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.