Jennifer White ’97, M.P.P. ’06

It took Jennifer White ’97, M.P.P. ’06, until her mid-40s to finally make it to South Africa. In the six years since she first set foot in the country, she has had an important impact on a segment of its economy that has been underappreciated and underpublicized: Black women winemakers.

As founder and CEO of Roots and Vines Wine, importers of South African wine, White’s multi-decade, multi-faceted journey weaves through UCLA history, South African history, influential mentors and student power.

A top student at her high school in San Diego, White began her student life at UCLA in 1989. Five years earlier, the movement to divest funds from apartheid-era South Africa gathered momentum on university campuses, with student activists at UC Berkeley and UCLA among those leading the way. In fact, Nelson Mandela considered the divestment of over $3.1 billion of UC stock holdings to be one of the most important catalysts to ending white-minority rule in South Africa.

White knew little of this at the time. She said, “I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the world.”

She also wasn’t paying much attention to her studies. “I didn’t know anything about life and was partying way too hard at UCLA, having way too much fun. You come to UCLA and you’re a small fish in a big pond. So I didn’t do well and I got dismissed my first quarter.”

Inspiration

Fortunately for White, there was a way back. She got reinstated and using the Academic Support Program (sponsored by the Afrikan Student Union), she signed up to get a big sister that was from her hometown, which also included her peer counselor. The program employed the Academic Success Study Program, which had specific methodologies and strategies to help students work smarter, not harder: study groups, study hall, test banks, various individual and collective strategies, course recommendations, professional clubs, and community service groups. These services worked to help Black students succeed academically at UCLA.

White said, “We had the first student-initiated retention center in the country. When I came back to work at UCLA in the 2000s, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley were taking trips to UCLA to study our center, to meet with our student leaders so that they could set up their own centers. We were at the [cutting edge] of student affairs at UCLA in that we empowered students to help themselves – nobody else did that. And we still do it.”

The Academic Success Study Program had been developed by Eric White ’82 (no relation to Jennifer), who was involved in bringing the anti-apartheid movement to UCLA. Eric, a former UCLA wrestler who would become academic advisor for UCLA College of Letters and Science, created the program as a result of his own academic challenges, became Jennifer’s mentor.

Becoming more connected to campus groups and having a mentor who had been instrumental in divestment activism began to expose White to issues important to her community, and to those on another continent with whom she identified.

Influences

On the UCLA faculty at the time was Professor Mazisi Kunene, who had been exiled from South Africa. He would later become poet laureate of Africa (1993) and the first poet laureate of South Africa (2005).

Jennifer White said, “When Eric White took Professor Kunene’s class, Professor Kunene showed a movie called ‘Last Grave at Dimbaza’ [a 1974 documentary film made by South African expatriates and British film students who wanted to document apartheid in South Africa], which was smuggled out of South Africa. It showed some of the atrocities of the apartheid regime. Eric saw that film and he made it his mission in life to show it in every space he was in. He and his friend, Bobby Grace ’84, who was Undergraduate Students Association Council president, started making phone calls to students across the country and around the world, sharing the power of the divestment campaign at UCLA.

“Eric and his friends did some research. They identified $5 million that ASUCLA was investing in South Africa. When the students found this money, it gave them a platform. Eric met with all of the banks. He literally took the film to Bank of America, showed them the movie and got them to divest. Then it kind of snowballed and all of the big universities started to divest. But it was initiated at UCLA, with Professor Kunene and the students who were in his class,” White explained.

At her mentor’s recommendation, White took Kunene’s course African Literature in Translation and became a great admirer. She eventually earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in educational psychology at Howard University. White returned to UCLA as a student affairs officer and as a graduate student, receiving a master of public policy degree in 2006. She was still not done with her education.

Africa

“After graduate school, I finally took my first trip to Africa,” White said. “I had talked about Africa my whole life but I had never been. I took a trip to Ghana and I couldn’t stop talking about it after I returned. Everyone else was 20 and I was 30 and it was a totally different experience. I was a graduate student studying abroad (at the University of Ghana, Legon), which was sort of non-traditional. That really connected me to the continent.”

The trip was another watershed moment in White’s life. Upon her return, she organized the first UCLA Black Alumni Association trip to Ghana.

White subsequently organized trips to Ethiopia, Togo, Benin and Egypt. Yet, she had not been to South Africa until she was convinced to go by Mama Mathabo Kunene ʼ97, the wife of Professor Kunene, whom she had come to know at UCLA. After apartheid ended in 1992, they both moved back to South Africa after having been exiled.

“When we came to Durban, South Africa, they had a royal welcome for us; Mama Kunene held a gala dinner for us for our role as UCLA Bruins in turning the tide of apartheid. She acknowledged the role of students – and of the role of Angelenos specifically – going so far as to shut down the South African embassy on Wilshire Boulevard. All that activity and energy and awareness of what was going on in the world, is something that I try to carry into my trips to South Africa, because Bruins need to know how important they are,” she said.

White had the goal to build a community center in South Africa, but Mama Kunene said to her, “Jennifer, I love you, but we don’t need any more community services in South Africa, we need businesses. When Nelson Mandela was freed and we started building the roads, we needed contracts to build hospitals and roads and telecommunications companies. Where were all the Bruins then?”

Winemakers

At Mrs. Kunene’s suggestion, White set aside the idea of building a community center. She then visited a vineyard and fell in love with Pinotage, the native red of South Africa. She recalled, “When we were on the vineyard tour in 2018 in Stellenbosch, they shared that most of the workers on the vineyard were Black women. Most of us on the tour were Bruins and, being from California, we were familiar with Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and the grape workers’ movement. But we had never heard of Black women picking grapes.”

White learned that for over 300 years, Black women have sustained this industry literally on their backs. The workers were paid in sludge – the bottom-of-the-barrel, cloudy, unsellable wine. Alcoholism and many other social ills developed, much like Native Americans on reservations, which continues to this day. For generations, families had grown up on vineyards, satiated and happy workers, but illiterate and without schooling. That finally ended with apartheid in 1994.

White thought, “We sustained an industry for 300 years, how can we empower Black women in this industry?”

In the U.S., the wine industry generates $70 billion-per-year. She got the idea to start a women’s investment collective to empower Black women by leveraging investment, import and export opportunities through South Africa’s booming wine industry.

Procurement

White said, “When we decided to import wine, I recruited 10 Black women to invest $5,000 each so we could launch the wine business. We started a separate LLC and we’ve been in business for about three years. We are importers and distributors; our business is really wholesale.

“When we first started out, we went to the South African embassy and told them what our plans were and they said, ‘There are no Black wines, so we don’t know what you’re going to do. Good luck.’ We then went online and found 56 Black winemakers right on the Wines of South Africa website.”

White said she and her investors spent three days of wine tasting with Black women-owned wines and wineries. “Since apartheid ended, Black winemakers have been able to attend the two winemaking universities. They make their own wines now, which are stellar. To export you have to have a contact already in your export country, and being a small South African producer, the likelihood that they had some American contacts was not very high.” Rose and Vines Wines became that valuable contact.

According to White, “These are some of the best wines! We have a South African sommelier on our team to vet all the wines. Our wine advisor told me to select the wines that make you go ‘Wow!’ That’s what we brought back for our investors.”

White and her team continue to work to expand the business. “While it’s fun to do tastings and talk to people, we weren’t going to make any money until we got into liquor stores and restaurants and wine bars across the country. We have one wine bar in Los Angeles and one in San Diego so far, but we plan to add more locations. Hopefully we’ll get in to those restaurants on campus and we’ll really be Bruin connected!”

Bruins

White proclaimed, “Our investors are mostly Bruins. UCLA is my community still, literally. It’s really just about having a community that understands you and affirms you and helps share the tools to be successful. I learned that at UCLA and I love sharing that I’ve done that with my business and carrying people to Africa and inspiring them to invest.”

White’s involvement with Africa is broader than empowering deserving workers or achieving a return on investment.

She said, “I do healing trips to Ghana. If you’re African American, possibly your route was through Ghana and West Africa, so it’s kind of a pilgrimage, like going to Mecca for Muslims. I take people for their first journey and we do ocean healing, get massages on the ocean, go into the slave dungeons, etc.” It’s one way she helps others reconcile with the atrocities committed upon their ancestors.

Jennifer White’s journey has taken her from San Diego to UCLA to South Africa, with many lessons learned along the way. Her experiences at UCLA shaped her outlook, changed her life, grounded her in community, showed her how to succeed and gave her the desire to help empower others – a True Bruin’s journey for which we can admiringly raise a glass.

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Save the Date: Jennifer White will be the featured speaker at the UCLA Alumnae Conference on Sunday, March 12, 2023, and Roots and Vines Wine will be a part of the Entrepreneur Marketplace.