Omowale Adewale is a community organizer and educator with over 20 years of experience in youth programs, healthcare advocacy, cooperatives, and social and political campaigns. He is the co-founder of Black VegFest and Liberation Farm, an organic and vegan produce farm committed to the nourishment, growth, and healing of Black communities.
In this special piece for VegNews, Adewale walks readers through a history of Black liberation and shares his experience as a Black farmer to shed light on the systematic obstacles Black farmers—which make up just one percent of the country’s farmers—face on a daily basis.
Last month, Liberation Farm visited Capitol Hill in Washington, DC with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. As the only vegan farm raising the issues of colonialism, animal agriculture, climate change, and white supremacy, I think it’s important to learn why I came to this analysis.
Courtesy of Omowale Adewale
Organizing and its powerful impact
Today, when I talk about liberation, it’s not a decolonizing social media project wedged between my luxurious excursions on colonized private land resorts in Jamaica, exposing locals to my class contradictions. It is not an academic or political career path to discuss liberation only to exchange it for currency and comfort that further insulates oppressive regimes and systems of power. And I do not raise the question of Black liberation half-heartedly, haphazardly, or hastily nor the ethics of veganism without understanding the full ramifications of colonized food systems.
On the contrary, the conditions I base my analysis on began to seed in 1969, during my mother’s rites of passage with the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Brooklyn, NY. While the BPP was being critiqued and its members assassinated, they were teaching self-reliance in the form of free food, free healthcare, and community defense under US colonialism. When my mother was without healthcare, she found one of the BPP’s clinics and went in for free service.
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
My mother drifted in and out of the BPP in her teenage years, between 1969 and 1971, and yet it resonates within me 56 years later. The BPP was trying to create intentional communities in Black US cities while resisting colonialism at the end of the Great Migration. The US government, on the other hand, used repressionist tactics to stop the BPP from exhibiting our collective power.
This history provided me with a deep foundation and led me to question this colonized system and discuss the importance of resistance. When I was just six years old, my mother Cleo Shiver inspired me to forge a relationship with my neighborhood through cultural and health-centered events, voter registration, school gatherings, labor organizing, community governance, and more. The earliest memory I have is handing a woman a political engagement flyer, and her immediate response was to smile, thank me, and empower me to continue.
Community organizing is more complicated, but at its most fundamental level, it provides trusted information at the grassroots—but you must be engaged in uprooting colonialism and its contradictions.
There are basics to learn. Essential to organizing, leafleting is passing out literature to local neighbors. It supports civics, the exchange between community and government. The organizer speaks up at community boards, town halls, street corners, shops, centers and arenas to communicate with elected officials, local service providers, companies and especially members who live in society.
Regardless of how new the establishment looks, I learned that civics rests on top of US colonialism, which creates instability in the community and larger society. That’s why my mother got organized, and that’s why the BPP organized her—to address our collective conditions.
Organizations built in community provided nuanced lessons for me to follow: independent training and education is critical to community development. Community groups provide individual and organizational accountability. Organizers offer transparency in exchange for integrity. Collective decision-making provides the pathways to liberation.
Courtesy of Omowale Adewale
German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed arguments held an absolute or definitive viewpoint, or, a right and wrong. Hegel’s Dialectics explain that deeper understanding is achieved through the debate of ideas. Critical to this understanding is the requirement of sublation. Sublation is objectivity, therefore the opposition must be operating at a level of civility. Without being immersed in the day-to-day conditions, you may lack proper context.
If dialectics is the map to the objective truth, historical materialism is the treasure. If one possesses historical materialism in a court case, a debate, or in the question about liberation, one possesses the justification. This concept was popularized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, ultimately suggesting that the protagonist has the right to some form of justice.
For example, the history of land grab, enslavement, genocide, and forced colonialism are indisputable historic human rights violations that have occurred throughout civilization. Historical materialism says that the justification is to resist colonialism, to call for Reparations, to demand a plebiscite, to demand land be returned, or make another demand. There are several examples.
The Onondaga Nation and the US
Indigenous Peoples like the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee are able to trace their ancestry back to at least 1142 in what was originally called Turtle Island (the Americas).
In 2024, the Onondaga Nation had 1,000 acres returned to them in the Hudson Valley region of New York. According to AP News, this is part of a 237-year-old fight. The Onondagas continued to fight for their land over two centuries.
OnondagaNation.org
According to the Onondagas, they struggled without adequate housing and land to grow quality food. Reclaiming of the land is what the Onondagas call Rematriation. Onondaga women are reclaiming what was taken from them and Mother Earth. It is the process of restoring order with the natural world. Today, after cleaning house, the Onondagas have returned to using food as their currency.
The artifacts and the treaties between the US established physical evidence of their fight, but the justification for the resistance and the land being returned is the original theft of the land.
The Maroons and Rastafarians of Jamaica and Britain
During 17th century Jamaica, the resistance of Nanny of the Maroons helped lead the Maroons out of slavery through resistance fighting. Nanny of the Maroons used the impenetrable foliage of the forest and swampland to shroud her people and mount a guerilla-style attack against British colonialism. Queen Nanny resisted enslavement and colonialism, while developing an intentional community. By 1740, Britain saw no way to colonize the Maroons so they created the Treaty of Peace. The justification for resistance was to avoid enslavement and colonialism.
Commemorative bust of Nanny of the Maroons | Wikimedia Commons
Another example from Jamaica is the anticolonial work of Rastafarianism that addressed poor working class conditions in the 20th century. The founder of Rastafarianism, Leonard P. Howell and Tenet Bent Howell created the Pinnacle, an intentional agrarian community for the poor and working class. Beginning in 1934, Howell was arrested for sedition and a self-reliant community. D.A. Dunkley discussed the 20-year systematic attack on Howell and the Pinnacle in The Suppression of Leonard Howell in Late Colonial Jamaica, 1932-1954.
The Pinnacle was a 500-acre area in the countryside of the mountains of Sligoville, Jamaica. The community was financed by a thriving agricultural industry which included food and medicine. It unnerved Britain because it meant colonizers did not have control of the economy.
After the British stopped harassing the Pinnacle in 1944, neocolonialist Alexander Bustamante took over. The colonialist strategy morphed into the neocolonialist solution, using Bustamante’s mulatto complexion to control a mostly dark Black population. The selection of Jamaica’s first chief minister was made clear during Queen Elizabeth’s knighting of Bustamante in 1953 before the Jamaicans had their first election in 1954.
When Bustamante became Prime Minister in 1962 he was just as brutal to the poor and working class Jamaicans. Bustamante began a trend in the Caribbean that disrupted Jamaica’s mining and agricultural industries and handed it over to Britain. In neocolonialism, “the economic system and thus the political policy [in neo-colonies] is directed from the outside…For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress,” Kwame Nkrumah, former president of Ghana, explains.
Black farmers and the US
And then, there’s my story of historical materialism. In 2020, in an effort to grow Liberation Farm—an intentional Black community that practices self-determination, trauma healing and wellness living, food sovereignty, compassion, and collective safety to restore balance—we were hit with numerous roadblocks, namely by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Courtesy of Omowale Adewale
Leading up to 2024, we were denied fair funding multiple times at the Farm Service Agency (FSA). That year, Liberation Farm took the USDA to the National Appeals Division (NAD) and won. According to a Farm Aid report, Liberation Farm had a 17-percent chance to beat the FSA. When adjusted for race and state, our odds became 6.2 percent. The NAD judge called the FSA’s justification “erroneous.”
This was very important language. This decision helped to highlight why Black farmland acreage reached its peak of 14 percent in 1910 and why it’s now at 1 percent. The FSA systematically denies farm loans to Black farmers. Before this win, Black farmers had won money via USDA settlements, but the USDA had always managed to dodge admission of guilt.
Liberation Farm never received any funding from the ruling, but like Nanny of the Maroons, we inspired others to resist. Liberation Farm later used a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain data and help tell this farm story.
In the US, the average FSA loan denial rate is only 8 percent, but for Black farmers, the denial rate is 35 percent. The data also shows at least 30 states in the US deny Black farmers at higher rates when compared with other farmers.
Historically, this has resulted in the stealing of Black farmland. From 1910 to 1970, Black farmers lost between 13 and 16 million acres of land. During this period, half the Black population migrated from the South—which included my maternal family—in an event called the Great Migration.
According to US national archives, the Great Migration was spawned by white supremacist terrorism which is naturally woven in the fabric of US colonialism and often used to repress the civics of Black people who resist. The event destabilized Black agriculture in the US, leaving few opportunities to generate a steady economy. The Great Migration urbanized Black families, because after WWII, laws largely prevented Black families from moving to the suburbs—this was called redlining.
Courtesy of Omowale Adewale
Meanwhile, the US uses propagandist rhetoric to invite xenophobia, a form of racism that creates anti-immigrant policies to confuse the issue of colonialism. People are told that China is buying up US land, yet China possesses less than 1 percent of foreign-held US land. People are told Mexicans are the problem, but these migrant workers are following the agricultural jobs that are leaving Mexico because of US foreign policy including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
Meanwhile, white farmers own 98 percent of US farmland. This kind of inequity must become unconscionable in the white community and unbearable for the colonized.
The 2024 presidential election was a reminder that resistance must be supported all the time, and not just on occasion. This is why Liberation Farm exists. Liberation is larger than honing in on one form of exploitation.
All humans compound the suffering of animals, regardless of our intentions. Veganism is an important organizing tool to liberate animals. However, it is used to ignore non-human animals. That is a colonial response to retain portions of injustice and walk away from addressing colonialism. It ignores people of color in the poorest, most marginalized spaces who save animals and raise the entire level of liberation.
As an organizer, Liberation Farm has to work on multiple fronts, because we are Black and our community needs to heal and rest to win tomorrow. We also recognize colonialism feeds us exploitation and death, because that’s its history.
The racialized greed of Big Dairy
Animal agriculture exists because our appetites are all part of a compounding system of exploitation. In the 21st century, US dairy sales have declined annually. However, while dairy consumption has decreased by half in the past 50 years, dairy production has continued to increase by almost 50 percent. Clearly, our system is based on greed and exploitation, not supply and demand.
Today, the Farm Bill is late by 15 months and thus, the 1949 Agricultural Act has been activated. The government will have to purchase the dairy industry’s surplus. The Dairy Margin Coverage Program supports 100 percent of dairy’s production. The dairy market protection ensures that even when consumers stop buying dairy, dairy farmers can continue to be paid by the government.
Getty
In response to Big Dairy’s greed, the 1985 Farm Bill created the Milk Diversion Program which paid the dairy industry to stop producing dairy products. The Farm Bill had to beg dairy factories to close so they would stop producing milk to request more government welfare payments.
This has only taught the US dairy industry how to better manipulate government and taxpayers. Smaller dairy farms have consolidated with larger farms. Between 2012 and 2022, New York dairy farms decreased from 5,000 dairy farms to 3,100 dairy farms, a 66-percent decrease. Yet, the same New York dairy farms increased from $2.5 billion in 2012 to over $4 billion in 2022. The average dairy farmer made $500k in 2012. Ten years later, the average dairy farmer makes over $1.2 million a year. The USDA documented the new changes by the dairy industry in a 2020 report, “Consolidation in US Dairy Farming.” Dairy farmers have found a way to maintain their industry through consolidation and continued industry subsidization.
Adobe
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) feeds 30 million young people milk a day. According to Boston Children’s Hospital, 80 to 90 percent of Black, Indigenous Peoples, and Asians are lactose intolerant compared to 40 percent of white people. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine says high fat content and hormones in milk, cheese, and other dairy products are linked to breast cancer. Men who consumed three or more servings of dairy products a day had a 141-percent higher risk of death due to prostate cancer compared to those who consumed less than one serving. In addition to studies that link dairy to hypertension and skin conditions such as acne and eczema, we begin to understand that colonialism is a system of exploitation which not only clogs our arteries but harms our children.
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Milton Mills, MD, calls the US dairy industry racist because it is 99 percent white. Could this be why dairy is so well-maintained and protected in the US? At minimum, with new information, it gives us cause to resist, find community, and clean house.
Author’s note: In constant evolution, Liberation Farm is Black vegan agrarian living, connected to Black VegFest, a fruitful way to break bread and discuss liberation with our guests. On Saturday August 9th, Black VegFest invites the public to take part in a compassionate call for liberation at its 8th annual festival in Brooklyn, themed “Clean House.”
For more plant-based stories like this, read:
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