On March 25, the Biden Administration announced plans to redress systemic racism within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is known to many Black farmers as “the last plantation” for its discriminatory lending and regulatory practices and high incidence of civil rights violations. Tom Vilsack, the agency’s secretary, vowed to reverse the century-long pattern that has contributed to the number of Black-owned farms dwindling from about one million in 1920 to approximately 40,000 today. The plan will provide $5 billion in aid and debt relief to Black farmers.
“He knows what the state of South Carolina and this country has done to Black farmers in South Carolina. They didn’t do it to white farmers.”
The initiative is sure to upset conservatives including Senator Lindsey Graham, who went on Fox News in early March to complain about a provision of the COVID-19 relief bill intended to benefit Black farmers, who had been disproportionately excluded from the first round of pandemic stimulus. “If you’re a farmer, your loan will be forgiven up to 120 percent . . . if you’re African American, some other minority. But if you’re a white person . . . no forgiveness. That’s reparations,” he fumed, adding that liberals “are out of control.”
The measure will undoubtedly also peeve House Republicans Tom Tiffany and Burgess Owens, who announced plans to introduce legislation to block COVID-19 relief funding for non-white farmers. Owens, who is African American and the grandson of a farmer, called targeted relief “a modern-day form of racial segregation.”
Graham’s “reparations” comment gained greater attention when House Majority Whip James Clyburn snapped back, telling CNN that Graham needed to go to church to “get in touch with his Christianity.” Clyburn added, “He knows what the state of South Carolina and this country has done to Black farmers in South Carolina. They didn’t do it to white farmers.”
Graham—just like Tiffany and Owens—surely does know that, for the last century, the USDA has historically refused to grant Black farmers the same access to capital during economic crises, even forcing those farmers off their land to benefit ailing white farmers. He surely also knows that Black farmers have long suffered from reduced access to legal services and considerably less public investment in community resources, including roads and access to water.
But his supporters may not know such facts, allowing both Graham and many conservative news outlets to stoke their fears of minorities draining funds that are meant for them. “It’s racial reparations by the back door,” the New York Post said of the provision, neglecting to mention that white farmers primarily benefited from the relief bill Trump had signed in 2020. (Tiffany and Owens also did not address the inequities of the first relief bill, though they acknowledged the USDA’s historic prejudices.)
These appeals to white victimhood are not unique. In the public imagination, dark-skinned government dependents loom large, while whites are falsely supposed to be self-made. Urban “welfare queens” and college-bound minorities draw ire, but little is said about the federal government’s extensive history of affirmative action for whites.
This mythology helps to explain why so many white Americans truly believe they are experiencing historic levels of racial persecution.
This mythology helps to explain why so many white Americans truly believe they are experiencing historic levels of racial persecution, when in fact they are increasingly suffering from the collateral effects of white supremacy.
Author and activist Heather McGhee is the latest to explore this phenomenon. In her bestselling new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, she writes that, for much of our nation’s history, the federal government bankrolled the white middle class. The nineteenth-century Homestead Acts, for instance, gave 270 million acres of land—much of it taken from Indigenous peoples—to 1.6 million mostly white settlers. (One Homestead Act allowed for Black Americans to participate in the land grab, but discriminatory practices stalled their gains.)
In the 1930s, the New Deal led to the government financing whites’ mortgages and prioritizing white workers for public service jobs, while ushering in “redlining” and other discriminatory housing practices that persist today. This legacy of government activism succeeded in keeping millions of (mostly) white people out of poverty, which likely explains why, over the years, the majority of whites supported federal interventionism.
It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act was looming in the 1960s that opinion on Main Street turned. Faced with the prospect of sharing public resources with Black Americans, support for New Deal-type programs nose-dived from 70 to 35 percent. Public swimming pools closed, the image of welfare cheats began to dominate political discourse, and people developed an intense cynicism toward all-things-government. After decades of benefiting from federal programs, many white Americans began to think it was best to dismantle everything after all.
As I discuss in my forthcoming book, The Unfit Heiress: The Tragic Life and Scandalous Sterilization of Ann Cooper Hewitt, the expansion of civil rights to Black Americans also triggered a massive push to forcibly sterilize women of color, who were perceived to be “hyper-breeders.” In the 1970s, public hospital administrators used millions of federal dollars to ligate the Fallopian tubes of women who had not consented to undergo such procedures.
The great irony, of course, is that lashing out at the welfare state has greatly harmed whites—not just people of color.
The great irony, of course, is that lashing out at the welfare state has greatly harmed whites—not just people of color. Reagan-era cuts in public programs have hollowed out the middle class that the New Deal built, leading to a “bow-tie” social structure where the gap between rich and poor today resembles the divide during the Gilded Age.
Decreased public investments in higher education and home ownership have meant fewer Americans can afford to attend college or buy a house; and the failure to nationalize or even responsibly regulate healthcare has contributed to sky-rocketing costs. An astonishing 44 percent of Americans admit to skipping or rationing medicines for economic reasons, a practice that has recently claimed the lives of at least a dozen people with diabetes.
Family farms have suffered from inaction on climate change and trade policies that privilege large-scale producers, leading to many of them needing to be bailed out to prevent an industry collapse. Lindsey Graham obscures this history, instead pretending it’s because their Black peers have pressed for special favors that white farmers’ livelihood is imperiled.
For too long, white Americans have fallen for such tricks. We have accepted the myth that only so many of us can thrive—and that in order for some of us to have rights and resources, others must be excluded.
We have blamed society’s most vulnerable members for the bad policies of the corporate elite and the politicians who do their bidding. There is no doubt that such “zero-sum” politics utterly contradicts the religious teachings many claim to follow, as Clyburn implied. Nor is there any doubt that such politics is incredibly self-defeating, as McGhee demonstrates.
It is essential to address the inequities of the past and reinvest in public programs, as Biden’s USDA reforms and COVID relief bill are intended to do. Only by uplifting those who have long been excluded can we build a just future for all.