Planting the Seeds of Change: Germinating a Greener Future An Exercise in Co-Creation

Abstract

This project was conceived in the summer of 2020 in Minneapolis during the first global pandemic since 1918, and a few short months after the bystander video of the murder-by-suffocation of a handcuffed and unarmed Black man, George Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer who is white (as three other officers looked on without intervening), went viral and sparked world-wide horror, sorrow, outrage and protest. That such a murder could happen was not news to the Black community in Minneapolis. Hundreds of years of oppression, starting with having been kidnapped from Africa and brought to this continent as chattel slaves, through widespread lynchings starting when the Union pulled out of the South after Reconstruction following the Civil War, racial convenants in housing deeds, red-lining discrimination in mortgage lending, the highway system being intentionally routed through prosperous Black centers of commerce, the War on Drugs, discrimination in employment and education, mass incarceration and the current militarization of police departments and over-policing of Black and brown neighborhoods have generated a well-earned distrust of the white police state. Along with this reprehensible situation, underinvestment in other ways has left many Black neighborhoods with inadequate conventional sources of healthful food.