I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2020 to 2022—during some of the most tumultuous years politically in my lifetime. Naively, I didn’t think any of the events of 2020 would affect my research on organic farming history. After all, I was researching the past, so what did that have to do with present-day pandemics, police brutality, or presidential elections? But by my second year of graduate school, I was getting a clear message from my committee and cohort—I had to use a critical race theory narrative to tell the history of organic farming. Some of my peers even changed their thesis or dissertation topics so that they fit better with CRT.
The problem was, I couldn’t fit most known facts about organic farming history into a CRT narrative. One reason that there are so many different historical narratives is that not all of them work equally well to explain certain events. A progressive narrative, for example, works great to describe the “evolution” of farm machinery from hoes to horse-drawn plows to ever-bigger tractors. A declensionist narrative works best when describing the environmental damage caused by pesticides and excessive fertilizer use. CRT is great at explaining why most agricultural land in the US is owned by white people.
But CRT is, by nature, a pretty narrow theory. True to its neo-Marxist roots, it’s almost entirely concerned with unequal distribution of wealth, power, and land. Beyond that, its ability to explain major events in agricultural history is weak. It’s hard to see how racism drove the invention of tractors or pesticides, for example. Nor can CRT explain why processed food took off in the early twentieth century. True, it was white people who invented it—but why at that time in history and not earlier? And CRT has no insights to offer on why some white people would criticize a food system built by other white people, since it treats racial groups as homogenous.
The other problem I ran into is that a true CRT narrative (or counternarrative, as it’s more often called) can only be written by people of color. Leah Penniman or Monica White can legitimately use CRT; white people like me technically can’t. Most of my white peers at UW-Madison chose to overlook this fact; those who thought about it realized that the best thing we could do was to center the experiences of people of color. The difficulty I ran into was that I just couldn’t find many people of color in organic history—and the ones everyone cited, like George Washington Carver, had only marginal connection to other key organic leaders or events.
Learning about CRT broadened my perspective, alerted me to some important historical events, and got me thinking about how some of the basic assumptions of American thought might have racist roots. But in 2020, it wasn’t okay to just draw a few insights from CRT and mix them in with other ideas. I had originally intended to go on to a PhD, but discovered that I wouldn’t be able to use any narrative other than CRT in my dissertation in the emotional political climate of the pandemic. Eventually, I realized that the only way I could experiment with different narratives was to finish my research independently after getting my master’s degree. It was an eye-opening experience in a lot of ways, and I’m hoping that by the time I finally get the book done there will be room for a complex narrative that doesn’t fit neatly into a progressive, declensionist, or CRT framework.
Comments