Racial discrimination in the 21st century is a phenomenon that embarrassed us in the world as a democratic nation with a strong government system. with all assets, government systems, and rule of law in our country, we still have this systematic racism in both theoretical concepts and reality. Theoretically, racism is dated back to the foundation of our country (United States) which was founded as a racist nation. To look at racism through our course content we observe in the food supply chain, that systematic racism is embedded in all food supply chains, as we study only this small portion of the business, considering this as an example, and witnessing the recent event (Gorge Floyd death) which triggered the mass movement. We can say that racism is present in all structures, institutions, as well as social relations in our society which goes back to our past system and unjust history that privileged one race or another.

In our country, the word of racism has a very close connection with the antiblack practices, where the white supremacy ideology came from the unequal political and economic power of whites, which rationalized white power over black. The recent mass movement around the country pushed me to dig deeper in the racism issue and I came to know that this issue is a controversial topic even in our justice system which shows when it comes to black people cases the justice system acts partially with prejudice and tends to punish black people more.

To study racism in the field of food and agriculture we witness one way or another visible racism in both food and agricultural system, our capitalist food system is fixed but unjust and unsustainable, because the power is disproportionately concentrated in the hand of racially privileged groups. The rate of black landowners in the nation is very small percent compared to white, and the rate of losing black race farmland is twice than the losing white race farmland. Where the white farmers dominate as operator-owners from the start to the end the people of color with the poverty wages, where the resulting poverty from the low paid job is racialized. Among those portions of people who live below the poverty line in the US black people is the big chunk of it, which results in high levels of food insecurity. Poverty and food insecurity have close ties with diet-related diseases and make these people more vulnerable and unsafe in our society.

 Through this class, we are exercising contemplative practice each session only for a couple of minutes, where we reflect all of our senses comprehensively on our soul, body, and environment, that how we are connected with the world, what is our impact on the world and what is our connection with our environment? I am sure these exercises have different meanings for different people. However, this short exercise gives me the sense that humans are deeply connected and depending on one another regardless of our race, religion, or geographical location, and the same is true with our environment.

Our dependence on one another globally starting from the very basic livelihood, like the food we eat, and the clothes we wear. When we go grocery shopping, we can see the food we consume is coming from all over the world especially from our neighbor country Mexico, https://classroom.synonym.com/list-of-foods-imported-into-the-us.

Which we observed on assigned videos that from the farm to the market our food is taking a lot of time, effort, and labor, which shows our dependencies and interconnectivity to others regardless of how rich or poor we are. It shouldn’t be untold, that those farmers and chain of supply workers are depending on us too, we can say, it is the two-way street. The same is true in our clothes and shoes, that either it is importing from China or other parts of the world.

But our dependence on the environment is far beyond imaginations, since we are getting our environmental livelihood cheap or free, we never focus on their vitality of it in our life. For instance; the air we are breathing is the most important element, which with the absence of the air our lives will end immediately, https://www.studyread.com/importance-of-air/

likewise, water. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcT6Kf9OiZoThese two very important elements of life (air and water) is not the only element that directly we need to consume in our open body for surviving, but it is the only source that indirectly affects our life too. Since the life of human beings is only possible by eating to maintain our body, our food is coming from the land directly or indirectly, our vegetables are coming directly, meat and other animal products are coming indirectly that we consume. This means the land, plants, water, and air are all the component of our life, that besides we dependent on one another, we are unavoidably depending on these elements, and we should make the best policies to protect and keep it clean to the best possible way, even if some of our leader like Donald Trump discarded. When I first joint this class I was confused that how food is connected to politics but now I can see that food has a very broad field and it is the most important part of politics.