pursuing real justice.” So, when it comes to emergency food assistance spaces, how can that commitment happen?
Wilson-Hartgrove left attendees with a hopeful challenge: “I think it is on all of us to build the kinds of communities that will connect us to our neighbors, from which we’ve become disconnected largely. And what inspires people to interrupt those myths is a deeper story that tells us that who I am and who you are is always bound up with our neighbors, no matter what story we’ve been told about how we’re different.”