Monica White

Dr. Monica M. White is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies, associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and past president of the board of directors for the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure in both the College of Agricultural Life Sciences (established 1889) and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies (established 1970), to which she is jointly appointed. As the founding director of the Office of Environmental Justice and Engagement (OEJ) at UW-Madison, Dr. White works toward bridging the gap between the university and the broader community by connecting faculty and students to community-based organizations that are working in areas of environmental/food/land justice toward their mutual benefit. She is also an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2022-2024 and received the 2024 Distinguished Career for the Career Award in the Service of Sociology from the American Sociological Association. Her research

research investigates Black grassroots organizations that are engaged in the development of sustainable, community-based food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility.

Dr. White’s first book, Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) received the First Book Award from the Association of Association for the Study of Food in Society, the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Division of Race and Ethnic Minorities Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and an Honored Book Award from the Gendered Perspectives section of the Association of American Geographers.

Freedom Farmers revises the historical narrative of African American resistance and breaks new ground by recovering the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed in this history. It traces the origins of Black farmers’ organizations to the late 1800s, emphasizing their activities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas much of the existing scholarship views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of Black people, Freedom Farmers reveals agriculture also as a site of resistance by concentrating on the work of Black farm operators and laborers who fought for the right to participate in the food system as producers and to earn a living wage in the face of racially, socially, and politically repressive conditions. Moreover, it provides a historical foundation for current conversations regarding the resurgence of agriculture in the context of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces including Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Dr. White is currently working on her second book project, We Stayed: Agriculture, Activism and the Black Southern Rural Families Who Kept the Land, which tells the story of three generations of the Paris family and their experiences and resistance under racism’s evil boot. The family patriarch, G.H. Paris, was an early Farm and Home Administration (later the USDA) loan agent based in Tuskegee, AL. In this capacity he provided support for the overlooked and ignored majority Black population employed in the agriculture industry as landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. He and his wife Fannie taught their sons, George, Wendell (now Reverend Paris), and Nimrod, the importance of the relationship between self-provisioning and self-determined political options both through their agricultural work and through the boys’ accompanying their father on the farm site visits he conducted as a loan agent. The sons also witnessed how both parents encountered and resisted Jim Crow racial discrimination. As college students, George and Wendell became unsung heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, organizing Black tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and landowners in the Alabama Black Belt, the same region their father had served as a loan agent. While the white racist political structure sought to deny the majority Black population electoral participation, the Paris brothers were actively involved in voter education, registration, and direct-action campaigns to demand the desegregation of public accommodations. Using funding from the Carnegie Fellowship, in collaboration with Prime Stone Media Consulting and Productions, the family members have participated in a documentary in development on the history of the family, their role supporting Black farmers and their participation in the Civil Rights Movement and other movements for justice.

Dr. White’s work in the classroom and as a member of the food justice movement for over two decades embodies the theoretical framework of collective agency and community resilience and the use of community-based food systems and agriculture as a strategy of community health, wellness, and development. In addition to her service on the Board of Directors of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, she has served on the advisory board of the Southeast African American Farmers Organic Network and on the advisory board of New Communities, Inc., under community organizer and civil rights activists Reverend Charles and Ms. Shirley Sherrod.

In collaboration with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, Dr. White serves as the National Director of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) AgroEcology Center Project (https://www.agroecology-center.org/), where she is actively engaged in developing centers for sustainable agriculture at HBCUs. The project has received more than $6 million in funding to support new centers as well as the establishment of a peer-reviewed journal and a Black agricultural archive that will include Black rural farm family oral histories, accounts of farm site visits, and interviews with Black farmers on agricultural and environmental knowledge. The first center opened at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University in November, 2022 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqNHyKcfr1I).

In addition to the Carnegie Fellowship, Dr. White has received a multi-year, multi-million dollar USDA research grant to study food insecurity in Michigan. She has also received several teaching and service awards, including the 2024 Distinguished Career Award in the Service of Sociology—American Sociological Association, the Louise Hemstead Leadership Award, College of Agricultural Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Honored Instructor, UW-Madison Division of Housing, the Michigan Sociological Association Marvin Olsen Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Sociology in Michigan, the Outstanding Woman of Color at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Vilas Early Career Investigator Award from the Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, which consists of $100,000 in support for her work on We Stayed.