Rural Root Shock

Abstract This article expands social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove's characterisation of US postwar urban community root shock in time and space. We explore the impacts of land dispossession and population displacement on Black farming communities and their health from colonial origins on. We review racial capitalism driving such rural root shock as a socioecological nexus, with particular focus here on its effects in little‐studied Black communities of the US Midwest. National and regional elite power repeatedly deploys novel strategies in land grabbing, labour exploitation, and counterinsurgency out of an ethos operationalised around narratives of white civilisational redemption. The dynamic, however, is perpetually interrupted. Campaigns of resistance and alternate modes of social organisation launched in opposition repatriate the locus of community control central to population health and well‐being. We postulate Black‐led struggles in reversing rural root shock in the historical present help all farmers. We further propose humanity, presently caught in a global spiral in socioenvironmental expropriation, would benefit from such examples in reconnecting local people and place.