Black Farmers Finally (FINALLY) Getting Some Cash Money For USDA Discrimination
USDA makes a good start.
Last week saw a small, partial victory for Black farmers and others who faced discrimination in farm lending by the US Department of Agriculture during most of the 20th Century. The USDA announced that it had issued payments to more than 43,000 farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners through the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, a program that was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The total payments came to $2.2 billion, which is just a fraction of the total financial losses resulting from decades of discrimination by the federal government, but it’s a start.
In a statement, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said,
“While this financial assistance is not compensation for anyone’s losses or pain endured, it is an acknowledgement. My hope is that this will ensure that many farmers can stay on their farms, contribute to our nation’s food supply, and continue doing what they love.”
A landmark 2022 study estimated that over the course of the 20th Century, Black farmers lost over $320 billion worth of land, partly as a result of federal discrimination, partly due to spotty title documentation going back to Jim Crow, and often due to outright fraud, theft, intimidation, and lynchings by whites who took the land for themselves.
Addressing that history of discrimination was an early priority of the Biden-Harris administration, as New Orleans Public Radio reports:
Farmers have been waiting on this money for years. The payments were stalled after white farmers and banks sued over the first version of the program in the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. The plan had a provision that set aside $4 billion for socially disadvantaged farmers, including Black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian farmers.
After courts blocked the first try, the Inflation Reduction Act took a second shot at providing some relief, in the form of $3.1 billion in assistance to economically distressed farmers, and a second tranche of funding that was targeted to farmers who faced any form of discrimination — racial or otherwise — from the USDA prior to 2021. In the insane logic of the Trump/McConnell-era courts, race-conscious compensation for discrimination was unfair even if the discrimination was entirely racial to start with. Sure, discrimination was bad, but what about the oppressed white people who weren’t discriminated against?
The USDA notes that payments ranging between $10,000 and $500,000 went to 23,000 people who have or had farming or ranching operations, averaging about $82,000. Another 20,000 people who planned to start agricultural operations but were denied loans received payments between $3,500 and $6,000. Payments went to people in all 50 states as well as people in the District of Columbia and the remnants of the American empire like Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands.
Ebony Woodruff, director of the Agricultural Law Institute for Underrepresented and Underserved communities at Southern University Law Center, told Louisiana Public Radio that, now that the IRA funds have been disbursed, the USDA still has plenty it could do to continue to address historic discrimination, like removing personnel who may have participated in discrimination, which didn’t just vanish overnight at the agency.
“The discrimination that's happening in these local county committee offices is still occurring in 2024,” she said.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), who worked to include the assistance in the IRA, said in a statement, “I am pleased that today the USDA announced that this financial assistance has been disbursed to Black farmers and other farmers who were victims of USDA discrimination.”
The press release also notes that in 2020, Booker “introduced the Justice for Black Farmers Act, legislation to comprehensively address the terrible history of USDA discrimination against Black farmers.”
Seems like an important thing to keep in mind, in case a future incoming presidential administration might be considering doing more to make the USDA’s past mistreatment of Black farmers right. We bet Sen. Booker would be happy to share some thoughts with Harris-Walz staffers, just saying.
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[WWNO / New Republic / USDA]
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OT: I wonder if President Biden is relieved that he's not running for a second term, now that it's been over two weeks since he made the decision to drop out of the race. He can concentrate on the next five months or so of his term, doing his best for the country, and knowing that he passed the torch into good, steady hands.
The big documentary on this, 8 episodes over 2 seasons, is "High On the Hog," on Netflix. Based on a book by Dr. Jessica Harris which is fantastic in its own right, it basically points out that African American food is American food, and makes the connections between the foods of the African diaspora, particularly West Africa, with what slaves were forced to eat, and how that connects into the modern day. Part of it does talk about Black farmers, who were often forced off their land and suffered from extreme discrimination.
There's even an episode about sharecroppers, about how that was both a continuation of slavery, and punished African-American farmers for even trying to modernize.