In the age of Trump, reporting on marginalized communities more important than ever

As the daughter of Mexican immigrants, my childhood memories revolve around canning tomatoes to make fresh salsa in the winter and running out to our backyard garden to pick cilantro and greens for my mother to cook. Pretty much everything we ate was made from scratch.  But one of the things I remember most was my mother's love of tea. She knew how to mix herbs to make remedies for a variety of ailments; knowledge that was passed down from the women in her family in Los Altos, in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. She knew that chamomile soothes the stomach and relieves bloating and indigestion, that dried Hibiscus flowers can lower blood pressure and strengthen the immune system. Boiling tea leaves grown from our garden to soothe our maladies was commonplace in our home.  As we grew up, my mom mixed less and began to buy boxed teas. Bewitched by media advertising from big tea companies, she slowly succumbed to the structural racism wrapped around consumerism. And in losing her connection to tea-making, our family, and our community, lost something more.“Cultural identity is the currency that allows for self-determination," says Michelle Martinez, Executive Director of Third Horizon Consulting. “When self-determination is taken away through food, you begin to internalize oppression.”Martinez is a third-year cohort member in the Detroit Equity Action Lab (DEAL) at the Damon J Keith Center for Civil Rights, at Wayne State University Law School, where I am honored to serve as the program's first Race and Justice Journalism Fellow. The fellowship allows me to write about race and justice for one year while learning about the city's most pressing equity issues from experts who are in the trenches dealing with these matters daily.The DEAL program was created by former W.K. Kellogg Foundation Program Officer Sharnita C. Johnson, whose work centered around equity and community, and Peter Hammer, Wayne State law professor and Director of the Damon Keith Center for Civil Rights.Hammer felt that groups fighting for education, transportation, health disparities and food access in Detroit were not making the progress they desired and wanted to bring together some of the brightest minds in Southeast Michigan to create new ways of dismantling structural racism. He felt that the political establishment wasn’t doing their job when it came mass inequity.I began to seriously focus on race, justice, and the media while working as a journalist during Detroit’s bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.  The bankruptcy led to the appointment of an emergency manager and usurped control of local elected officials in a primarily black city, disenfranchising voters and violating a deeply valued tenet of American democracy-- local representation.  While there was a lot of local and national coverage of the bankruptcy, there was an omission of coverage of the voices of Detroit's people during the insolvency. This deeply concerned me, as did the stories that did come out, which helped to pit the pensioners against art, water, and public safety. Around the same time as the bankruptcy, a controversial land sale involving a millionaire investment banker took place, the Detroit Future City Plan was rolled out, and the mass water shutoffs began. These important events lacked proper coverage from the perspective of how land and public infrastructure privatization would impact Detroiters.Protests of these events by African Americans have drawn harsh comments from the establishment. I’ve heard non-profit leaders call members of the community “obstructionists.” I’ve heard journalists call activists “grape throwers," sighing with a "here they go again" attitude in response to news that protesters disrupted city council meetings. I also saw Detroit citizens referred to as “CAVE people” or, “Citizens Against Virtually Everything” in the Detroit Future City Plan. These remarks are disparaging, veiled in racism, and rooted in economic elitism. Local media failed to ask one simple question. Why? Why are these issues so upsetting to such a large group of people? How would these events impact Detroit’s communities? What were the economic ramifications to people living here? Why did so many people leave their jobs, organize in their neighborhoods and step away from the demands of everyday life to protest what was happening? I wanted to know why. So I went to the Damon Keith Center for Civil Rights to get some insight. That is when I first met Peter Hammer and DEAL Director, Eliza Perez-Olin. Both had a broad understanding of current and past events, and they were able to shed light on what was happening in the city.