A Letter to BIPOC farmers: White people are going to laugh at your ideas to decolonize agriculture. You have to be ready for this, and be prepared to brush it off... [THREAD]

You, BIPOC farmer, are descended from the best food producers in history. Emancipated slaves were the best farmers in the world and poised to take over American agriculture forever in 1865. White America literally waged a 100 year race war to keep this from happening...

Indigenous people, meanwhile, had created a great continental food forest so vast that White folks didn’t even realize the whole New World around them was cultivated. They booted us off our land, plowed it up, and stuffed us in boarding schools to make us forget...

White folks are good at growing grain, beans, and livestock, but can’t do it without mining water and soil. They are also good at getting agronomy degrees and then hiring vulnerable Latinx people to do all their skill and grunt work while taking all the credit and ownership...

This is how Black and Brown people have been systematically marginalized in agriculture over the last century. And those who dominate the trade are scared to death that we’re going to return to the Earth and disrupt things...

That fear usually expresses itself as ridicule, and the more degrees and data they have, the more aggressive the ridicule will be. Because these people have devoted a fortune’s worth of time and money to being educated in a White-ethnocentric worldview on food and agriculture...

Most of them view everything through the lens of data, statistics, controlled experiments, “systems,” etc. And for all their erudition, their best solutions usually fall somewhere on the spectrum of managed decline...

A few of them, unable to compete with their peers, pervert elements of non-white food cultures into “alternative” ag; conveniently doing away with science and data, but failing - willingly or otherwise - to cast aside White-ethnocentrism...

This is how you wind up with Permaculture, The Savory Institute, Sacred Cow, Stone Barns, Apricot Lane, and other obstuse, White-owned appropriations of Indigenous/Black cultural elements generating a mountain of money, but not from actually feeding people...

You, BIPOC farmer, need to remember the nature of these two groups as they ridicule you from a place of White ethnocentrism; ridicule ranging from laughing in your face, to burying you in data, to tokenized soothsaying (“we must remember that indigenous persectives are valuable”)

Because one of these groups, for all their degrees and expertise and pragmatism and cleverness, is still operating within a wide envelope of extractive White-ethnocentrism leading that’s led us right into the Earth’s sixth mass extinction...

And the other group is simply stealing your shit, doing a horrible job using it, making careers and fortunes from peddling it to people who don’t know any better, and hoping no one notices...

You, BIPOC farmer, belong on this Earth. They’re not laughing at you because they’re superior. They’re laughing because they’re afraid. They’re afraid they’ve wasted a lifetime of work & study in an echo-chamber of whiteness; afraid of folks discovering the emperor has no clothes

When they ridicule you, don’t engage. It’s not your responsibility to address the Fear of the Other or deconstruct their pocket White supremacy. Just keep doing you, and you’ll find yourself saving your communities and making the impossible happen while they run their mouths...

And then, decades from now, when you’ve succeeded... you’ll get to watch them pretend that they were with you the whole time, just like their parents did to Dr. King. But in the age of an internet that never forgets, you’ll have the receipts to keep your legacy free of whitewash

Success is the best revenge, and it ages like a Romanée-Conti Grand Cru. But remember not to fall prey to looking to your oppressor for validation, because that’s the most dangerous kind of White supremacy there is: the kind they manage to get inside us...

Look to the faces of your community, to the soil, the earth, the water, and relations that dwell within. They’ll tell you honestly how you’re doing. Leave the scions of the world’s most destructive culture to their think tanks and permaculture design courses...

Because honey, you are a miracle centuries in the making; they can’t touch you. They can’t even see you. And that’s too bad...

For them. [/THREAD]