Food Apartheid on the Virginia Peninsula: Serial Forced Displacement Meets Serial Environmental Racism

ABSTRACT Since 2013, the state of Virginia has pursued two significant initiatives: a commemoration of the forcible arrival of Africans in 1619 and a state‐level council to address food deserts. Yet, there has been little discussion of their interconnections. We ask what role might this 400‐year history play in the existence of food deserts today? We explore the post‐emancipation history of four Black communities in southeast Virginia. Today, three are gone, and the remaining one—Grove—has been identified as a food desert. We argue that Grove experiences food apartheid constructed in part by creative extraction, or the appropriation of value from Black communities to support white communities at various scales. Two processes of creative extraction—serial forced displacement and serial environmental racism—constructed Grove as a space for people and land uses undesired in whiter, more affluent parts of the county and a space of clustered disadvantage that invites supermarket redlining and public disinvestment in health‐promoting amenities.