This article traces Black environmental relations in the stewardship of community gardens and other green spaces in the city of Newark, New Jersey. It engages with a widely held belief that Black diasporic people, particularly those who live in cities, are alienated from nature or altogether opposed to agriculture as a result of the historical traumas of slavery and its immediate afterlives, including sharecropping and convict leasing. Focused on Black Newarkers with marked roots in the American South and the Caribbean, this essay follows gardeners and other stewards of urban green space as they contend with the legacy of the plantation yet still frame land cultivation and stewardship as a mode of recovery and resistance. It highlights the ways in which Black growers and other green space stewards indeed reckoned with their associations between cultivation and captivity but did so in ways that enabled them to name present-day labor extractions and enact alternative forms of care and self-determination.

White supremacist ideas are prefabricated within the concept of a hierarchized white racial order and resultant unequal distribution of life and death. These age-of-Enlightenment-humanist ideas remain tethered to public opinion and policy, cohering racial whiteness as the ideal in a collective political unconscious. Of course, an anthropology of white supremacy is not a departure from existing radical political economic analytics but rather a companion/continuation of related projects. In this essay, we provide analytical terms specific to the anthropology of white supremacy and suggest five principles, theorized through the context of ethnographic encounters in, and historiography of, the city of Detroit. More broadly, this article suggests that white supremacy is a crucial foundational element toward the emergence of capitalism and liberalism in the modern period. To follow, we take a specific if narrowed approach attuned to the way that the concept, white supremacy, a priori marks the structural signification of persistent, destructive ideas such as scientific racism and racial whiteness as the unraced, nonwhite lack of reason/understanding and nonwhite lack of being-in-the-world—ideas that anthropology as a discipline would do well to unpack.

This paper considers the relationship between gendered care work and state-sponsored disaster recovery in New York City. As an ethnographer and a volunteer at New York Relief Center (NYRC), which provided disaster case management to Puerto Ricans displaced by Hurricane María, I demonstrate how despite state funding, Puerto Ricans displaced following Hurricane María (2017) remained unhoused, unemployed, and disconnected from services. In what amounts to an ambivalent form of state care, city bureaucracies not only permitted this but also, to a significant degree, produced disaster migrants’ deepening precarity. Disaster case managers (DCMs)—the first point of contact—engaged in gendered radical care to create alternative forms of recovery. DCMs, all working-class Latinas, mobilized personal networks and invested countless unpaid hours to secure services and materials given a low priority by NYRC. DCMs demonstrate how precarity gives way to life-affirming practices such as community activism, the formation of networks of care, and in some cases the crafting of new possibilities for sociality and solidarity. These efforts interrupt the everyday slow violence that diasporic and displaced Puerto Ricans encounter because of ecological injustice, state ambivalence, and coloniality.

In Batey Liberty, a sugarcane settlement located in the northwest region of the Dominican Republic, community conversations about witches abound. The witch is perceived as a corporeal and ephemeral figure that transcends dimensions of time and space. Residents of Batey Libertad differently articulate their relationship to varied iterations of the witch, which in turn inform their everyday lives. This article interrogates what I call “witch talk” to draw attention to the correlation between disclosures of witch encounters and specific occurrences of state violence through the act of immigration raids. It argues that the discourse surrounding the witch is a trauma response to the ongoing and increasing persecution of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. An analysis of witch talk reveals that the witch is a proxy for the unnamed state. However, a reorientated examination of the witch offers decolonial possibilities for what her presence could signify.