Posted on 05/24/2021 4:47:49 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
LaGRANGE, Mo. - Shade Lewis had just come in from feeding his cows one sunny spring afternoon when he opened a letter that could change his life: The government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.
It was a windfall for a 29-year-old who has spent the past decade scratching out a living as the only Black farmer in his corner of northeastern Missouri, where signposts quoting Genesis line the soybean fields and traffic signals warn drivers to go slow because it is planting season.
But the $4 billion fund has angered conservative white farmers who say they are being unfairly excluded because of their race. And it has plunged Lewis and other farmers of color into a new culture war over race, money and power in U.S. farming.
“You can feel the tension,” Lewis said. “We’ve caught a lot of heat from the conservative Caucasian farmers.”
The debt relief is redress set aside for what the government calls “socially disadvantaged farmers” — Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other nonwhite workers who 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.
The program is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress to confront how racial injustice has shaped U.S. farming, which is overwhelmingly white.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
“We know for a fact that socially disadvantaged producers were discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture,” he said. “There is a very legitimate reason for doing what we’re doing.”
It’s illegal and unconstitutional by the 1963 civil rights law.
The Democrat party is a probably racist party and, as instigators of the civil war and the creators of the KKK, it’s time for them to be banned.
You don’t stop racism by creating it. Duh!
I seriously cannot fathom how worse it will be after one year of this.
“The government was offering to pay off his $200,000 farm loan, part of a new debt relief program created by Democrats to help farmers who have endured generations of racial discrimination.”
Insanity. How is this happening? Are there no laws anymore?
40 acres and a Mule.
Is this illegal act being challenged in court?
An alternative headline,
“The New York Times and Democrats stoke the fires of racial division with White People’s Money”
If Shade Lewis is 29 years old, he wasn’t even born in the era of the Jim Crow South. Was his father a farmer during that time? His grandfather? And how do you make a living as a Black farmer in Northeast Missouri? You plant your crops. You milk your cows. You farm. No black or white way to do it.
PING
Notice they say only the “conservative” white farmers have a problem with this.
Apparently the liberal white farmers are totally cool.
Tell me how he got $200,000 in debt in the first place.
Good question.
First answer this... Is the theft of the last election illegal?
Then ask, what is illegal?
It isn’t easy being a white farmer. Right in the middle of spring planting, some black farmer eyeballs your woman, or sasses you, and you gotta interrupt to put on your sheets and hood, and if your wife didn’t keep it creased and ready, you gotta give her the back of your hand, and then you run over Lassy on your way to the lynching, and Timmy won’t stop crying and wants to come along and “watch him dangle,” but he’s still too young.
Worst thing is, the eye holes on the hood aren’t made right, and you can’t see out them, and you try ripping them wider, and that only makes it worse.
This never used to happen when Harry Truman was POTUS./SARC!
If he couldn’t get credit, how the hell does he owe 200 grand on farm loans, that the government is now going to pay off for him... this makes me hurl.
Can’t be much of a farm with just 200 grand owing on it. That’s how much my first house cost at closing, with just half an acre of back yard, and a slumping foundation.
Lawsuit City. 14th amendment violation.
Identify as African American and claim the relief.
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