“The USDA’s racist policies of unfairly denying loans to Black farmers has caused foreclosures and insurmountable debt from one generation to the next.”
To learn more about this, check out this 2019 article in The Counter: “How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against Black farmers”
For over two years, we have investigated USDA’s treatment of Black farmers under the Obama administration and found a disturbing pattern: Though USDA came to enjoy a reputation among policymakers and the press as a steady force for good in the lives of historically marginalized farmers, [Obama’s and Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom] Vilsack and others in the department made cosmetic changes, and little else.
Under Vilsack, USDA employees foreclosed on Black farmers with outstanding discrimination complaints, many of which were never resolved. At the same time, USDA staff threw out new complaints and misrepresented their frequency, while continuing to discriminate against farmers. The department sent a lower share of loan dollars to Black farmers than it had under President Bush, then used census data in misleading ways to burnish its record on civil rights. And although numerous media outlets portrayed the Pigford settlement payments as lavish handouts—a narrative that originated with right-wing publisher Andrew Breitbart—USDA actually failed to adequately compensate Black farmers, and many of them lost their farms.
What emerged is the clearest depiction to date of USDA’s civil rights record under the Obama administration, one that makes it clear that—despite changes in rhetoric—Black farmers faced the same challenges under Obama that they did under Bush. Yet Vilsack’s claims [that the Obama administration had significantly reversed USDA’s history of racial discrimination], backed by an array of manipulated statistics and pushed by a savvy public relations team, became widely accepted myths. These myths obscured the ways the department continued to discriminate against Black farmers throughout the Obama years. They depicted a renaissance that didn’t exist, making it harder for Black farmers to get the financial help they needed, often with devastating consequences. This made it easier for Vilsack to whitewash the department’s history, promote his own legacy, and deny ongoing problems through the promotion of a false claim: the suggestion that somehow, despite it all, African-American farmers were winning.
Government assistance in America is invisible until Black people receive it. Then it becomes racialized, demonized and stigmatized.
