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Blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in Black America

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janitorial and garbage collection services, to highly lucrative construction contracts. While Deppe admits that he is extrapolating from limited data, he estimates the total gains as $27,760,000. Finally, he notes… Click to show full abstract

janitorial and garbage collection services, to highly lucrative construction contracts. While Deppe admits that he is extrapolating from limited data, he estimates the total gains as $27,760,000. Finally, he notes that deposits in African American banks increased by over $5 million, and this enabled them to provide vital credit for residents and businesses in the community. These are the directly attributable gains of Breadbasket, but Deppe is sure that many Chicago businesses when they observed the boycotts and subsequent settlements agreed by local companies chose to take the initiative and amend their practices lest they became a target for Breadbasket. Accordingly, the full scale of Breadbasket’s material impact is incalculable, but assuredly substantial. For social scientists, Operation Breadbasket has manifold significance. It demonstrates the way in which social movements can address economic grievances through campaigns rooted in communal solidarity and collective action. It also highlights class tensions within the African American community that ultimately transform a project that initially aimed to boost employment and wages into a campaign that promotes African American entrepreneurship with particular benefits for its aspiring middle class. While Deppe uses the divergent approaches of Jackson and his half-brother, Noah Robinson, to demonstrate the dangers of using Breadbasket sanctions in a disproportionate fashion that came close to extortion, he subtly acknowledges that Jackson’s attraction to the dynamism of black capitalism in the context of America’s entrenched hostility to socialism was markedly different from the social democratic vision that Martin Luther King espoused as his dream in 1968. Ultimately, Deppe provides a valuable account of a systematic effort to use social networks to counter economic discrimination and privilege. It also, implicitly perhaps, offers a case study of the perils of charismatic leadership. Ultimately, the limits of Breadbasket can be revealed most starkly by contemplating the bleak realities of life for many African Americans in the decades that followed 1971 as under-employment and social exclusion intensified within communities wracked by drugs, police brutality, and gang warfare.

Keywords: blood sugar; breadbasket; sugar racial; pharmacology; america; african american

Journal Title: Ethnic and Racial Studies
Year Published: 2018

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