Dr. Breeze H.
Dr. Harper has a PhD in the social sciences, with emphasis in Black feminism, cultural foods studies, and ethical consumption. She holds a MA in Educational Technologies (emphasis in women and gender studies; Black Studies; critical race theory) from Harvard University, where she received the Dean’s Award for her masters thesis work on how racial-gender privilege operates in cyberspace forums.
She earned her BA in feminist geography from Dartmouth College and received the Innovative Thesis award for her work on heterosexism in rural geographies. She has 15+ years career experience as a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, ranging from curriculum development, to conference planning, to research and reporting, to publishing books and articles, to workshop design and facilitation, to recruitment and retainment, to critical content editing, to strategic consulting. She is the co-founder of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion services company, Critical Diversity Solutions, LLC.
Critical Race Feminist Analysis of Food, Ethical Consumption, and Sustainability
Dr. Harper has been invited to deliver workshops, keynote addresses, and lectures at universities, businesses, and nonprofits throughout North America. Her talks explore how and why people have unique relationships to food and wellness, sustainability, and ethical consumption and how these relationships are impacted by race, anti-Blackness, socio-economic class, gender, sexual orientation, and physical abilities.
Afrofuturism
Since 2009, Dr. Harper has been delivering many keynote addresses, ranging from DEI, to animal rights, to veganism, to food justice, to racial justice. Most recently, she has been speaking about afrofuturism via her novel Seeds of Sankofa. She was the Visiting Black Scholar at Butler University in April 2022 and gave a keynote talk about afrofuturism and food, and read from her novel Seeds of Sankofa. In 2023, she was nominated for the prestigious Impact Media Award via Food and Farm Communications Fund (https://lnkd.in/dRqAs5SE) for Seeds of Sankofa and her racial and food justice writing. In addition, institutions such as UC Santa Cruz, Sacramento City College, and The Evergreen State College (to name a few) have hired Dr. Harper to give keynote talks about afrofuturism and read from Seeds of Sankofa. She has received high acclaim for Seeds of Sankofa and her engagement with afrofuturism from her clients.
Seeds of Sankofa explores soil and seeds as both metaphors and literal to narrate a future of regenerative possibilities without forgetting the past. In order to grow seeds, we need rich soil, water, and sun... which helps us birth the foods that nourish humans and other beings. The novel also explores zombification as a consequence of slavery, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and monocultural farming practices and its impacts on Africans of the diaspora living in the USA.
The new novel also explores grief, loss, and trauma through both the supernatural and "normal":
How do grief and loss manifest in multiple worlds, such as the world of the soil microbiome, our human bodies, the metaphysical, and the plant world?
How can we explore grief and trauma that are intimately connected to ecocide intertwined with racial and reproductive violence?
What happens when human beings cannot grow as their biodynamic authentic selves, but instead, gestate in a system in which monoculturalism is both cultivated and normalized...and is falsely narrated as Black liberation?
LGBTQ Youth and Black Experience
In 2024, Dr. Harper’s latest novel will be published, called Potato Chips & Wine: A 90s Queer Teen Romance. In the book, the protagonist Pearl Marie Thomas is a Black girl in a rural and mostly white county of New England. The year is 1996. All Pearl wants is to find love and the perfect vegan meal without her pious mother bothering her about her 'unkempt dreadlock' hair style, or her stepfather reminding her that unless she 'behaves', she cannot attend the women's college of her dreams: Smith College. In the closet, required to attend a Catholic High school, daydreaming about sultry romance scenarios with girls she'll never have, and being guided by the literary ghosts of Audre Lorde, Pearl unexpectedly meets Ramona Lee, a Korean-American teen who captures her heart. Set to a playlist/videolist of the 1980s and 1990s, Potato Chips and Wine cleverly narrates the joys and frustrations of a Black teen girl trying to survive and find happinesses in a mainstream society of the 1990s that narrated Black people as 'born criminals' and LGBTQ people as 'sinners.'
In 2014, Dr. Harper’s social fiction novel, Scars: A Black Lesbian Experience in Rural White New England (Brill Press) was published. It interrogates how systems of oppression and power impact the life of the only Black teen, who is also lesbian, living in an all white and working class rural New England town. Dr. Harper has been invited by institutions such as University Oregon to give talks about Scars. She was honored in 2014 by Portland State University for their “Walk of Heroines” women food writers event. During that event, she narrated how she used food objects to explore the collateral damages of white supremacy in Scars and gave a mini workshop about how to explore racism for food writing.
Other Lecture Topics and Engagements
One of Dr. Harper’s most popular talks took place at Whidbey Institute in 2016, called Uprooting White Fragility in the Ethical Foodscape . It has been shown in universities, community organizations, and other spaces to inspire dialog and action plans around operationalizing anti-racism and gaining literacy around how systemic racism and anti-Blackness operate in even the most "ethical" and "well-intended" spaces.
In 2019, Dr. Harper gave the keynote talk at Flee Retreat, a Chairman Mom organized event. Entitled, "Anti-Racism in the Workplace: How White Women Can Be Allies to Nonwhite Women of Color," Harper received a standing ovation and piqued the interests of some of Silicon Valley's brightest womxn leaders to collaborate with Dr. Harper to help them or their organizations with inclusion, diversity, and equity. This included Kim Malone Scott, New York Times bestselling author of Radical Candor, in which Dr. Harper continues to work.
Dr. Harper has also participated in panels and joint presentations with other food and social justice leaders such as prominent vegan chef and activist Bryant Terry (Afro-Vegan, Vegan Soul Kitchen and The Inspired Vegan), food justice activist Lauren Ornelas (Food Empowerment Project), Raj Patel (author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System), sociologist Alison Alkon (Black, White and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy), Julie Cummins (Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture), Decolonial Food for Thought blogger Claudia Serrato and community advocate and food entrepreneur Brahm Ahmadi (People's Community Market, Oakland, CA).
