Ya gotta love these omnibus bills like COVID19 relief. They've got so many passengers that you don't even know who's riding on the other end of the bus. (Reading the bill aloud was a nice touch, but did anybody listen to it?)
One of those legislative passengers, a clever section of the bill, was a century overdue. For all those long years, Black farmers have been almost entirely cut out of the US Department of Agriculture's federal farm loans, subsidies, and improvement initiatives. Meanwhile, White farmers have come to rely on a harvest of handouts just to stay in business.
Undoubtedly, farm aid has kept more U.S. land in tillage than there would otherwise be. But not for Black farmers.
In 1910, 14% of U.S. farmers were Black. Today, it's 2%. In part, that's because of an egregious breach of ethics that often kept Black farmers from being able to pass down their entire farms as an inheritance.
Their deed structures created fractional ownership setups, so that each generation had less land to use to make a living. It guaranteed painful, deep poverty and raised the likelihood that White farmers could buy the land -- cheap.
Says Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), “We know that there is a direct connection between discriminatory policies within the USDA and the enormous land loss we have seen among Black farmers over the past century.”
Booker has introduced legislation to help Black farmers in the past, but the ribbon for this year's legislation goes to freshman Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia.
Aren't you glad he got elected?
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