Land Justice and Liberation:
A Conversation with Leah Penniman
of Soul Fire Farm

Leah Penniman 0:00
And I want to encourage all of us to recognize that if we eat, which we all do, if we live on land, which almost all of us do, that we have a responsibility to address this racial injustice. And in doing so, you know, when you tug on one fiber the whole web unravels that we are able to undo white supremacy as a whole and the society.

Omkari Williams 0:38
Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth: Conversations on Race and How We All Get Free. I'm your host Omkari Williams and as a speaker and coach on activism, I've been working to make activism irresistible for over eight years. If you want to move the world towards justice, but feel like activism is loud, or for people you see in the news, you're in the right place. There are many paths of activism, including paths for introverts and highly sensitive people. And there is a path that is perfect for you. We need your contribution, no matter how small you might feel it is. The conversations you'll hear in this podcast will inform you on issues that we're confronting in our efforts to realize justice for all people, and inspire you to get and stay on your path of activism.

Omkari Williams 1:28
I'm really excited about the conversation that you're about to hear. It's been on the books for many months, and I'm going to be speaking with food justice activist Leah Penniman. Leah Penniman is a Black Creole, farmer, author, mother and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti racist food system for 25 years. She currently serves as founding co-executive director of Soul Fire farm in Grafton, New York, a Black and Brown led project that works towards food and land justice. Her book is Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. And you can find out more about Leah's work at Soulfirefarm.org and follow her @Soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Before I bring on our guest, I want to thank the National Liberty museum for their support. And I invite you to support this mission by becoming a member of my Patreon community. You'll find a link to do that in the Episode Notes.

Omkari Williams 2:32
Leah, it's so great to have you here. How are you doing today?

Leah Penniman 2:36
Wonderful. Thank you for having me.

Omkari Williams 2:38
Oh, my pleasure. So let me start with this. You wrote this beautiful book titled Farming While Black: Soul Fire farms Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. And before we get into the meat of this conversation, I would love for you to set the scene for us by telling us how you came to do this work?

Leah Penniman 2:58
Absolutely, well, Toni Morrison in blessed memory said, if there is a book you need to read that hasn't been written, go and write it. So Farming While Black really came out of my journey back to the land. I started farming.

Leah Penniman 3:13
When I was a teenager, I was enthralled by the environment because it was the one source of refuge for me from a very racist, very violent public school that I was in. And I wanted to be of service to the Earth and farming was the accessible way to do that. I completely fell in love with, you know, the elegant simplicity of seed to harvest and being able to serve both the community and the land at the same time. So after you know many years of working other people's farms, my partner John and I were living in the south end of Albany, New York, which is a neighborhood under food apartheid and struggling to get fresh food for our own children who were then newborn and toddler. And when our neighbors found out that we knew how to farm, they started half joking half not joking, encouraging us to start a farm for the people so we could all get fresh food. And that was the impetus for Soul Fire Farm, you know, a lot of hard work and toil and mistakes along the way. But you know, in essence, by 2010, we were able to open this farm that began with an explicit mission to feed the community.

Omkari Williams 4:18
That's so wonderful. And I have to say, because I used to live not far from Soul Fire Farm. And it was my first experience as a born and raised Manhattanite of living in the country and having enough property that we could actually have a huge garden, an enormous garden. And it took me a couple of years to really get comfortable in the garden. And it wasn't until I had that experience of having to struggle to get comfortable that I actually began to engage with the fact that I was really disconnected from the land and I'm sure that that is a pretty common experience that a lot of the people who come to Soul Fire Farm have, and it feels like a really important thing to acknowledge.

Leah Penniman 5:11
It's crucial to acknowledge. One of my colleagues, a Black farmer in Philadelphia at Sankofa farms, who's named Chris Bolden Newsom, he's a fourth generation free farmer. He said, the land was the scene of the crime. And I think about that a lot the way that you know, almost 300 years of chattel slavery followed by 100 plus years of sharecropping and tenant farming, followed by racist violence expelling smallholder independent farmers from their land and US Department of Ag discrimination, there is no way that a people can endure that much land based oppression, and not get that intertwined, intertangled with the sense of the land herself.

Of course, the land was never our oppressor. But because that oppression took place on the land, there is a healing that needs to happen. And I will tell you, we've had thousands of folks come out to the farm by now, and especially the young people and mind you these are, you know, teenagers now, so they are 3, 4, 5, 6 generations sometimes removed from the red clays of Georgia. And their first association will be slavery, when they get off the van, you know, off the bus, they'll say, " Is there slaves working here?" Is this cotton, tobacco, you know, and so that's powerful. But I will say, you know, and not to gloss over because the healing process is, is profound and deep and generational. But I will say that without exception, when young people have the opportunity to have a dignified and joyful experience on the land, surrounded by folks in charge, who look and sound like them, and will have common experiences, their homecoming is pretty quick, their homecoming can be hours or days, at the most, to the point where they have their bare feet on the earth. They're eating lettuce out of the field that we're talking about, right. So that has been powerful, because to me, that speaks very much to the healing power of the earth and our ancestors in the earth, who've been calling us home and just waiting for the opportunity.

Omkari Williams 7:00
That is so true, because one of my most cherished memories of my time on that farm that I lived on. And the thing I miss most is being able to just walk out in the morning, no shoes, walk down to the garden, and pick fresh vegetables to juice for breakfast. That experience of just connecting to the food that I had helped grow and just then taking it back and letting it nourish me in that very specific way. But then there's also the spiritual nourishment of the whole process of growing food. It was really profound. And I think that it's so important that we reconnect, all of us, in some shape, way or form, reconnect to that experience of of the land. Because, you know, it's not just Black people, people of color who are disconnected at this point. At this point, it's most of us in the United States, we are disconnected from this experience. And it's an important experience to have.

Leah Penniman 8:02 Absolutely.

Omkari Williams 8:03
So one of the things in your book that I find really interesting is not only that it's rich with information for people of color who are already, or are thinking about diving into this practice of farming, of reclaiming a relationship with the land. But it's also really for White people who want to support that mission. And what I'd love to focus this conversation on is actually the 16th chapter in your book, the one that's titled, White People Uprooting Racism.

And the reason I want to focus on that is because what I believe is that for true liberation, for all of us to be free, we need white people to step into a fight that can be all too easy for them to turn away from. And you start that chapter of the book talking about going to Woodburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York. And would you talk about why you started that chapter with that specific story and how that institution and others like it sort of not only sustained but sort of typify a system that is both racist and economically unstable.

Leah Penniman 9:12
Absolutely. So something to understand about upstate New York is that historically, like so many rural communities, it's been agricultural and dominated by orcharding. And by cattle for milk and meat. And as the US Department of Agriculture started to push consolidation in the you know, starting in the 50s, but really ramping up in the 70s and 80s, this get big or get out, mantra and policy started to destroy smallholder farms, Black farms and White farms alike. And what came to fill the vacuum in the rural economy was the private prison industry.

Leah Penniman 9:52
You know, as agriculture declined the New York State Department of Corrections which is our state's largest agency by budget, started building prisons in our community. And it was insidious, because then the politicians in those towns start to rely on the prisons as an economic base and have an incentive for draconian sentencing policies, the war on drugs, because those prisons need to be filled. And so it pitted you know, communities who could have been and should rightfully be allies, poor Black folks and White folks against each other, because the poor White folks in the rural communities are relying on the incarceration of poor Black folks in order to get their bread and butter.

Leah Penniman 10:34
And I started with this, because it's both deeply personal and also political. I mean, as a farmer going into these correctional facilities, in order to teach classes on farming and food justice, it was powerful to me to see how many folks who are locked up are just yearning, yearning for soil and sky and sea to run their own businesses to be doing similar work to what we're doing at Soul Fire Farm, you know, juxtaposed with, with the, you know, environment that's been imposed on them through the carceral state. And the reason I wanted to start with this also is, you know, a lot of folks don't think about food as being a racial justice issue. But I would posit that the entire food system is based on stolen land and exploited labor, and that racism is the DNA of the food system. Whether you look at who owns the land, who does the labor and whether or not they're protected under the law, they are not, when you look at who gets to eat the food, the types of seeds that are grown, you know, there's racial injustice, infused in all of that. And I want to encourage all of us to recognize that if we eat, which we all do, if we live on land, which almost all of us do, that we have a responsibility to address this racial injustice. And in doing so, you know, when you tug on one fiber, the whole web unravels, we are able to undo White supremacy as a whole in the society.

Omkari Williams 11:55
One of the things that I think doesn't get talked about enough and you touched on it in your answer is the negative impact on white people of white supremacy. And you referenced how poor Black people and poor White people should be natural allies, but this system actually creates divisions between those groups. And before we get more into talking specifically about how we get free, I would love to explore what you think the costs of White supremacy to White people are? Because I feel like people need to understand that they actually also have skin in the game, if you're going to move them in a direction that you want them to go.

Leah Penniman 12:38
Oh, yes, the cost of White supremacy to all people? Well, there are many, I'll highlight a few. I think the obvious one and the low hanging fruit is that participating in a dehumanizing system dehumanizes us and so if we, you know, hope to hope to live up to our highest purported ideals in society as being freedom loving, and ethical, caring, and compassionate, righteous, you know, then it's, it's impossible to to move through life hypocritically. Without that taking a toll on our, our, the core of our being on our soul. So you know, that's the obvious one is we don't want to be horrible humans, right. But then, you know, to tease apart some of the nuance here. And this, I'll credit to my friend, Owen Taylor, who's a White, Italian descendant farmer, in Philadelphia, also, who talks a lot about what white people have to trade in, in order to access White privilege.

Leah Penniman 13:31
You know, many well all White folks have ethnicity. And many White folks, especially those who come here as immigrants trade in language, they trade in religion, they trade in food ways, cultural ways, seed ways, in order to amalgamate into the soup of Whiteness, and to be able to access White privilege. And with that, the sense of non belonging this ahistorical sense, and this isn't just abstract. So I'll give you a little anecdote about this.

Leah Penniman 13:59
We run training programs at Soul Fire Farm. And in the application, one of the questions we ask is, you know, is there some sort of cultural element that you want to share with the community, a song, a dance, a workshop, art, something? And, you know, Black and Brown folks attend our immersion programs, and almost all of them fill in that box with an idea. And we did a program on dismantling racism for White people. And not one person filled in that question. It was so stark. And when we queried the group about this, when we're together in person, they're like, well, we don't really have culture. What do you mean culture? That was astounding to me. So we actually did, this is an aside, but we did an experiment. We encourage them for the entire week, not to appropriate, to try not to appropriate anything. That the only thing they could do had to come from their own culture. And people had a total freakout. They couldn't think of the music, their food they couldn't think of you know, even the tablecloths but the patterns on the fabric, what were theirs. So that's a thought experiment I encourage.

Leah Penniman 15:00
And then the one other thing that I'll mention, you know about cost of White supremacy is, you know, we miss out on a whole lot of genius when we assume that one racial group has access to truth. One case in point, climate change, not only are Black and Brown folks disproportionately impacted by the burdens of climate change, but also disproportionately have the solutions. You know, I'm in agriculture so I'm very focused on carbon sequestration in the soil. And the carbon sequestration techniques we have come out of the Black agrarian tradition and and Indigenous tradition, things like cover cropping, raised beds, polycultures. So if we don't lean into the genius of communities with the solutions, the consequence could quite literally be the extinction of our species. It's imperative, right that we undo this, because we actually need all of us to be sharing leadership, if we're going to solve some of these, you know, horrendous problems of our times.

Omkari Williams 15:53
I so appreciate that you said that, because it is something I deeply believe is that there's no way that we solve the problems that are confronting us unless everyone is participating in that process, because our collective wisdom is so much greater than our individual, specific wisdom. And we have massive problems that we need to take on. So we actually need every bit of wisdom and knowledge and commitment that we can bring to the table to address these issues. And as you said, the survival of the species is literally on the line, and you would think that might get people's attention, but it depends.

Leah Penniman 16:32
I know. Mmm...

Omkari Williams 16:33

I know. Right? It's like, okay, so where are you planning to live down the road. But here we are. So one of the first things that you talk about in the chapter, after you talk about this prison structure, and how that is so toxic to us, is reparations. And that word is a loaded word for a lot of people and conversations on this subject can become really heated. And I love that, because I think that that is so important. So I would love for you to talk about reparations and why you feel like this is such an important important part of healing the trauma of people of color, but also for creating a truly free society for everybody.

Leah Penniman 17:22
Yes, reparations can be a scary word, but really at its root, it is it is the word repair. And it's, so I'll tell a quick anecdote, and then I'll explain. And so a friend of mine, Ed Whitfield, mentor of mine, tells a story. He says, imagine that your neighbor came over and stole your cow in broad daylight. Everyone saw them do it, there's no question about it. And a couple weeks later, the neighbor comes over to your house with tears in their eyes, remorse in their hearts apologizing for having taken the cow and says, you know, but I'll make it up to you, every week for the rest of the cow's life, I'm going to bring you a quart of milk. Now, I don't know what she would say to that. But I would say well, actually, my cow back would be the the appropriate remedy.

Leah Penniman 18:09
Right, and I tell this sort of kindergarten level story, because I think fundamentally, that's what reparations is it's giving the cow back, you know, we, a white child born in America today, according to the Pew Research Center has 16 times the wealth when they take their first breath as a Black child. And that's not because they were, you know, doing financial literacy classes in the womb, or were great entrepreneurs before birth, it's because wealth is inherited. And wealth can be traced back to slavery, to exploitation of labor, to theft of land, all of it. And so, fundamentally, we can't have an equal society when we start on unequal footing. So reparations looks at, you know, how do we start to level the playing field? How do we start to give back some of what was taken, whether that's land or unpaid wages, access to education, so that folks actually do have a fair shot. Because if you eliminate racial disparity from policies starting now, that is not going to make up for the fact that 98% of the land value in this country is white owned. No, it's not going to make up for that wealth gap, we have to actually do some shifting around resources to have a truly equitable society.

Omkari Williams 19:12
I completely agree. And I love that cow story. That's fantastic. I'm going to borrow that story. So perfect.

Leah Penniman 19:20
Thanks, Baba Ed, for the story.

Omkari Williams 19:22
Exactly. Seriously, that's just so clear. So you have a list of policies that you think should be enacted in order to dismantle the systemic nature of that wealth gap that you were just talking about. And those include advocating for universal basic income, raising the minimum wage and universal health care. And the thing that jumped out at me when I was looking at that list is that the things on your list are actually not just things that help people of color. These are things that help low income folks across the board. And so would you talk about why even though they don't only apply to people of color you have these policies and many others on your list in the reparation section.

Leah Penniman 20:07
Ooh, that's a juicy question. And actually, it might have more to do with pragmatism than philosophy. And so I'll tell a current example, if you look at the Justice for Black Farmers act of 2020, which was introduced by Senator Booker and Senator Warren co-signed by others, that many of us Black farmers had a hand in drafting. And this legislation does things like return millions of acres of land to Black people, forgive $5 billion dollars of debt, establish a farm Conservation Corps that prioritize Black, Indigenous, and people of color, you know, addresses civil rights, it's a whole package of reforms.

And we were absolutely thrilled just that it got introduced the fact that I got national attention, all that to say, as some of your listeners may know, a little piece of that bill got tucked into the most recent COVID Relief Act, and it was the $5 billion of debt relief for Black farmers. Immediately, white farmers sued in 12 courts claiming reverse racism. And now mind you without getting into a whole thesis about the history, it is unequivocal, that banks, including federal, you know, federal government, banks and the USDA have been discriminating against Black farmers. And according to the US Commission of Civil Rights, that's the leading cause of the decline of the Black farmer from 14% of the nation's farmers down to just over 1% today, it's unequivocal. And yet the claims of reverse racism have all but halted the debt relief, which would have, you know, stymied the bloodletting of land out of the Black community. And so what Senator Booker is doing now, is he is figuring out a way to reintroduce the legislation so that it benefits socially disadvantaged and low income farmers, it will still help out the Black farmers, but it will also help out some, you know, farmers of other ethnic groups.

Omkari Williams 21:56
I have mixed...

Leah Penniman 21:57
Yeah, so all the feels, all the feels. Because we should be able, we should be able to call it what it is and directly address it. And I also understand, Senator Booker is like, look, these farmers can't wait for their debt relief. And these court battles are going to take years, and they probably will make it to the Supreme Court, which would be dangerous, because with our current Supreme Court, you know, getting that struck down could also strike down any program that has any advantage for for Black people the 2501, USDA programs, social, you know, on and on and on. So they don't want that. So all that to say, you know, but just yeah, when there's a policy that will address the issue for the majority of Black Americans, we will support that, even if the political climate does not allow us to be very precise about what we're targeting.

Omkari Williams 22:44
I find that so I just find that fascinating, because there is so much underlying racism in just the objections like, just objecting…

Leah Penniman 22:56
Right.

Omkari Williams 22:57
to actually giving back to people what they were denied through, basically chicanery, and just was just a willful determination to take things away from them because of the color of their skin should not actually be a hard thing to do. It should not be a thing that anyone is going to argue about. Because you should be able to just look at that and say, You know what? These policies were wrong. We know better than that now, and we're gonna make this right. And that Cory Booker has to go through these hoops to try and craft a policy that will slide past all these gatekeepers who are so invested in maintaining the current structure, honestly makes my head spin. Just, huh, it's Yeah,

Leah Penniman 23:47
I know. I was just on a podcast with Senator Booker. And I, you know, I just got all the words stuck in my throat when he was explaining this change. Of course. I don't know what to say. I understand, though, why you would feel you need to do that. And it's not that we're giving up on the court. But it's just…

Omkari Williams 24:04
no, it's practical, what what he's doing, what the Senator is doing is practical. He's not wrong when he says this would be tied up in court for years. And, you know, with this Supreme Court, we all know how that would end. So here we go.

Leah Penniman 24:20
Right, we might end up worse off than we are, if that makes it to the Supreme Court, because then they'll use that precedent to undermine anything that tries to address racism or anything.

Omkari Williams 24:30
So yeah, which means that we all need to be very strategic in what we do. And I think that that's actually a good lesson to remember. So let me sort of shift gears a little bit. I want to talk about White people as allies and co-conspirators. And what that looks like for you because I know that forming interracial alliances is something that's important to you, you talk about it in your book, and I want to know how you think that that best works. How do people avoid falling into the trap of being White saviors, which is a role that is well established in our society and deeply problematic. So when you talk about forming interracial alliances, what's the sort of the roadmap that you really work from?

Leah Penniman 25:22
Oh, yes. So, you know, I guess I guess the underpinning philosophy is just that we do need all of us to address these really big issues, you know, Black folks didn't create racism didn't create food injustice. And so we can't solve that by ourselves, even people of color as a whole, you know, we need everyone. But my philosophy on this is that it's important that the people most impacted by issues are the ones in leadership. So I'll tell you this, this quick story that came back to me recently, I was giving a talk. I won't name the university, but I was giving a talk way, way, way upstate New York in a very rural community. And the very first slide that I put up, said, the intersection of Black Lives Matter and food justice. And this young white man, student, immediately objected stood up and said, isn't Black Lives Matter a terrorists organization?

Leah Penniman 26:10
You know, and so, I asked him a few questions just to sort of get to know where he was coming from. Turns out that he was a military family, a lot of veterans in his family. And so I said, you know, clearly you are the expert in this room, when it comes to what it's like to be in a military family, I would even venture based on what you told me that you're the expert on PTSD and its impact on veterans. And so when it comes to those issues, I'm going to come to you and ask you, what needs to be done, and how I can support but in issues of racism, the people who've been racialized and directly experienced racism are the experts. And so I asked for your deference, right. And that young man actually sat down and listened to the lecture. But all that to say, you know, when we talk about allyship, when we talk about working together, the most important thing that we ask ourselves is, is the work that we're doing transferring power, and dignity and resources to frontlines communities?

Frontlines communities being those who are most impacted. And when we talk about racial issues, that's Black folks, Indigenous folks, Asian folks, Latin X folks. People of color are those who need to be in charge, and have the solutions. You know, there's this mythology that somehow communities of color don't know what's going on. And all they need is a white savior to come in and teach their children to make kale salad and plant flowers in the yard, when in fact, you know, these solutions have been in our communities and under resourced and under appreciated, you know, for hundreds of years in this country. And so, the solution, again, is to transfer power, resources and dignity. You know White folks can get in the boat, but they're not going to be, you know, steering in the ship. They're going to be paddling along with everybody else asking, How can I help? How can I support? How can I leverage my access to privilege, networks, resources to support the leadership of people of color?

Omkari Williams 27:56
Yeah, that actually, that actually answered my next question, which was, you know why it's so important to go to the people who are on the ground and right there in the community, because they're always going to know better what they need than someone coming from the outside. And this is one of the few areas where we actually feel like, oh, yeah, let's go to some outside expert, rather than asking people on the ground is when it comes to dealing with communities of color and what they need. And dismantling that sort of knee jerk response that someone else is going to come in and bring the answer is, I think, a critical part of this whole process. And I really appreciate that you highlight that in your book.

Leah Penniman 28:42
Thank you.

Omkari Williams 28:43
So okay, so I'm going to now tell you what my favorite section is.

Leah Penniman 28:50
Wonderful. Thank you!

Omkari Williams 28:52
Oh, you're so welcome. My favorite section in your book is your section on Calling In. And we live in such a divisive time, and call out culture and cancel culture are just running amok and that drives me really kind of batty. It just it feels so deeply counterproductive to addressing the problems that we're confronting. Would you talk about the approach that Soul Fire Farm takes and how others can replicate that in their own communities and organizations? Because I think calling in is the key when we're trying to address these really deep seated issues.

Leah Penniman 29:33
Oh, this is a personal one, I can feel the heat rising in my body. So I will say well, I agree with you. I agree with you. And even since I wrote this book, I have watched the culture of disposability, which really is a carceral culture, run amok in our movement spaces and destroy people's lives. Organizations. I have seen people too afraid to speak who used to speak with powerful voices and light the way for us, I have witnessed just atrocities. And so this has become even more personal since I you know, wrote it more as a, you know, "lah di dah" here we're sharing the way that we address conflict. I was like oh, no, we got to figure this out. And, you know, I know that some of my comrades might disagree with me. But to me non-violence, rooted in love is really the basis of my movement philosophy and calling in is a non violent strategy to offer feedback. And it's relational. It's fundamentally relational.

Leah Penniman 30:29
So I mean, without getting too much into the mechanics of it, essentially, when something comes up where we we believe that someone has violated a contract with us whether that's an explicit written down contract or a social contract based on our shared ethics or values, rather than dismissing shunning, shaming, exiling, dragging them on social media, we invite them into conversation. And you know, to make that safe, we might need a witness, we might need a mediator or facilitator, we might just need to take a walk around the block and a few deep breaths. But in a conversation that's relational, we invite the other person to share where they're coming from. And we also give ourselves the space to say how the incident has impacted us. What the impact was on our feelings, what stories we might have made up about the incident, we can check those out. And then we make a plan together around repair and next steps. And I mean, it sounds basic, but it's really, really, really hard.

Omkari Williams 31:27
It does not sound easy to me at all. I mean, for one thing, there's so much vulnerability that is required in this process. You have to be vulnerable on both sides, the person who committed the offense and the person who was harmed, both have to be willing to be very vulnerable, which is not exactly a trait that is celebrated in our society.

Leah Penniman 31:51
Hmm, no, no, people are really taught to fight, to be defensive, to dig in, to find faults with the other. You know, we're trained, you know, just we're trained in this hetero-patriarchal, White supremacist, capitalist society that is all about othering. It's all about extraction. It's about winning. You know, Rumi, Rumi talks about, you know, the field, beyond the notions of right and wrong, I will meet you there. And that is something that I just play over and over and over in my head, like, what if it's actually not about winning, or proving or being right, but about being able to come together in this field beyond those notions, right, where we can be in relationship. So hard, and I'm a human, you know, I get mad too and want to win and all those things, but I talk myself down and really think about what kind of world do we want to inhabit? And let's start creating that.

Omkari Williams 32:41
Yeah. And I think that to me, the reason this is my favorite part of the book is because it underpins everything else I think that you're talking about in the book is, there has to be that willingness to meet each other beyond the structures that we've grown up in and beyond our understanding of our places in the world. And I put that in air quotes. And it's from that place of being willing to sit down and have a really difficult conversation with someone that we can make the changes that you talk about throughout the rest of the book, it feels like without that piece, nothing else is going to work.

Leah Penniman 33:24
I appreciate that you said that. And something that came to mind around, you know, willingness to sit down and have hard conversations, something that I've talked to a lot of white folks about recently who are you know, aspiring to act as allies or accomplices, is about this sort of troubling trend, where I see white folks are reaching towards people of color, in order to you know, I don't I don't want to be be critical, but there's something about like the the optics of those collaborations, when in fact, you know, a really, really good use of white people's time would be to have these hard courageous conversations with their family members, their neighbors, their colleagues who are white, who are enacting this oppression. And who you know, the the more progressive White folks often just distance themselves, they unfriend, or they go silent, or they quietly criticize, but they're the ones who could bridge and engage and sit down with, you know, Uncle Joe over Christmas dinner and, and start to have conversations about land back, about reparations, about immigration, and they're the only ones who really have a chance of reaching that person. So I think the willingness to have courageous conversations is not just about you know, addressing conflicts with those we are closest to but it's also about having the courage to to push the people we love to stand up for what's right.

Omkari Williams 34:44
I really appreciate that you said that because I think that that is so true. And honestly in a lot of ways, it is easier to have a conversation with your White friend if you're Black or your Black friend if you're White, you know, than it is to talk to your relative who, you know, went out and voted for Trump.

Leah Penniman 35:07
Right.

Omkari Williams 35:08
It's definitely easier. But that's not the place, those conversations have to happen with the people who aren't in our corner right now, because those are the hearts and minds that need to be shifted. Those are the perspectives that need to be broadened. And so yeah, White people are in a particular and unique position to make that difference in the world. And I actually think that's a really good mission for a lot of White people is to just make that difference in your own family in your own sphere of influence in some way. So thank you for that.

Omkari Williams 35:46
We are almost out of time and I want to make sure that I get to ask you for the three actions that you would suggest to our listeners that they can take in order to support the work that you're doing in the world in order to support food justice.

Leah Penniman 36:03
Oh, I love that, three actions. Okay, so the first action is going to be I'm cheating a little bit because of course, there are no three easy actions, right, of course, I'm going to say if you if you go onto Soul Fire Farms website we have a whole lot of resources and guides to taking action and to educating yourself. So investing in learning more and understanding the multiplicity of what needs to happen would be one of one of the actions. I would say the second one to be more specific, is to check out the reparations map, which is co-created by the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, and Soul Fire Farm. And on the reparations map*, you can find Black and Brown projects all across Turtle Island, and increasingly across the world that are looking for resources, you click on the map, see what they need, and do your best to to help support them. And the third thing I would say is, you know, for those of you who do have the privilege of being able to vote is to start to pay attention to some of the legislation that impacts Black and Brown farmers. Things like the Fairness for Farmworkers Act, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, the Farm Bill, pay attention and let your legislators know that you care about these issues. And that you really are you know, that you're paying attention and making sure that they look out for the people who grow our food.

Omkari Williams 37:13
I want to second that last one in particular, because I have been informed by someone whose work this is that it takes very few calls to your legislators office about a particular issue for them to actually take it seriously. We always feel like oh, they're not going to pay attention to my call, but they actually do really pay attention. So those calls matter a lot. And I love all three of those actions. But I had to throw that piece in there. So...

Leah Penniman 37:40
Oh, it's so true. Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who is increasingly a friend of mine said that 20 letters on a single subject will push that issue to the top of the agenda was like 20 letters that's it? So yeah,

Omkari Williams 37:51
I know. It's like, oh, this is easy. 20 letters, we can do that. I know 20 people. So cool. Well, Leah, thank you so much. I have loved every single moment of this conversation. And I'm glad that I mean, it took us like a year to get this, but I'm so glad we got here.

Leah Penniman 38:10
Well, thank you for your patience. It's been an absolute joy to talk with you as well.

Omkari Williams 38:14 Thank you.

Omkari Williams 38:16
There is a lot of work to do. And I guess that's the hard part. But the wonderful piece is that there are so many people out in the world contributing to the work in their own unique ways, and Leah Penniman is a perfect example of that. But what Leah does all of us can do in some way, shape or form for ourselves. We can all take a step, we can all take an action and make our difference. And I hope that you will take action on one or all of Leah's suggestions. Activism isn't just for a chosen few. It's for all of us who care about a just and free world. What if an activist looks like you?Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with another episode of Stepping Into Truth very soon.

Omkari Williams 39:11
*You can find the reparations map here: https://nefoclandtrust.org/reparations