The junction of 2nd Street and Marshall in Jackson Ward, one of Richmond’s most historic neighborhoods. It’s also over a mile away from the nearest grocery store. (Photo by Logan Jones-Wilkins)
By Logan Jones-Wilkins
A food desert, as defined by the US Department of Agriculture, is an urban area in which it is difficult to buy affordable, nutritious food. Yet, even deserts are ecosystems, where life can flourish when the conditions are right.
Selan Hailu, a clinical psychologist, is a co-founder of The Human Connection, a Richmond-area think tank devoted to bolstering marginalized communities. Founded in 2018, the organization is built to cultivate life in the “deserts” of Richmond by fostering connection to self, connection to others, and connection to the Earth.
Connectivity, she argues, will overcome self-segregation and subjugation.
“If we are to look at the country or world as a living organism, then these issues like food deserts are the ailments,” Hailu said. “Those ailments are built around the dehumanization that comes from disconnection between each other and our humanity, the things we need to thrive.”
There are other food justice advocates in Richmond network who see as a legacy of racism. Duron Chavis, a nationally prominent farmer and activist, rejects the semantics of food deserts.
“These communities did not wake up all of a sudden and not have a grocery store,” Chavis said in a recent Facebook video explaining his work. “There is a history of design flaws, or intentional discrimination and systematic racism, explicitly in communities of color across the country.”
The historic red lining of Richmond’s poorest neighborhoods was made worse by infrastructure projects that bisected communities of color and their plots for local agriculture. That created an urban environment that stratified communities, and local economies, by race.
It goes beyond the city limits, Chavis says. Because racial discrimination forced Black farmers off their farms and into cities, they lost their livelihoods, leaving a higher concentration of poverty within Black communities. As “red” lines were drawn, grocery store economics followed those same lines and perpetuated the spatial distribution of food access, or lack thereof, in American cities.
With the exception of the Market on 25th, in Richmond grocery stores fled to the more affluent sides of the city. Yet, for those working on issues of food access and justice, plopping grocery stores in a food desert is not necessarily the solution.
Hailu and her think tank and Chavis with his farms are looking inward to these communities for self-sustaining solutions.
“There is a lot of work on food justice within our ecosystem,” Hailu said. “In our think tank, we have Tyronne Cherry down in Petersburg at the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm. He has been working in education for his whole career, and his work centers around food justice through urban farming.” And that is just one of the many restaurant owners, farmers, and educators who are working with The Human Connection.
Hailu’s organization also explores urban design and adaptive solutions, hoping to boost produce growing on a very small scale: gardens in homes, gardens on rooftops, and gardens in community spaces. The goal, she says, is to bring produce to the people in a way that not only feeds folks in food deserts—but connects them to their own humanity.
That’s something that no grocery store can do.