Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Earth & Environmental Sciences

Advisor

Juliana A Maantay

Committee Members

Setha Low

Nevin Cohen

Subject Categories

Food Studies | Human Geography | Political Economy | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Black geographies, food geographies, urban studies, material inequities

Abstract

This work studied Black food geographies in Newark, NJ, which represent alternative food provisioning practices and strategies working within but also parallel to traditional food geographies and exist within and despite of foodscapes of domination. Black food geographies not only include the spatial agency of Black residents but also entail the structural intersectionality and organized abandonment that Black residents currently experience as well as their historical production. Thus, food access of Newark’s Black resident was analyzed with a three-pronged mixed methods research design, a supply-centered analysis from a Positivistic perspective, a political economy-centered historical analysis from a Marxist perspective, and an ethnographic analysis from a Feminist perspective. The supply-centered approach included a food desert analysis and a food store survey to provide an empirical foundation as well as additional locational variables for the ethnography, while the historical analysis focused on the urban processes associated with segregation and suburbanization to investigate the root causes for racial food and health inequities in Newark today. The ethnographic approach analyzed Black food provisioning practices and the daily experiences of racial inequities in Newark’s food environment through interviews with Black residents who identified as main food provisioners combined with participant observations in food retailers and community organizations. The supply-centered analysis of Black food access showed that Black residents are more likely to live in neighborhoods without access to chain supermarkets but with an over-abundance of small bodegas and corner stores offering less healthy food items at consistently higher prices. However, the ethnographic analysis of Black food geographies rendered the stressed the central role of economic barriers to a consistently healthy diet and not physical access to large food retailers refuting the findings from the supply-centered food desert analysis. The second most commonly reported barrier to a consistently healthy diet was the overall insufficient number of large food retailers in Newark’s Central, South, and West Ward. Transportational barriers were also common due to the low car ownership among Newark’s poor Black residents and the lack of convenient and save public transportation in the city’s Black neighborhoods. To overcome these economic, access, and transportation barriers Black food geographies extend far outside of Black neighborhoods into the predominantly White suburbs, and they entail a large combination of many different food provisioning practices, shopping strategies, and feeding work based on social capital, Black institutions, and community activism. Black residents experience structural intersectionality in their daily food geographies, which are not only raced but also classed and gendered. Black residents have lower economic access to food compared to White and Hispanic residents, but poor Black residents experience more barriers than Black residents with higher incomes. Furthermore, Black women from all economic backgrounds are much more likely to be settled with food provisioning and feeding work than Black men, while poor Black women experience not only have to cope with racism and sexism but also with their economic precarity. Despite the low economic food access in Black neighborhoods, Black women In Newark are able to overcome some of the effects of structural intersectionality and organized abandonment in their own lives and their communities through social and economic food provisioning practices with the help of social capital, Black institutions, and community activism. Thus, these practices represent acts of resistance against the structural racism these women experience daily, but also acts of care for their communities, and represent examples of Black self-help as a political framework for communal uplift. Based on the findings from the ethnographic analysis of Black food geographies a additive food access index was developed integrating those variables which were reported to exacerbate barriers to a consistently healthy diet. An index value was calculated for each census tract in Essex County which contains the Newark metro area with its suburbs based on the proportion of Black residents, SNAP as well as WIC participation, vehicle ownership, homeownership, social security participation, and head of household status. Results of the food access index show low economic access in Newark’s predominantly Black inner-city neighborhoods and high economic access in the surrounding suburbs, and compared well with other food access measures which rely on physical distance to large food retailers. These findings have important implications for food access studies because the food access index eliminates the need for food retail data and utilizes only easily available census data allowing for the analysis of food access over whole metropolitan areas. Results from the historical analysis highlight the interplay between local, state, and federal governments which all contributed to uneven food access in Newark. While racist economic, housing, and transportation policies set a national framework for residential segregation, this work provides evidence that the local government bore a lot of responsibility for the destruction of Newark’s bustling Black communities in the Central Ward. The City of Newark was responsible for the urban renewal and economic development plans displacing not only Black residents but also hundreds of small businesses serving the Black community, which not only segregated Black residents in sub-standard public housing in the inner-city without any access to local retail, but also provided employment, infrastructure, and amenities for White commuters. This stresses local openings for racial justice through federally funded but locally planned progressive urban economic development projects.

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