Discussion
So I’ve been enjoying Matthew Ingram’s book “The Garden” this past month, month and a half, and have generally gotten quite a lot out of his tour of “visionary growers and farmers of the counterculture.” I have to say that his chapter on “Black Farmers” is just garbage, though.
It feels tacked on, to start with – dutiful, tucked in just before the end, one might almost say segregated. Surreally, with maximum cringe, it namechecks a small number of *individual Black participants* in
Credit where credit is due: he does identify that the #CSA as we know it was largely devised by Booker T. Whately at Tuskegee, where the trash garbage Wikipedia article on CSAs erases this completely. I wish he’d pushed further into the history of Black land-tenure strategies in Reconstruction, though, which would have turned up the origins of the community land trust ( #CLT). A whole chapter on Black farming in the United States that neglects that story feels radically incomplete. (*Hip-hop*?)
various counteragricultural movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, recounts his asking Karen Washington of Rise and Root Farm about the parallels between her origins in Bronx-based guerrilla gardening and hip-hop (!), and makes recourse to mostly white scholars’ accounts of Black agricultural practice. Worst of all, you can *feel* the lack of the enthusiasm and curiosity that has otherwise characterized so much of the book, leaving the prose here oddly clunky and awkward. It’s such a shame.
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