though it may not feel like it yet, depending where on the globe you are located. We can feel it coming.

And although Fall is traditionally our favorite season, the push towards cooler weather, root vegetables, apple picking, and rejuvenated meal planning is matched this year by an equally strong pull not to move away from the events of the summer, and the movement toward much-needed cultural and policy-based change. 

This feeling of deep and hard-to-articulate reluctance to go 'back to normal' reminds me of grief, and that feels appropriate. I can recall that in March and April of this year, the common refrain was: 'when things go back to normal.' It didn't take long for that refrain to shift into something quite different: 'the new normal', which was more of a question than a statement, as in, 'what will the new normal look like?'

The shift in perception has forced us to grapple with what it is about 'normal' that we want to keep, and what we want to leave behind, or replace. It's the very thought of going back, even toward things that are missed - hugs, smiles, the feeling of fresh air on the lower half of my face - that I can't abide; too many steps toward progress have been retraced in past efforts to end racism. The question is: How can we keep moving forward, holding the truth of all that needs to change? 

One way that we, as White folks, are holding that truth is by going willingly into discomfort.

Since June, we've made the editorial decision to capitalize the W in White. We were moved by this article on the Center for the Study of Social Policy's choice to do so. And although we mentioned it in a previous newsletter, we've thought about it each week without talking about it (something we were reminded of when an insightful newsletter reader questioned our reasoning). We realized it was important to us to share the details behind that choice, and some resources for further thought and discussion.

At the start of 2020, we were safely in the camp of either never having thought much about capitalizing the B in Black, or thinking it was somehow racist to do so. In color blind culture, pointing out race is racist. (It is also worthwhile to point out, as yet another insightful newsletter reader did for us recently, that the use of 'blind' in terms with negative connotations furthers the narrative that different abilities are lesser abilities.) But after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, we were moved by the recognition that not pointing out race, and its very real impact on Americans, serves to make White people feel more comfortable. As writer, scholar, and cultural organizer, Eve L. Ewing writes, "Whiteness is not only an absence. It's not a hole in the map of America's racial landscape. Rather, it is a specific social category that confers identifiable and measurable social benefits."

If "race is psychology, not biology" as W.E.B DuBois once posited, then to capitalize White is to provide a visual and cognitive cue, or reminder, that White people created race in the first place as a means to support profit over people. Using this standard is not an attempt to reclaim identity, but to call it out. It's not an attempt to identify with White Supremacy, but to identify the Whiteness that pervades our culture. As a White-owned business, we're choosing a capital W as a reminder to ourselves and others that we are accountable for an identity that gives us privilege and power in these United States - we did not choose it, but we will choose to own it as a reminder that hate can hide in a lot of places, including lower case letters. And as we move forward, reluctantly and inevitably, we'll keep calling the truth forward with us. 

Next week, we'll be sharing the first in a series of responses to the question of whether an Americorps job is a Good Food Job. We look forward to going deeper into the conversation.

In food, justice, and food justice, 

Dor + Tay