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This chapter reviews the literature on racism in the food system and demonstrates how theories of anti-blackness help to further frame contemporary food access inequities in cities. Building on literature from scholars who have framed self-reliance in the Black experience, the chapter also outlines “geographies of self-reliance,” a framework for understanding how self-reliance is not simply ideological but also becomes a spatial mechanism. Lastly, the chapter offers “quiet food refusals”—the types of food work and decisions being made outside the public gaze—to make a case for paying attention to the everyday ways Black residents are navigating the unequal food system.

This chapter pans westward to investigate a single novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), regarded as the beginning of the Western, an origin story for that national mythology. The Virginian and the Western would seem to have nothing to do with slavery, but as this chapter reveals, slavery supplies the scaffolding for that most American of heroes, the cowboy. This chapter explores the centrality of anti-Blackness in the origins of the Western, engaging with genre theory and Sigmund Freud’s work on jokes. It explains the Western’s appearance against a backdrop of incorporation, finance capitalism, and emerging economic theories of marginalism. Tracing the connections between the frontier economies of the South and the West, and between the slave overseer and the cowboy, it reveals the Western as originating from a fantasy of Black genocide and white supremacy.

The introduction provides an overview of the chapters and situates the present study in conversation within three separate historiographies: the “nueva ola” generation of Dominican historians who published new social histories during the post-Trujillo period; U.S.-trained historians interested in questions of race and identity in the Dominican Republic; and, within the emerging scholarship on gender and political culture in the Dominican Republic.

Louis Sheridan was a wealthy merchant and free black man. This chapter examines his negotiations with the American Colonization Society and other groups for passage to Liberia. Despite his willingness and resources, the negotiations were fraught. The analysis of the correspondence illuminates deeper concerns of black identity related to notions of Afro-Pessimism and black optimism.

The fourth chapter discusses the broad fabric that makes up the tenuous relationship between Black and Brown in post- 9/11 American culture and how its shift to identification intersects with historical race policies and politics. Through an analysis of popular culture (like the TV show Blackish) and political interventions, the chapter question what the racialized pathologies and medications of post-9/11 anxiety means to the Black-White binary that is often the popular historicized approach to race in the United States. Despite the attempts to educate the general public about the ways in which explicit and implicit violence impacts communities across the country, it has been unable to quell what seems to be a rising tide of increased and systematic violence against African Americans.

A critical lever in African-Indian negotiations has been race as a changing and contested terrain: from challenging white supremacy to critiques of inequality within the Global South. Against this historical balancing act between Africa and India, alarmist cries over Asia’s new “scramble for Africa” seem to be an overreaction. Africans have negotiated with Indians on their own terms; Indians, including embassy staff in West Africa, recognize cultural and racial sensitivities arising from the history of the Indian diaspora in eastern and southern Africa. Although economic growth, improved relations with the U.S., and competition with China have brought India greater global influence in the neoliberal era, African migrants in India and critics in Africa and the diaspora challenge Indian power and protest historical racism in the #gandhimustfall movement, contemporary anti-Blackness in India and the Indian diaspora, and Hindu nationalism. African-Indian entanglements must be understood in all their complexity.