White farmers resent U.S. debt relief for farmers of color

Shade Lewis (Photo by Needa Satam, NYT)

The $4 billion program to erase debts that farmers of color owe the federal government, created by congressional Democrats as a response to "generations of racial discrimination" by the Department of Agriculture against Blacks and others, has generated much resentment among white farmers.

“You can feel the tension,” Missouri farmer Shade Lewis told Jack Healy of The New York Times. “We’ve caught a lot of heat from the conservative Caucasian farmers.” Lewis, 29, is "the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri," and with other farmers of color he is "in a new culture war over race, money and power in American farming."

The program, part of the latest federal relief act, is for “socially disadvantaged farmers” — Black, Hispanic, indigenous and other nonwhites, about 5 percent of the toal. They "have endured a long history of discrimination, from violence and land theft in the Jim Crow South to banks and federal farm offices that refused them loans or government benefits that went to white farmers," Healy reports. "Black farm advocacy groups say that nearly all the land, profit and subsidies go to the biggest, most powerful farm operations, leaving Black farmers with little.

"But in large portions of rural America, the payments threaten to further anger white conservative farmers. The plans have drawn thousands of enraged comments on farm forums and are being fought by banks worried about losing interest income. And some rural residents have rallied around a new slogan, cribbed from the conservative response to the Black Lives Matter movement: All Farmers Matter." some farmers and ranchers have sued to block the program, and a group run by former Trump aide Stephen Miller is backing a lawsuit by the Texas agriculture commissioner. Healy notes that the Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that programs to remedy past discrimination must be “narrowly tailored” to accomplish a “compelling governmental interest,” including such remedies.

Lewis lives in 94% white Lewis County, where grain farmer Jeffrey Lay is president of the county Farm Bureau. “They talk about they want to get rid of discrimination,” Lay told Healy. “But they’re not even thinking about the fact that they’re discriminating against us.” Lewis cites discrimination he has encountered and says, “You can sit here and talk about race and things you’ve been through. They don’t understand. They’ll never understand.”