Re-imagine Justice

All of my work centers around environmental justice.  I’ve been doing community organizing around environmental justice.  This week I was challenged to think of something that in many ways is an old topic for me in a new way using sensory clues.  I’ve been thinking about what does justice sound like.  Maybe it’s the sound of voices and music at a protest.  Maybe it’s the sound of the Anishinaabe hand drums and shakers as people learn about their culture for the first time – or remember old songs.  I can imagine seeing justice in new ways, I can feel justice in new ways.  But certainly I can’t TASTE justice…

This week my mind wondered as I was working to the image of O’keeffe’s teaching dissecting a jack in the pulpit creating a life long, almost obsession, for this artist and the details of flowers.  This scene was described in ‘Sparks of Genius’ as artists looked at familiar objects in new ways.  The flowers remind me of a Detroit community garden that’s in the North End on Oakland street that’s in my neighborhood.  I often take comrades from other cities and students here to show them part of the vision of what community resilience can look like.  Well – here I guess I could investigate what Environmental Justice - more specifically FOOD JUSTCE – tastes like...

Climate Justice activist from around the country at the Detroit Oakland community garden

The Oakland st community garden is the same distance from my house as a grocery store – King Cole.  I decided to take a walk to these two locations this morning with my taste-testing expert – my 5 year old son.  First we walked to the Oakland garden to see what kind of items were available for taste testing. 

We found some really lovely cherry and pear tomatoes, pears (they also just started a jamming and canning business on the street) and Kale.  We also bought some strawberry preserves from their new business ‘Afro-jam’.  Walking home we stopped by King Cole and bought almost the same items – regular beef tomatoes (from south Africa), a hard pear (from New Zeland) and some Kale.  They had smuckers jelly – strawberry.[1]

Now for the test – my son ate up all the cherry tomatoes and said – no thanks to the big beef tomato.  He liked both cut up pairs – but ate all the pears from the garden.  The response to the Kale was similar – yuck.  But when I put the community Kale in a smoothie with the pears his response was – this is delicious!  As for the jams – he like them both on toast.  I think I’ll stick to the afro-jam.

Thinking about creativity and justice my mind also wondered to some of my favorite movement artist – the BeeHive collective and their Just Transition work they have been doing for us that does appeal to the senses asking people to think differently…

BeeHive Collective Banner for Detroit's Just Transition work

 All in all – I have a good idea as of today what justice tastes like. 

---

[1] There is a lot to say about the difference between the ‘food-sheds’ of the two and the environmental implications of that – but I’ll leave that as a footnote for now!