Thanks to the pandemic, the prepper community moved from the fringe to the mainstream. We all became preppers in a way, rushing the stores to buy toilet paper, cans and jars of food, and anything else that we thought we would need to get through coronavirus. The rush triggered the shortages, making the thing that we feared to become real.
Searching online for images of preppers and my screen became filled with White faces. Preppers and diversity don't seem to go together too well. And the absence of Black people in that space got me wondering about how race shapes the preppers groups in the first place.
I live in an ingredients house, meaning that there are slim offerings in the fridge. But open the cupboards and the raw ingredients are there to make a month or more worth of meals. My cupboards are my pantry; filled with lots of dried beans, peas, rice and other grains. As well as herbs and spices. This stuff can last forever, if I let it. The freezer is filled with cooked from scratch meals. A fast dinner is simply re-heating one of these in the microwave. There is no point stocking the fridge with stuff that we won't be able to eat up before it goes bad.
Preppers buy and store enormous quantities of food, so that they are prepared for when the apocalypse comes. Some have enough emergency food supplies to last two or more years. I guess by the time it runs out, they would have figured out how to hunt or farm so that they don't starve.
On one of my long bike rides through the ravine - probably because I was bored, wired and needed to be out of my head - I paused by the archery range. It was filled with archers, drawing their bows to let loose the arrows aimed at the bullseye on the target boards. Most of the bullseyes were shredded. These archers won't have much of a problem if the end times come. They already know how to shoot a target. Okay this one is still, but they have the skill to hit a small area with a bow, from a distance. Useful for hunting animals.
From my online image search most of the preppers prefer more sophisticated weapons. Guns. One never seems enough, so a variety of pistols and rifles are stocked. And the bullets for them. What happens when the bullets run out, as they eventually will? Other preppers like knives. The bigger the better. And one is not enough either.
One of the appeals of prepping seems to be it is a way of handling the chaos of the current world and its potential collapse. The climate crisis has made that Armageddon scenario more real. You can't control the bigger challenge but you can gain some control by managing your food sources.
But why are there so few Black preppers?
Possibly as the Black community tends to be food insecure, we don't have the money to buy and store two years worth of food. Many struggle to put a meal on the table at the end of the week.
It could also be that Black people are not wanted in that space. Preppers are keen on rugged individualism and the mythology that each (wo)man's house is her/his castle. I don't think this sits well with the Black people. We know that building community is the key to our survival. It has been that way in the past, and it is still that way now. Preppers forget that as settlers, the only reason they survived in this new-to-them-world, was that the people already living here were experts of this, their Indigenous land.
Maybe also, all those guns and other weapons in White hands make Black people nervous. Biting the bullet ceases to be a metaphor, when historically, we were the targets for the bullets. We still are.
The biggest reason that the preppers lifestyle and ideology might not appeal to the Black people is because we have already lived through an apocalypse. That one started in 1492 with the Indigenous genocide, followed by slavery. Black people are still living in the wake of that apocalypse. We don't have the luxury of daydreaming about surviving another.
© Jacqueline L. Scott. You can support the blog here.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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