equity work is a living ecosystem

Last weekend, I spent an hour or two weeding in my local community garden. I’ve neglected the garden, this summer – the growing season spent cultivating the business, rather than the tomatoes. But on Saturday morning, before the rain hit, I slathered on the bug spray, grabbed a trowel and the keys to the garden shed, and plunged into the soil. The bolted greens got yanked from the ground and cut up for compost, the honeybees circling the marigolds buzzed as I disturbed them, and now the dirt looks like it can breathe again.

I’ve eaten astonishingly well all week since – sungolds roasted in olive oil and melted into anchovies for pasta; a pile of collard greens, bitter and pungent, alongside the chicken marinated in my maa’s garam masala and the rice streaked with caramelized onions; cucumbers chopped into chunks, salted, and tossed in sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. The marigolds I deposited in a little bottle by my desk. Everything tastes vibrantly fresh, almost overwhelmingly so – blooming and abundant despite my lackluster stewardship.

The garden teaches me lessons and gives me metaphors and nourishment (and so many mosquito bites) every time I visit. Lately, I’ve been thinking of equity and justice work as a living ecosystem, influenced by the health of the soil in which it’s planted, the ideas that are uprooted and cut up for compost, the invasive lanternflies that invade and proliferate. This is by no means a new metaphor – see Dr. Camara Jones’ foundational allegories on racism.

But a community garden means there are people to consider, too. There are conflicts to navigate. Do I cut back my neighbor’s squash vines that are choking my tomatoes? How much responsibility do I take for weeding the communal paths, or tending to the dying peach tree in the back? Who belongs in the garden, anyway, and how do we steward these relationships?

My little community garden lives in the heart of Harlem, first established by the Black women who grew up here and are now the local grandmas. We’re on a street that is a snapshot of gentrification in NYC – apartments owned and rented by Black folks who’ve been here for generations, a brownstone owned by white folks who have been here for twenty years, a church nearby that decries gentrification and also spews homophobia, a Dominican bodega on the corner as well as a Whole Foods by the train, and a few handfuls of transplants like me, moving in where we can but maybe shouldn’t. When these racial tensions erupt, it’s a white woman and a Black man shouting at a garden meeting, but it’s also an exact snapshot of this moment in time, in the context of many intersecting histories.

Equity work requires relational labor and community care. That work is inherently emergent, inherently alive. adrienne maree brown says, “trust the people, and the people become trustworthy.” Sonya Renee Taylor says, in conversation with Prentis Hemphill, “there is a present, and inside that present, there are people to love. There are traumas to be healed. There are folks to feed.”

And then she asks: “What does it look like to take our very precious, very tender, very necessary energy and return it to what there is for us to do in service of our own integrity and the care of one another right now?”

I’ll leave you with that question, for now. I’m asking myself, too.