Underrepresented Communities in Agriculture in the US

Let’s start by stating the obvious: progress has been made. After 11 years of political wrangling and relegation to political limbo, the House finally passed the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, which funds the $1.15 billion settlement reached between the USDA and African American farmers in 1999. The Act also separately funds a $3.4 billion settlement reached between the Department of the Interior and American Indian farmers over mismanagement of royalties from leases of tribal lands. The other good news: President Obama has expressed a willingness to work to resolve similar claims brought forward by women and Hispanic farmers.

Yet, despite the progress, there’s a lot to gripe about. I could gripe about the fact that this bill took 11 years to pass–11 years during which many of the claimants “died at the plow, waiting for justice.” I could gripe about whether the $50,000 allotted each of the potential 72,000 African American claimants is really enough to compensate for the loss of a livelihood, of a connection to the soil, for the loss of food self-sufficiency and independence, for an overall institutionalized system of discrimination. I could gripe that Agriculture Secretary Vilsack thinks his department can “move beyond this sad chapter in history” when efforts are not really being made to investigate the individuals and circumstances responsible for the abuses of power in the first place.

But you can gripe about that on your own time, in the comfort of your own home. I’m going to gripe about the ridiculous opposition to the bill that came from a cohort of senators lead by Rep. Steve King (R-IA)–a cohort that includes such dependable opposition as Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Here’s their argument, in a nutshell, and in Rep. King’s own words:

“We’ve got to stand up at some point and say, we are not going to pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress. That war’s been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially, and there’s no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one’s filing that claim.”

Journalistic sensitivities and pretenses of objectivity aside, I just have to ask–what on earth is he talking about? Here’s a video of King arguing with John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Association:

I’m still not so clear why Rep. King is so sure that this bill is about slavery, not present injustices, but the best I can I figure is this: He’s sat on the judiciary committee, and he’s sat through slavery reparations hearings in the past. I assume when you’re Steve King, that’s all it takes. Evidence that doesn’t matter to Rep. King include the following facts established by the Congressional Research Service, the facts that won Black farmers the settlement in the first place:

• In 1920, Black farmers in the United States owned 15.6 million acres of land; by 1999 that number had fallen to 2 million, and the number is still dropping by 1,000 acres per day.

• In 1910 there were 926,000 African Americans involved in farming; at the end of the century, just 18,000 remain, and studies report they are going under at five to six times the rate of white farmers.

• In recent farm subsidy payments, just 18 percent of Black farmers received government payments in 2002 compared with 34 percent of white farmers.

• The average payment for Black farmers was $3,460 versus $9,300 for whites. Overall, although 5 percent of the nation’s farmers are non-white, they get just 1 percent of federal commodity payments.

Other facts that don’t matter to Rep. King: that payments are being made out to African American farmers who farmed or attempted to farm between 1983 and 1997, not those who tried to farm in 1865, or even in 1965. As I said, I’m just not seeing the link to reparations or to slavery.

There’s another other thing Rep. King’s sure about: that the vast majority of claims (75%, to be exact) being made by African American farmers, are being made by (and this is Anderson Cooper paraphrasing) “Johnnies who were born on a farm, but went off to the city, became a drug addict, and now want the $50,000 that comes from the USDA under this claim.” Blatantly racist overtones aside, the fact is that both the USDA and the FBI dispute King’s statistics. In fact, of the 15,000 cases it has investigated so far, the FBI found 3 to be fraudulent. That’s 0.02% of all claims so far. The source of King’s information? One district director sent out to administer the first round of payments under the claim.

So here’s the message I get from Rep. King: If you’re Black, and if you’re uppity, it’s because you’re still hankering for slavery reparations. In his world, there are no modern crimes against African Americans. Forget the institutionalized system of overt and subvert racism that still plagues the country–for King, none of that matters. Every crime ever committed against an African American or against the African American community has already been compensated–compensated with a check cut in 1865, a check King believes was signed in Yankee blood.

So it’s not really the African American community stuck in the past, it’s Rep. King. That’s a big ol’ piece of 200-year-old irony right there.

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Thanks to Abel Ramos for pointing me to this story.