Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate<\/a>,\u201d due to be published in December by the University of California Press. There has been research done nationwide, he says, but the backbone of his book is the years-long ethnographic study he did in the Greenville neighborhoods of Southernside and West Greenville. His work began in 2014, charting the struggles of those two historically Black neighborhoods and working with leaders such as Mary Duckett, Jalen Elrod and Lillian Brock Flemming \u201971.<\/p>\nThere are reasons the food desert concept has been so palatable, Kolb says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt basically catered to the interests of middle-class white people,\u201d he says. \u201cIt gave them an entryway into helping the neighborhood without having to engage in really difficult conversations about the role that racism and poverty has played, gutting out their neighborhoods for 20 or 30 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did these people wrong,\u201d Kolb says, \u201cand they deserve retail restitution.\u201d<\/p>\n
The problem of retail inequality, as Kolb sees it, is complex, with roots running deep through the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, gentrification and racism.<\/p>\n
One option residents in Southernside and West Greenville have lost over time is their corner stores \u2013 about 33 of them that dotted the neighborhoods as recently as the 1960s, Kolb says. They may have had \u201coutdated, dusty shelves\u201d and a slim offering of canned goods, but they also had owners who lived in the neighborhood and were invested in its success.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey knew the people who were their customers,\u201d says Kolb. \u201cThey looked out for them. It felt like they were run for and by the community. That\u2019s what residents want.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 1980s brought big-box stores and changes in urban public policy. White flight continued, property values plunged and focus shifted to the suburbs. Greenville\u2019s appetite for gentrification was evident to Kolb when he arrived in the city in 2008. He watched as retail businesses began to cater to the affluent professionals the city was hoping to attract rather than the longtime residents who were already there.<\/p>\n
The policies \u2013 redlining maps and neighborhood covenants, for example \u2013 that laid the groundwork for these changes \u201cwere written in race-neutral language,\u201d Kolb notes, \u201cbut they had very racialized consequences. They were basically institutionally racist policies that crushed the urban core in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
And once the businesses in the urban core died, it became harder for poorer residents without reliable transportation to get to what they needed.<\/p>\n
Transportation remains a huge problem \u2013 although Kolb notes the rise of underground informal Uber-like \u201cride networks.\u201d Other issues fueling inequity include everyday realities such as the lack of time or energy to prepare solid meals; many of the people Kolb interviewed told him that home cooking was \u201cjust not feasible\u201d for them, leading them to the convenience of prepared foods.<\/p>\n
Solutions need to address these everyday realities, Kolb says. What\u2019s missing is what he calls \u201cgood retail\u201d \u2013 businesses that want to \u201cinvest in their community and cater to the wants and needs and preferences of the longtime residents, rather than just extract money from them or exploit the most vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Kolb, retail equality is very much a social justice issue, and avoiding uncomfortable issues gets us nowhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe live in a consumer capitalistic economy where equal membership means equal opportunity to shop,\u201d he says. \u201cWe need to understand that the concept of food deserts caught fire because we\u2019re more interested in dealing with the symptoms of deep social problems than the root causes. We\u2019re more comfortable talking about fresh fruits and vegetables than racism and poverty, and we need to recognize that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You may have been hearing the phrase \u201cfood desert\u201d for more than two decades now. Since it first officially appeared in a 1995 report from a UK government task force, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,22,5],"tags":[1046,1047,1048,1049],"class_list":["post-9548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-sociology","category-top-four-news-1st-story","tag-food-deserts","tag-retail-inequality","tag-southernside","tag-west-greenville"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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