North American food scholars, activists and policymakers often consider how to make a community food project more inclusive to "vulnerable populations" to increase participation in local food efforts. Drawing from qualitative research conducted with two community food organizations in Seattle, Washington, I argue that inclusive efforts are not addressing the power asymmetries present in organizations and within communities. Engaging with black geographies literature, I reveal how a black food justice organization grapples with violent histories of slavery and dispossession rooted in a black farming imaginary, and works to re-envision this imaginary to one of power and transformation. The spatial imaginaries and spaces of each food organization acknowledge racial histories differentially, informing their activism. Black geographies possess knowledge and spatial politics that can revitalize community food movements, and I consider how white food activists might reframe their work so that their efforts are not fueling the displacement of residents of color.

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From the foreclosure crisis of 2008, to the tech boom-provoked housing crisis currently engulfing the San Francisco Bay Area, low-income residents of Oakland, California have been displaced from their homes at an alarming rate over the past decade. In this piece I draw from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and engage with Black geographic thought, urban and sound studies to build a borderlands analytic. I consider how the “tension, ambivalence and unrest” of the borderlands provides a lens to understand the volatility of cities gripped by rapid gentrification. Using a borderlands analytic to make sense of the borders that are produced and policed in gentrifying cities, I consider how Black and Latinx life has been criminalized spatially and sonically so as to be displaced by forces of racial capitalist extraction. To do this, I look to the implementation of gang injunction zones in Oakland in 2010, and then to two moments in 2015 when the city’s soundscapes were policed and criminalized. This piece centers the Black and Latinx geographies experiencing dispossession in Oakland, and considers how residents are imagining and fighting for their city’s future.

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