Farming While Black

by Leah Penniman

  Founding members of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance at the Penn Center in St. Helena, South Carolina. NBFJA is committed to reclaiming land sovereignty for Black farmers. Photo courtesy of NBFJA.

  1934–77: Redlining

  The National Housing Act of 1934 institutionalized pre-existing racism and segregation within the housing industry. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) created “residential security maps” that ranked neighborhoods from A to D, listing them from the most desirable to least desirable for lending. The D neighborhoods were predominantly Black communities and were outlined in red, labeled too risky for mortgage support. These maps were used by public and private lenders to deny mortgages to Black people. Further, the FHA’s Manual of 1936 advocated deed restrictions to “prevent the infiltration of inharmonious racial groups” and to “prohibit the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.” Redlining led to lower property values, abandonment, vacancy, and decline in Black neighborhoods. When the GI Bill was enacted during World War II, veterans who wanted to buy homes in their own redlined neighborhoods were denied the zero-interest mortgages to which they were entitled. Consequently, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported homes purchased by people of color. Black veterans were forced to turn to predatory lenders for “on contract” homeownership, where the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full. If the buyer missed a single payment, they would forfeit the down payment, the monthly payments, and the property itself. In the 1960s, 85 percent of all Black home buyers in Chicago bought on contract.25 As recently as 2015 three US banks settled charges of systematically rejecting mortgage applications from people living in neighborhoods predominantly of color.26

  1935–Present: Exclusion from New Deal

  The National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), Agricultural Adjustment Administration (1933), Social Security Act (1935), National Labor Relations Act (1935), and Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) were enacted after the Great Depression to protect worker rights and bolster the economy, but categorically excluded agricultural and domestic workers, most of whom were Black. The statutory exclusion of agricultural and domestic employees was well understood as a race-neutral proxy for excluding Blacks as a compromise with southern Democrats intent on preserving white supremacy. As a result Black workers earned lower wages, no overtime pay, and no retirement or disability benefits; they did not have the right to unionize. Today Section 152(3) of the National Labor Relations Act still excludes agricultural and domestic workers, who are mostly Black and Latinx, from key protections. Consequently, farmworkers can be fired for seeking to unionize, and do not receive overtime benefits. If they work on a farm with fewer than seven employees, they are not even entitled to the federal minimum wage.27 Domestic workers are also excluded from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1971 Occupational Safety and Health Act, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Although migrant workers arrive in the US healthier, on average, that their peers at home, their life expectancy is only 49 years.28

  1949–70s: Urban Renewal

  The Housing Act of 1949 and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 gave federal, state, and local governments the power and funding to displace residents through eminent domain. Cities condemned and cleared low-income neighborhoods, which they designated as “slums,” to build highways and entice new development. Black and Latinx residents were uprooted, and vibrant neighborhoods were disrupted. At the same time, cities used federal funds to build high-rise public housing towers to concentrate the urban poor, increasing class and race segregation. Urban renewal destroyed 2,000 communities and displaced 300,000 families from their homes. Approximately half of urban renewal’s victims were Black, prompting James Baldwin to observe, “Urban renewal means Negro removal.”29

  1971–Present: Mass Incarceration

  “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” explained former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman in defense of Nixon’s 1971 War on Drugs.30 In the years following the War on Drugs, prison population skyrocketed to its current height of over 2.2 million with an additional 4.7 million Americans on probation or parole, giving the US the dubious distinction of incarcerating a higher percentage of our citizens than any other country in the world. A 2014 report by the ACLU on the criminal justice system documented that “racial disparities result from disparate treatment of Blacks at every stage of the criminal justice system, including stops and searches, arrests, prosecutions and plea negotiations, trials, and sentencing.”31 Incarceration rates are at least five times higher for Black males than for white males, and two times higher for Black women than white women. Harsh discipline policies in schools funnel Black students into the “school to prison pipeline,” where suspensions and expulsions increase the likelihood of imprisonment. Studies show that Black students are disciplined at higher rates than white students when exhibiting the same behaviors. Black youth are sent to juvenile detention center for status offenses like truancy, running away, and incorrigibility at a rate 4.6 times higher than white children.32

  Today’s Wealth Gap

  In 2014 the Pew Research Center found that white households had 13 times the median wealth of Black households in 2013, up from 8 times the wealth in 2010, and that disparity continues to increase.33 Further, 80 percent of wealth is inherited, often traceable back to slavery. In the seven “cotton” states, one-third of all white income was derived from slavery. The book Slavery’s Capitalism, edited by historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, demonstrated that the capital accumulated by Lehman Brothers, Berkshire Hathaway, Aetna, Wachovia, and JPMorgan Chase can all be traced to slave labor.34 Education, income, and employment disparities fail to explain current racial wealth differences, as “by far, the largest factors explaining these differences are gifts and inheritances from older generations: a down payment on a first home, a debt-free college education, or a bequest from a parent.”35 White adults who do not complete high school, have children before getting married, and do not work full-time still have much greater median wealth than Black and Latinx adults who are married, more educated, and work longer hours.36 This wealth disparity extends to landownership. Black people own approximately 1 percent of rural land in the country, with a combined value of $14 billion. White people own more than 98 percent of US rural land, over 856 million acres valued at more than $1 trillion.37

  Today’s Income Gap

  Black households earn only 59 cents for every dollar of white median household income. Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty than white Americans and twice as likely to be unemployed at all levels of education. Income disparities can largely be explained by discrimination in employment and education. In 2014, 48 percent of all Black children attended high-poverty schools, as compared with only 8 percent of white children. In 2003 scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research submitted thousands of otherwise identical résumés that had been randomly assigned “white-sounding” names (like Brendan) and “Black-sounding” names (like Jamal). The former elicited 50 percent more callbacks. Later studies upheld these findings of “implicit bias” in the hiring process. Further, Black applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records. Employers are more likely to promote white workers into skilled and high-paying jobs, and channel Black workers into back office positions.

  Today’s Food Access Gap

  White neighborhoods have an average of four times as many supermarkets as predominantly Black communities. As a result of these food apartheid conditions, incidences of diabetes, obesity, and
heart disease are highest for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people. Black Americans are also three times more likely to go hungry than white Americans.38

  Today’s Power Gap

  A deep disparity exists in the power structure of Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. African Americans make up two-thirds of the city’s population, but whites serve as mayor, five of six city councilors, six of seven school board members, and 50 of 52 police officers. The nation at large does not fare much better in terms of sharing power with Black people. Only four of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are Black; that’s 2 percent and declining.39 The media and Hollywood are overwhelmingly under the control of white men, with only 4.8 percent Black television writers. Congress is more diverse than ever, but Black people still only comprise 9 percent of elected representatives and 4 percent of the lobbyists. In the nonprofit world around 95 percent of the leadership is white, even though 60 percent of nonprofits purport to serve communities of color.40 To this day, the people who wield power in the courtrooms and boardrooms are overwhelmingly white.

  Today’s Environmental Gap

  It’s not just in Flint where Black families experience disproportionate environmental burdens. A preponderance of research shows that environmental racism is alive and well in America. Environmental toxins such as lead, polychlorinated phenols, volatile organic compounds, and organophosphate pesticides are differentially concentrated in areas where Black and poor children live and go to school. Predominantly Black communities are located closer to hazardous waste facilities than white communities. These exposures lead to a 47 percent higher asthma rate for Black people as compared with whites, as well as increased cancer risks.41 Environmental benefits are also experienced unequally. While Black neighborhoods were bulldozed to create parks across the nation during urban renewal, Black people enjoy less time in those parks and wild spaces. The nation’s original parks explicitly excluded people of color, and today Black people are more likely to attend schools without green spaces, live in neighborhoods without parks, and lack the resources to travel to “pristine” wild spaces for recreation. Children’s diminished contact with nature increases their chances for depression, learning disabilities, obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, academic underperformance, stress, and social anxiety.42 Further, a history of sundown towns, lynching, and other racist violence in rural spaces has engendered a generational fear of wilderness.43

  Structural racism decreases Black people’s access to nature, which increases their chances for depression, learning disabilities, obesity, diabetes, heart diseases, academic underperformance, stress, and social anxiety.

  Internalized Racism

  If all of our somatic cells have identical DNA, how is it possible that liver cells do not end up in our brain? The answer is epigenetics, the complex matrix of proteins that turn certain genes on and off, impacting how they express. Epigenetics turns on the genes that make nerve cells show up in the brain and epithelial cells show up in the skin. Our environment, including factors such as stress, sleep, diet, and exposure to toxins, alters our epigenetics and that of our offspring. When researchers investigated the health records of 3,000 Finish people who evacuated to Sweden during World War II, they found that the offspring of Finnish children who were displaced were four times more likely to suffer from depression and other mental illnesses than those whose parents were not displaced. Similarly, a study found that children of Holocaust survivors had higher levels of methyl groups associated with the gene that produces the stress hormone cortisol.44 Studies in mice show that trauma can be passed down through multiple generations by altering epigenetics.45 The uplifting news is that positive life experiences that contradict the trauma can correct negative epigenetic marks, improving outcomes for the individual and for their offspring.46 Science is showing that both trauma and healing can be passed down genetically.

  Trauma and healing can also be passed down culturally. Even if we do not experience the trauma of forced servitude and near-complete subordination to the whims of another, that trauma may still inform our personal and collective identity.47 Internalized racism is the adoption, by people of color, of racist attitudes and stereotypes toward members of our own ethnic group, including ourselves. As Marlene Watson wrote in the introduction to her book Facing the Black Shadow, “What is the black shadow? It’s the running inner dialogue we have with ourselves all day long about our fears of being inferior as black people. It is our internalization of the white man’s lie that blacks are inferior to whites—the very lie that was the foundation of our ancestors’ enslavement. The black shadow is more than simply internalized racism; it’s also our complex feelings of fear and despair about being black, and consequently our longing to be less black.”48

  Internalized racism can manifest as subordinate behavior, negative self-image, denial of pain, victim identity, and violence. Some scholars believe that even if white people were to magically halt all white supremacist actions today, we would still need to heal for several generations before we stopped enacting white supremacy on one another. You are invited to consider the some examples of behaviors connected to internalized racism and reflect upon how they show up in you and your community:

  Subordination. Having internalized our presumed inferiority to white people, we show deference to them, assume that their ideas are correct, and look to them to confirm our opinions and decide the proper course of action. Having internalized that our safety and survival are dependent upon pleasing white people, we behave submissively, particularly with law enforcement and bosses. We learn how to anticipate and predict the wishes and desires of white people to win their approval and evade their punishment.

  Victim identity. Having internalized our presumed powerlessness, we withhold our viewpoints and opinions, staying silent in the face of oppression. At meetings, we position ourselves on the sidelines or in the back of the room, not taking up too much space. We complain privately about injustice but assume that we have no authority to enact change. We assume that external forces are responsible for our life, such as “the system” or even “God.” We fear for our lives even when there is no immediate danger. Having internalized suffering, we claim it as a badge of our identity and believe that we are not authentically Black if we are not struggling. Further, if other Black people succeed, we put them down, calling them sell-outs.

  Negative self-image. Having internalized that we purportedly have no history outside of our interaction with Europeans, we do not learn about our African ancestors. We reject our traditional religions as barbaric, devil worship, or inherently corrupt. We emulate the dress, food, religion, educational practices, language, and mannerisms of white people. We straighten our hair with chemicals and hot irons, weave in other people’s hair to make ours appear longer, rub bleaching creams into our skin, and cover our dark brown eyes with blue contact lenses. We believe that Black people with lighter skin and straighter hair are more beautiful, smart, and desirable. We believe that we are not intelligent enough to succeed in rigorous academics and not wise enough to take leadership in our organizations. We settle.

  Violence. Having internalized the violence of the plantation and the Jim Crow South, where looking a white person in the eye could result in a death sentence, we inflict violence upon one another. We use corporal punishment on our children, admonishing them to “stay in their place.” We “play the dozens,” hurling insults at one another while remaining cool and unemotional. Having internalized genocide, we indulge addictions to alcohol, nicotine, drugs, sex, and sugar. We beat and murder our intimate partners and members of our community, numbing ourselves to the pain of ubiquitous early death.

  Denial. Having internalized the experience of our ancestors discovering that no help would come to relieve them of their suffering, we give up hope that our struggle matters to other people. We go silent and deny our present and past pain. Elders in my own family have asked me to delete portions of the family history I was writing
when it told of life under slavery. My elders in Ghana have responded to my questions about the slave trade by admonishing, “These are things we do not discuss.” Instead we learn to put on masks of contentment and seek to carefully control our expressions and our environment. We caretake the feelings of others while carefully avoiding any probing into our own hearts, lest we explode.

  UPLIFT

  Black Is Beautiful Movement

  “Black Is Beautiful” was born out of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, as a reclamation of the inherent worth and dignity of Black people and a rejection of white colonial beauty standards. It spread throughout the world, including to South Africa, where it manifested in that country’s Black Consciousness Movement. Under the anthem “Black Is Beautiful,” our people wore their hair in natural styles, adorned their bodies with colorful, elegant textiles, and shunned bleaching creams. Don Cornelius spread the “Black Is Beautiful” movement through his television show Soul Train, possibly the first non-minstrel black entertainment on the national stage. As Black music, dance, and fashion were celebrated on the screen, children were able to witness positive reflections of self. “I don’t mean it lightly when I say that self-love was probably the most important lesson that was taught on the show,” remembered Questlove.49