TV ads arguing that U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, is too liberal because he voted against aid to white farmers raised this profound question: Huh?
What does Tester have against white farmers? He is one, right?
The ads, placed by the Senate Leadership Fund, explain themselves in such small type and for so few seconds that I had to pause an online version to make out what the ad was about. You can decide for yourself whether Tester cast the right vote.
Warning: If you are tired of these ads, brace yourself. Axios reports that the Leadership Fund, a political action committee connected with former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, plans to spend $25 million by election day on the race between Tester and Republican challenger Tim Sheehy. As of Sept. 11, according to Open Secrets, the fund had spent $4.7 million, all of it on negative ads about Tester.
The ad in question is about a vote Tester cast in March 2021 to defeat an amendment to the American Rescue Plan Act. The amendment, supported by all Senate Republicans, would have removed $5 billion in funding based on provisions of the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act of 2021.
Why farmers of color? The end of slavery left millions of people with some freedom but no income, no assets, no education and no claim to land they had cultivated for generations. Many Blacks became sharecroppers, subsisting off a fraction of what they produced on land they did not own.
Despite that, Black farmers slowly gained ground, both literally and figuratively. By 1910, one in seven U.S. farms was operated by Blacks, who owned between 15 million and 19 million acres. But by 1997, up to 90 percent of that land had been lost, and by 2012 fewer than 2 percent of U.S. farmers were Black.
What happened was your government at work. Even after the blatant racism of the Jim Crow era, the U.S. Department of Agriculture relied on local boards that had no interest in helping people they had legally oppressed for hundreds of years.
As Atlantic magazine put it in 2019, Black farmers lost their lands through means that were “sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent.”
Black farmers were often denied loans, and they took three times as long to get a loan as white farmers. Loans often came in too late and too small to pay for a good crop. Harvests were undervalued, reducing loans for the next crop. Cascading debt led to foreclosure.
Some of that lost land was purchased by pension firms, one of which pays part of my retirement, making me a beneficiary of all that coercion. Thanks, Uncle Sam.
A class action lawsuit filed by Black farmers led to a government settlement in 1999 and a further settlement in 2010. Both were inadequate for a variety of reasons: filing deadlines that could not be met, poor legal counsel, lack of business records, government recalcitrance. The settlements also paid only a tiny fraction of the farmers’ total losses, which may have been as high as $350 billion.
As late as 2009, the Government Accountability Office found that the USDA was relying on faulty data and failing to properly investigate discrimination claims. The new head of the USDA’s Civil Rights Office found 14,000 unaddressed discrimination complaints that year, 4,000 of which had merit.
By some accounts, discrimination continues. The USDA reported that 99 percent of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program went to white farmers, even though farmers of color are 5 percent of all producers. Disaster relief money also has gone disproportionately to white farmers.
The Farmers of Color Act was yet one more effort to relieve years of injustice. But within six months after the funding passed, at least 13 lawsuits had been filed to block it. The Supreme Court has been increasingly skeptical of any affirmative action programs.
These victims of government malfeasance are not dead and gone. They live among us, still paying the price for discrimination imposed by the government you and I pay for.
Conservatives like to say that with freedom comes responsibility. In a democracy, that means the people who elect the government are on the hook when the government does wrong.
Does redressing government misdeeds make one a liberal? OK then, call Tester a liberal.
