Center for Regional Food Systems

This annotated bibliography provides current research and outreach on structural racism in the U.S. food system for the food system practitioner, researcher, educator, and advocate.

Structural racism in the United States has been defined as the “normalization and legitimization of an array of dynamics—historical, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal—that routinely advantage Whites while producing cumulative and chronic outcomes for people of color.”

This resources identifies literature that links the social construction of Whiteness and its intentional or consequential impact on structural racism within the United States’ local food movement. It is focused on recent peer-reviewed and gray literature* materials that are national, regional, and local in scope that included significant references.

The ninth edition contains 510 sources, including 25 new videos and 100 new journal citations. In recent editions, our video curation includes recordings from webinars that focused on the intersection of food systems and racial equity.

The COVID-19 pandemic shed further light on existing racial disparities in the U.S. food system. Racist killings and attacks on Black Americans and the protests and demonstrations that followed in 2020 and 2021 have focused the nation’s attention on the historic, ongoing, and systemic anti-Black racism that is embedded within our country and institutions, including our food system. Both the pandemic and the refocused attention on racism influenced the significant number of new contributions to the ninth edition of this annotated bibliography

Our intention is to update this resource on a recurring basis. We suggest it be used as a companion resource for training or education sessions on structural racism in the food system.

A Zotero group library is available for the references cited in this document.

Zotero is a free software that lets users easily save, manage, and cite sources. You can create an online account at zotero.org or download the free desktop application, which allows you to sync with the group library and save documents to your computer. All the citations in the 9th edition are tagged in Zotero so that the user can filter the resources.

Below is short tutorial video demonstrating how to use Zotero to access the citations.

Suggested Citation

Kelly, R., Pirog, R., Carr, K., Guel, A., Henderson, J., Wilcox, K., Wimberg, T., García Polanco, V., Babayode, D., Watson, K., & Nelson, E. (2022). An annotated bibliography on structural racism present in the U.S. food system (9th ed.). Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. https://foodsystems.msu.edu/resources/structural_racism_in_us_food_system 

To share feedback or suggest a resource for the next edition of this publication, please contact Rachel Kelly at kellyra2@msu.edu.

*Gray literature is the general name for scholarly or substantive information produced outside traditional commercial publishing and distribution channels. Common publication types include: theses and dissertations; technical reports; working papers; evaluation reports; conference proceedings; publications from NGOs, INGOs, think tanks and policy institutes; patent, and preprints.

This work was supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.