The alternative alone solves the aff better- black foodways have always been a way to access self-determination in the face racial capitalist power structures.

Through these lenses, understanding UA as a form of resistance and self-determination under racial capitalism/settler colonialism first demands attention to “banal acts of daily subsistence” as these “reflect and reproduce capitalist social relations, express their contradictions, and contain the seeds of their overcoming” (Figueroa, 2015, p. 502). Urban food production has historically served as a means of subsistence for low-income, racialized, and marginalized populations, supplementing diets and providing agriculturalists with supplemental income from sales of garden surplus. Often arriving in cities and towns from rural areas, people with limited incomes grew food to lower grocery costs and earn a little money on the side (McClintock, 2010; Nicolaides, 2001); indeed, in many cities, agriculture and truck farming was often one of the few activities open to racialized immigrants (Gibb & Wittman, 2013; Lim, 2015; Wong, 2004, pp. 211–220). For African Americans who moved from the U.S. South to urban centers in the North and West during the two Great Migrations, growing staple vegetables such as okra, collards, and sweet potatoes and raising small livestock was a means of saving money, supplementing incomes, and having fresh produce in the summer and canned surplus for the winter (Wiese, 2005, p. 78). Later waves of immigration to U.S. cities similarly saw newcomers growing food at home and in community gardens (Airriess & Clawson, 1994; Baker, 2005; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2014; Martinez, 2010; Saldivar-Tanaka & Krasny, 2004). For many immigrants, urban gardening provides “biographical continuity” (Li, Hodgetts, & Ho, 2010, p. 786) between their old lives in their country of origin and their lives in a new culture and space (Irazábal & Punja, 2009; Mares & Peña, 2010). Gardens also provided sustenance for many Indigenous people forcefully relocated to large cities in the 1950s and 1960s (Pollak, 2016, p. 94). Food production has thus served as a buffer against economic upheaval inherent to the socio-spatial logic of uneven capitalist development (McClintock, 2010; Sbicca, 2014; Tornaghi, 2014), providing a modicum of food security, supplementing diets with fresh produce, and providing benefits to mental and physical health (Gray, Guzman, Glowa, & Drevno, 2014; Hale et al., 2011; Kortright & Wakefield, 2011). Urban food production has similarly contributed to Black self-determination. Indeed, foodways have long played an important role in emancipatory politics in African American communities—from the agricultural and culinary knowledge of enslaved people (Carney, 2009; Wisecup, 2015) to the anti-hunger work of the Black Panther Party (Heynen, 2009b)—and have been a site of negotiation between divergent Black political ideologies (McCutcheon, 2015), from which theories of praxis emerge that link analysis of racial capitalist structures and relations to the “deeply human side” of everyday survival (Heynen, 2009a, p. 197). Black gardening is thus “a way to stake a claim to permanency, education, economic citizenship, and community leadership, rather than only as a vehicle for food security” (Tuck, Smith, Guess, Benjamin, & Jones, 2014, p. 55). Examining urban gardens in a majority African American area of Washington, DC, Reese (2018, p. 421) explains how gardeners draw on “memories and myths” of a hyper-local Black economy that arose in response to redlining and segregation. These affective stories served as “both a critique of the breakdown of Black community life and as inspiration for reclaiming a past of cooperative living that was seemingly lost.” Indeed, gifting, sharing, and trading garden produce between Black gardeners has traditionally “reinforced community bonds and preserved tangible links” (Wiese, 2005, p. 85) not only to an African American agrarian heritage in the South but also to Black liberation struggles and the Blues development tradition, more broadly (Figueroa, 2015; Heynen, 2009b; McCutcheon, 2013; Ramírez, 2015; Rickford, 2017; White, 2011b). Echoing other studies of UA in Detroit (Pothukuchi, 2015; White, 2011b, 2011a), Safransky (2017, p. 1093) describes how for some Black farmers, UA is “a strategy of resistance, an act of self-determination, a challenge to systemic violence” that contributes to wider efforts “to undo colonial spatial orders and structures of white supremacy,” an observation that appears to be true of Black UA efforts across the country: New York (Reynolds & Cohen, 2016; Sbicca & Myers, 2017); Chicago (Block, Chávez, Allen, & Ramirez, 2012; Shabazz, 2015, pp. 115–118); Los Angeles (Bonacich & Alimahomed-Wilson, 2011; Broad, 2016); the Bay Area (Bradley & Galt, 2014; Sbicca, 2016); and many other American cities (Passidomo, 2016; Ramírez, 2015; Rodriguez, 2017). As the literature cited in this article illustrates, UA can serve as both a tool of racial Othering and dispossession and a tool of resistance to these same processes and their outcomes. Urban agriculture is not inherently one way or another—it is simply an everyday practice. How it is mobilized and by whom, however, can make all the difference in whether it serves to bolster racial capitalism or to undermine it. Viewing UA through a relational framework of racial capitalism and settler colonialism can help clarify some of its contradictory outcomes. Future theoretical and empirical work in this vein might address any number of scales, from ethnographies focused on the micro-geographies of everyday UA practices, to macro-scale relational comparative work. A few additional recommendations for future work are worth mentioning. First, regardless of the scale or scope of analysis, scholars should work hard to identify which specific processes are at play in a given case, to clarify precisely how racial Othering and settler logics of erasure and dispossession mediate particular political economic processes (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Day, 2016; King, 2016; Pasternak & Dafnos, 2017). Second, future work should place gender more centrally, given the gendered dynamics of UA and social reproduction, more broadly. Third, while some have called for more attention to UA practiced by people of color (to offset the disproportionate attention paid to the urban farming of young, White hipsters; see Reynolds & Cohen, 2016, for example), scholars should take care to avoid essentializing the UA practices of Indigenous people and people of color. Fostering and protecting spaces for people to tell their own stories is one important way to uphold the diversity of epistemologies and narratives. Finally, future work might even call into question using UA as a framework of analysis in and of itself. Given that hunting, fishing, and gathering of foods are all central to Indigenous food sovereignty and resurgence (Daigle, 2017; Poe, LeCompte, McLain, & Hurley, 2014; Simpson & Bagelman, 2018), we might ask whether a narrow, Eurocentric focus on cultivation, as opposed to a more broadly defined food system, works to erase non-White epistemologies and practices. In sum, given the extent to which discursive Othering and erasure undergird racial capitalism, how we frame UA and other food spaces—and, indeed, what we choose to focus our research on—clearly matters.