Into the COLAverse – Episode 18: Ashanté Reese

[00:00:00] Frederick: Welcome to Into the COLAverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama, as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. Oh my goodness. I am like serious.

so honored and excited to be here with you, Dr. Ashanté Reese – recently promoted to associate professor. Hey. Oh gosh. So exciting. So congratulations. And you are an African and African diaspora studies. you also got your PhD in anthropology from American University. Your BA actually here close by, right?

Trinity University. That’s right. San Antonio. and you took some time out to teach middle school at Coretta Scott King Leadership Academy. Gosh, my heart goes out to you. My, my mom c committed, her time on this earth to. Teaching bilingual, first gen Latina, Latinx kids, and It’s, we need great teachers in those spaces, So thank you for that. We also need you Ashanté here at ut,gosh, you do, you are really innovating in these, bringing these fields together of critical food studies, black studies, urban studies, racial justice. And food justice scholarly work. really significant black geographies examining these different ways that black people produce and navigate, especially food related spaces despite anti-blackness.

really important, incredible work that both. Very hard at systemic structures of racism, lack of kind of fresh food access. Even things like kind of aesthetics and community environments that make us feel good when we go shopping and having been taken away from us. But you also look, at these, in addition to these sort of deserts as you, you talk about them of kind of food,you look.

Find- quote unquote, finding a way out of no way. And that’s you, that I’m quoting. So can you tell us, like, how, like, how did you get here? first of all, like what, were there some seminal events, life changing moments? Was it, from you as the person in the very distant past to you?

[00:02:46] Ashanté: Yeah, that’s a good big question.

I like big questions. you already mentioned me teaching at Coretta Scott King, young Women’s Leadership Academy. It was a school in Atlanta. There is also, an equivalent for Boys and Atlanta Public Schools was experimenting with single gender education and so I was one of the founding teachers at that school along with a lot of other b really brilliant people and.

a lot, we say a lot of things change our lives. Teaching middle school changed my life, and not in the way of oh, I wanted to dedicate my life to teaching middle school. It was the opposite. I realized how hard that was. It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had. I don’t think I’ve worked longer hours in any other profession than teaching middle school.

Echoing your shout out and the need for people who are doing this really important work. But the reason, it really shaped my trajectory post teaching because I grew up in rural east Texas and questions of food access were not, The same, like there were two grocery stores in the town, a third when you count Walmart, which came when I was, super Walmart, which was maybe I was in high school or middle school by the time that was built.

So I didn’t have these questions around like this grocery stores and this part of town, and for what reasons. those weren’t the questions I was asking. And so I was confronted by that when I was teaching middle school. And I write about this a little bit in the introduction to Black Food Geographies, but students had questions around why my side of town had better access and better options than theirs.

And, I was really naive about that, hadn’t really thought about it and decided that’s what I wanted to research when I was in grad school. But I think over the years, I’ve also thought about how, I grew up in a rural area. I grew up in a, in, unincorporated part of town actually, that was mostly family.

And so there are also these themes around community building, ingenuity and care that I think are really important to me. And I think those came from how I grew up and they just keep showing up in the kinds of work that I want.

[00:04:51] Frederick: Yeah. So important, and it’s also really important, your work, is of, making sure to put a spotlight on the fact that food equality in this country has been lacking in a big, deep way.

In fact, food. racial justice and food justice go hand in hand. a lot of, a lot of people talk about redlining. I think they t you know, a lot of folk forget to talk about the significance. Not only of, banks not being, allowed in the neighborhoods and so on and so forth, but good access to good food.

[00:05:29] Ashanté: Yeah. I think. I think as someone who is like interested in and fascinated by cities, there is a way that like historic redlining is, it’s like the curse that keeps on cursing, right? Like it’s the impact of such just, it’s so deep. and so like an example of this to con concretize this for people who might be listening.

A grocery store would not say, for example, I don’t want to locate in this neighborhood because it only has black and Latinx people. No, no grocery, no one in their, not in their right mind. They would not say that on the record, but they might do something like, let’s see what the demographics are in this area.

How many people have college? How many households or two parent households, how many households make an income over a certain threshold, right? Those kinds of things. Don’t have to say, I don’t want to locate in this black and brown neighborhood, but because of the ways neighborhoods have been carved out over time, it almost guarantees that you are replicating a cycle of inequity when those are the kinds of measures that are used for deciding where to cite a grocery store.

There are also other things like. crime insurance rates, all of those things that we know can also be tied to neighborhoods, redlining, et cetera. and I think that’s just one way to think about it, and there’s plenty of other ways, but I guess the point I want to impress upon folks is oftentimes people will say grocery stores aren’t racist.

I’m like, yeah, okay. Maybe not. And the patterns that they follow, and so that’s something that we can like really delve into and think about the impact of,

[00:07:22] Frederick: Yeah. It’s really, your work is so important in so many ways and resonate and also in so many ways with me and, my experiences growing up in California as a Latino, one thing that’s stood out to me was the real, the significance and importance of the community market.

As more than just a corner store.

[00:07:44] Ashanté: Yeah, so you know, in black food geographies it is interesting because, At first, I wanted to spend a lot of time in all of the corner stores that were in and around the neighborhood that I was doing work. And I knew about community market or the place that I called community market because people kept talking about the owner.

And so one day I just decided I was gonna drive up and introduce myself to him. And he told me he wasn’t the person I was looking for. And I was like, okay. And he’s just kidding, I am. And so we built a relationship from there and what was interesting is you start to notice, How a store, beyond what people might call it, how a store actually functions for folks.

So like for example, this was one store where kids felt comfortable coming after school co there’s another corner store, just a block away, that required kids to leave their backpacks at the door and they could only come in two at a time. So there’s this kind of surveillance. Carceral Logic that’s operating there.

And so students would come to this store instead and they would talk to who I call Mr. Jones in the book. And he would joke around with them and all these things. And he knew their families and he was, deeply embedded in the community. And then elders who may have be taking the bus or walking to the store, some of them would drive.

It was nice to see how they would give a list to the other person who would be working in the store and he would do their shopping for them and then bring their bags out to their car, bring them out to their shopping cart if they were walking. And I think those kinds of things matter beyond just where we see something on a map.

And I think something is similar for things like what we call quote unquote ethnic markets. like these places where people get a taste of home, get ingredients that like a. H e b may not have or something, those are not necessarily values that we can quantify, but they’re really important to

[00:09:33] Frederick: people.

Absolutely. I will tell you right now that in I, when I moved, I was almost five from Mexico. My mom’s Guatemala and Irish American. My dad’s Mexican from Mexico. it was the little, it was the tienda at the, in the neighborhood that had a spin rack with comic books. And at school, and this is in northern rural California.

maybe a little bit similar to, where you grew up, where it was literally, we, it was known, we were known as like you were either a redneck or a Mexican. And at the, at this TK. Same thing, the owner let us hang out at the base of the spin rack. And that’s, it was comics. It was fantastic.

Four, it was all of those that L taught me English.

[00:10:28] Ashanté: Yeah, those are, and it’s, What I hear you saying in what you’re talking about is not only just a space to hang out, but they, these spaces become spaces of belonging too, right? Where all the markers of difference that are sometimes weaponized and used against people in a space, like where you’re talking about, where you’re learning English.

Depending on if you were do somewhere else, that would not be welcomed. This is a space where you felt some sense of safety and belonging, so you could take a real risk, and like l learning something new, you’re learning how to be, not, it’s not even just learning English, you’re like learning where your place is in that space.

And that became one place where you’re like, okay, I can be here. And I think that’s this is what’s so cool about food in general. Food. Yes. Serves our biological need. We all need to eat, but also like food in places that serve food or hold food in some kind of way. They become so much more meaningful than just a place where people meet a biological need.

Our social needs are met in these spaces sometimes, like there are places where kind of moral battles get worked out sometimes. there’s just so much that happens here, and I think that’s what makes, that’s what made community markets so special to me in gen specifically. But like in general, this is.

Attracts me to studying food. Like I can say, I want to learn about this food item, and that will lead us in a whole bunch of different directions. that could be, again, like these aren’t the things that we find on maps. I think that’s what I’m interested in. what are the experiences that people have that we don’t necessarily find when we’re just like pointing to the nearest grocery store.

[00:12:11] Frederick: Is. The difference for you, and forgive me if I’m getting this totally wrong, but would this be the difference for you between mapping spaces versus mapping places?

[00:12:24] Ashanté: Ah, this is a good, this is a great question. My students ask this a lot in, I teach a class, black geographies, and we talk about these spaces and places thing.

Yeah. I think place and space overlap, right? But there’s the, when we think about space, we’re thinking about the ways that people fill it up with meaning. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be attached to a physical place. It could be a. Metaphorically, it could be memory, it could be all of these different things.

So yes, you’re spot on with kind of thinking about the ways that space can hold all of that. it can hold a place and it can hold the absence of a place, in the ways that we make sense of that. And I. there’s an example in black food geographies where I talk about an older woman who still lived in the house where she grew up in, and she was narrating to me about a bakery that used to be across the street from where she grew up.

There’s no bakery now. There’s like apartments and condos, but even though there was a physical thing there, like condos and apartments, With her memory, she helped me understand and reconstruct that entire space of how it looked 40 years prior to the current moment. and so there’s something really meaningful about the ways people can imagine.

Remember, narrate spaces, occupy spaces that might not be the things that we’re looking.

[00:13:46] Frederick: Yeah, it reminds me. thank That’s Beau. Thank you. That was beautiful. it reminds me, I was, I gave a lecturer, in front of a bunch of students. I think it was in Wisconsin. And one of the young women said, I, people tell me.

so she’s mixed Latina and black. And people pull me this way and others pull me this way. And what do you, what do I do professor? Latinx? And I’m like, I, so I said, go in your right now, travel to that place. That you feel most comfortable in. And I gave her the example of what I do. And I travel to the ban the bakery from when I was little.

And the smells and it, and the textures and everything. And when I’m in that space, that place again, Nobody can push me off the log.

[00:14:55] Ashanté: Yeah. You know what you just said also reminded me that one thing that it feels really true to me, and ask me again in a year if this still feels true to me, but a thing that I hold true is that no matter where we are, No matter the experiences that we’ve had in our lives, almost every single human has had a good experience with food or a food space.

They have a memory, even if it’s a distant memory. And there’s this, I cannot remember the name of the book, it’s on the tip of my tongue, but a book of about, women who were in a concentration camp who were passing down recipes orally to each other. and then eventually they were written down.

But like even just reading that book and reading these, or these, recipes, I’m like, there was so much joy that they were sharing through this. And When you, what you just described about no one can knock me off the log. It makes me think about like why memory is so powerful. Why as being able to claim memory as a really important way of knowing space and place.

Because in the ways that like anti-blackness in particular functions and we’re thinking about gentrification and the ways that places are like wholly being transformed, we need memory. We need memory keepers who are remembering that like this way of being hasn’t always been this way, this way of relating to space or this building, like where this building is.

This used to be something else. And let me tell you what used to be here. that feels like really important when so much of the work of so much of what’s happening in cities across the world, I would say right now is very violent. Because it’s not just that people are forcibly removed, but it’s almost like in the removal you want to act.

Some people would prefer to act like they just didn’t exist at all. And so in that way, like memory and being a memory worker becomes a act of resistance. In my mind. The way we remember places become acts of resistance. They’re not just, they’re not just about us like. Historicizing a thing, like I truly think that it is about calling us back to a space where we remember that like the, there was something that preceded the violence, I guess is what I’m getting at.

[00:17:20] Frederick: Wow. Yeah. Beautiful too. I, memory keepers, memory workers, storytellers. and you are so careful in your work to allow those who are sharing their memories, the keepers and the workers. To begin and end where they need to. amazing. Let me ask you, another kind of place, that unfortunately seems to be.

Kind of also at threat of, it was hanging on for survival, but the community garden. And this concept of the quiet food refusal. Yeah. What I mean, I get it and, but it’s very different. Community Garden is not hipster like Community Garden, which, I think a lot of people, maybe in Austin these days think of community Garden in that regard.

But maybe you can tell Mute. Talk to me a little bit about that and Yeah. Are you still seeing, or are you seeing the threat. To it even more today. I don’t

[00:18:32] Ashanté: know. Yeah. So I guess, spoiler alert that garden doesn’t exist anymore. yes, I guess that, that, the threats were really real.

But I think your point about what I heard you asking also and or saying in the question is that, Even the term community is contested, as in not, it doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody. And so for those gardeners and in my book, gardening wasn’t just about recreation. and it wasn’t even just about doing right by the Earth in a particular kind of way.

It was a means of survival. both in terms of eating, but also community survival. When there were so many threats happening to people were being forcibly relocated, the projects were being torn down. this garden became like a. From multiple types of survival. So it was really important.

and I think the point that if I were writing that chapter now in 2023 and not in 2018 or whenever I was writing it before it was published, I would really emphasize that the work they were doing in that garden, it did not matter if it lasted forever. that the work that they were doing in that garden to transform that space mattered precisely because of what it meant to the people in the present.

It wasn’t just about like longevity, is what I’m offering here. And I think about community gardens. Yeah, first thing I think about is who and what. Who’s the community? Who’s defining the community? What does it mean? but I guess I also think about it in relation to what are the other things that are happening.

I do not think community gardens are the solution to structural problems, but I do think that what I learned from the garden in DC was that it doesn’t have to be a total solution for it to be valuable and viable. And I. And so I looked to them as a model of resource distribution. What does it mean to share?

this wasn’t a garden that had individual plots, for example. So I just thought wow, this is, that was the first time I had been to a community garden that didn’t have individual plots. that’s how I knew community garden style function. And so they even challenged for me and gave a vision for me around like how we might rethink those spaces.

[00:20:59] Frederick: Yeah, absolutely. moving a little bit into the edited volume,we’ve, we’ve been covering so much, including things that have, are also covered in black food Matters that came out in 2020. there’s just, so that’s such a rich collection that you co-edited and what I, what, people forget, and I don’t know if you’ve seen.

the film, Logan, it’s a Marvel movie. maybe one of the best, and I bring it up because at the very center of that story, and it’s not a typical Disney marvel, it’s, it’s a very, honest look at the us We arrive in the middle of the US and it’s a black farming. Family. And my students often, and I just taught it, are surprised to see black farmers.

In the media, especially in a Marvel movie. And this gets to just so many things that you’ve been talking about, but also, The kind of policies in place to that have been, certainly since the eighties, undermining,communities of color who have chosen that as a way of life.

along with, all of the things that we see happening around us, both with. Food, racial heritage, tourism in Latinx communities and, and spaces, but out, f folks coming into those spaces, but also soulful soul food, gentrification. And so on. I, I celebrate the moment in the movie, but then of course, that family’s com obliterated in the story, right?

and in many ways, Mirrors what’s been happening to farming communities of color in this country.

[00:22:54] Ashanté: Yeah, I haven’t seen that film. I haven’t seen that film, and it makes me think, have you ever have you, do you use. Queen Sugar in your class at all, like the TV series?

[00:23:06] Frederick: I don’t, but I should.

[00:23:08] Ashanté: I would really, one day I am like, ugh, I would just love to teach a class that is shaped around Queen sugar. one because it’s a beautiful show, but also like the themes that come out of it are so like powerful, And I think you’re right about the ways. The very real ways policy have been, has been used to like undermine farming in general, particularly subsistence farming in the US in general.

I think it’s hard to be a farmer in the US right now, and if you add race, racial, and gendered elements, it’s even harder. And even when you think about the fact that we don’t even. People who migrate to work on farms. We don’t call them farmers, we call them migrant workers. And I think there’s something really interesting about that language and who we assign a title and set of skills and who we don’t.

But that’s, that’s a whole other kind of thing. I think, I think a lot of people, one of the things that, I, one quote that I love to lift up from. Black food geographies is when I was talking to an elder and he was narrating his history in DC and then he stops and he says at some point, I guess it was around the sixties when peop black people got too sophisticated to dig in the ground.

And I love that quote because of how it made me stop when he said it. Cause I was like, whoa. But then it made me think about these connections between what we talk about as civil rights and progress and all these things. Because if you were a black person in the sixties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and you farming and access or perceived access opened up and someone was telling you that was the better way to.

And you know all that, you know about how hard your parents had farmed and share craft and all that. Why would you continue to farm? there’s a whole host of reasons why you wouldn’t. So yeah, I think about that and I think about it. It doesn’t surprise me that students might be surprised to see like black family, Farming, like that’s just not the narrative. Yeah.

[00:25:15] Frederick: Yeah. yeah, the sixties as well. And of course, one of some of the work in that collection is about the Black Panther Party. and the, putting front and center food sovereignty, right? In our communities.

Let me, let me just that collection just as yours, your single authored book. Also very importantly, Direct us toward these places of progressive food justice. anywhere between, black ownership of land communal cooking events. physical and spiritual spaces that are opened up through, in and through food.

again, pointing us to today, where are you finding these spaces, maybe for yourself,for the community? I don’t know.

[00:26:10] Ashanté: That’s a great question. for myself, I would say I spend a lot of time baking these days and I give away most of the things that I bake. but also just, hanging out with folks in Austin who become my friends, which is amazing.

And like often we’re sharing food together. But broader than that, like I draw a lot of inspiration from orgs like the,national Black Church Food Security Network. I think I got those names right. that started in 2015 in Baltimore, and it’s grown so much. It’s grown so much. and their whole point is to get black churches mobilized in this fight for food sovereignty because what we know is that black churches often.

Own a lot of land in communities, even if it’s just the land where the church is. And so Dr. Heaper Brown wanted to think about what does it mean for us to transform that land into something in service to food sovereignty? And so that’s really beautiful. the National Black Food and Justice Alliance just started an Afro Ecology center at Florida a and m University, and that’s.

when I think about the amount of work they put into starting, it’s just amazing. and so I love that. And I used to teach at Spelman College. before coming here. And they have a food studies program and I think it’s important that HBCUs are engaged in this work around food. So yeah, like those are some of the orgs and spaces outside of my everyday life.

And I was just talking to someone earlier who mentioned the 2021 ice storms. in Texas, winter storm in Texas and the kind of organizing that, some of us were doing around that. I guess I wanna also just point to some of these spaces that are not permanent. These kind of ephemeral ways that people gather to meet each other’s needs.

I feel really inspired by moments like that as well.

[00:28:08] Frederick: Yeah, thank you. also, my brain started moving into your engaged pedagogy spaces and wondering if along with. Your ask of the students to practice something like Grace and some, I noticed too, you have collaborative playlists that you create.

Yeah. I wonder too if in any of your food and racialized city, just food, race, gender and class in the US South, any of your classes, if food also becomes like literally a part of it.

[00:28:40] Ashanté: Yeah. it’s been. I came to UT during the pandemic. food was not really a part of things. But at the end of, my first year here, my students from both of my classes from the first two semesters, we had a picnic.

Mueller outdoor to just spread out and it was potluck and people got to, I brought tacos and then people got to fill in with other things and that was really cool cuz we, it had been, I mean I’d been here a year and hadn’t met any of the students in person, that was great. And then I was off for a year for research and then I’m back this year and I was just talking to my grad class about for our last week.

Maybe we want to just go. Like lunch somewhere, instead of being cooped up in the classroom. Why don’t we, because we have, my class goes through the lunch period. I’m like, why don’t we meet somewhere and like actually share a meal together and wrap up our semester? So we may do that, but before this, almost every class ended with a potluck, which was really fun.

I really, I like not only just for the, and I tell students I could easily bring all of the food, that’s fine. But there’s something really special about each of us taking some little piece of responsibility. To create a meal together. and I think students enjoy it too.

[00:29:56] Frederick: Absolutely. I know I would.

speaking of your time off and then we’ll wind down. I know that you mentioned at least tentatively titled the Carceral Life of Sugar. Is that something you were working on or, during your time?

[00:30:09] Ashanté: Yeah. Yes. a few years ago I had started a larger project about, Agriculture and prison farms here in Texas.

really about the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, department of a Agri Agribusiness is what they call it. so I had started that and then in 2018, there were graves uncovered in Sugarland, Texas, and I started following that story and decided that I would focus. Sugar just felt like a really powerful object to focus in on.

That was at the nexus of thinking about how cities are built, how the Texas Department of Criminal Justice solidified itself, and then also sugar, like what, that’s me meant to the Texas economy historically. And then what does it mean for us today? So while I was on leave, research leave, I was doing mostly archival work for that project.

between here and. Houston and Fort Bend County mostly. And yeah, so it’s an ongoing project, really just trying to think about these different configuration sugar has taken in relation to black life and the plantation prisons city. and just everyday life,what we do in our kitchens. So that’s what I’m working on.

[00:31:26] Frederick: Yeah. I can’t wait for that one. and this spoken from someone who. for my, because of my own weird diet, like I have celiac disease, I don’t actually have sugar in the kitchen, but,let me ask you as we wrap this up, Ashanté, that. Incredibly you are and have been trained as a yoga,and, yoga and meditation,teacher Yeah.

what can I, someone who. I don’t know. I didn’t, I never seem to give myself a minute to take a pause. What can you recommend for? And I’m not that flexible. Yeah.

[00:32:08] Ashanté: it’s so funny you answered, you asked the question, you answered the question, and you said, What can, as someone who never takes a minute, what can I do?

And my literal response was gonna be take the minute. okay. actually, I think a lot of times, especially when it comes to something like medi meditation and yoga, we think that you have to go sit in a class and it needs to be like an hour or you need to meditate for. 20 minutes for it to matter.

and it doesn’t, like some days I can do that, and then some days I can only sit for five minutes. Because it, the time isn’t really the thing. It’s the consistency of the practice, just reminding yourself, you deserve the pause. I think it’s important. And then with yoga, I’m also not very flexible actually.

I know people like, don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true. I have like lots of immobile immobility in my hips, for example. And I think for anyone who doesn’t want to go to a class for any kind of reason, I really love, yoga With Adrian on YouTube, she has hundreds of free videos ranging from anywhere from five minutes to 45 minutes.

So there’s something for everyone there. I feel like she’s so relatable. I also like, Chelsea Jackson Roberts on the Peloton app. Also very relatable. Classes are usually 30 minutes or less. but even if you don’t wanna do all of that, all of us can stop and stretch something. Even if we’re sitting in our chairs, I’m often pausing to like even just stretch my arms sometimes or roll my back.

I think it’s less about the time and more about the intention, is what I’m.

[00:33:38] Frederick: Do you do that with your students? I’m curious, do you have.

[00:33:43] Ashanté: Sometimes I, especially if I feel like I am noticing there’s a lot of stress. Like now we’re about to enter the part of the semester where everybody’s stressed all the time, right?

So when I notice that we might do that, and for most of my classes, I actually start the semester with, I don’t call it meditation. I just ask, can we breathe together? And while we’re breathing together, I ask question. And ask them not to like grasp for the answer, but just see what comes up for them.

And that’s how we start the semester. Like I ask them what their intentions are, I ask them what they’re afraid of, like I ask them those kinds of things. And and then we talk about it. yeah.

[00:34:19] Frederick: Amazing. gosh, this brief journey from space and placemaking corner stores as intergenerational communal gathering places, quiet food refusal, storytelling, memory keepers, memory workers to.

Quiet pause as refusal. Oh boy. Thank you, Ashanté. Thank you. You’re welcome.

[00:34:47] Ashanté: You’re welcome.

[00:34:50] Voiceover: Into the COLAverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find into the Cola Verse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Thanks for listening and see you next time.