The sugar industry enslaved Africans built now harms Black communities most

Evidence

But if sugar is killing all of us, it is killing Black people faster. In the food deserts of many redlined Black communities, where supermarkets are scarce, cheap, sugary processed foods fill the shelves of convenience stores and the bellies of Black shoppers. African Americans are overrepresented in the national figures on obesity; diabetes rates among Black men and women are nearly one and a half times those of white men and women. One of the great ironies of sugar’s history in the United States is that the brutal work of the enslaved created an industry whose success in producing unhealthy food for mass consumption has taken its greatest toll on Black communities today. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 267

Categorization

• XREF: This is the pay-off of the book’s reframing argument — slavery as foundational cause whose harms run continuously into present-day health disparities, a concrete instantiation of ‘origin story as infrastructure.’
• SEED: Angle: the redlining-food-desert pipeline as directly traceable to plantation-era commodity economics — a through-line from 1619 to convenience stores.
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the ‘sacrifice’ piece tangentially through the structural logic of one community bearing the cost of a commodity the whole nation consumes, though not to the ritual-sacrifice content itself.