The Outsiders: Principled Withdrawal, Whiteness, and Power in the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement

Abstract

This article draws on understandings of whiteness and the misconstrual of South Central Los Angeles to analyze the power dynamics between “outsider” activists and residents of South Central as they worked toward a more equitable food system. As concerns over the “obesity epidemic” and the push for “real food” in the 2000s coincided with a surge in GIS data on “food deserts,” a new cadre of activists, often white and middle-class, began intervening in South Central Los Angeles as part of the food justice movement. Residents had already been organizing around broader social justice issues and food retail equality. Though food justice brought these groups together in multiracial organizing, there were divergent visions about the problem and the goals of food justice work. In some cases of conflict, in a process I call “principled withdrawal,” residents withdrew from project situations that they did not align with ideologically, morally, or practically.