Letters to the New York Times regarding the Black Farmer lawsuit

May 3, 2013

Bias and a Settlement With Black Farmers

To the Editor:

“Federal Spigot Flows as Farmers Claim Bias” (front page, April 26) leaves out some key information about the settlement with black farmers.

Mainly, it does not offer historical context of the vast scope of discrimination in rural areas throughout the country by the Agriculture Department. It does not mention the decades of studies by the Commission on Civil Rights and the Agriculture Department itself that confirm discrimination against black farmers. It also does not mention the countless black farmers who worked diligently on farm plans only to have their loan applications thrown in the trash can right in front of them by the Agriculture Department’s county supervisor.

Also, the fraud alleged in the article was minuscule. The 60 claims investigated by the F.B.I. amounted to less than three-tenths of 1 percent of the 22,000 claims filed.

One would hope that the Agriculture Department would finally address the dreadful discrimination within its ranks, and thanks to Secretary Tom Vilsack, it is doing precisely that. The journey to overcome racial issues is not an easy one, but to ignore the existence of this injustice is the very definition of discrimination. Unfortunately, the article criticizes farmers who have been victimized rather than the Agriculture Department’s history of corrupt policies.

RALPH PAIGE

 East Point, Ga., April 29, 2013

 The writer is executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund.

To the Editor:

“Federal Spigot Flows as Farmers Claim Bias” underplays the history of racial dispossession, uses cherry-picked examples, and creates needless antipathy to the lawsuit and the settlement with black farmers. Focusing on fraud and invoking familiar, racially freighted stereotypes of undeserving opportunists serve to throw into question all payouts rather than explaining why they were ordered in the first place.

The Agriculture Department acknowledges racial and gender discrimination against farmers. The loss of farms we have witnessed over the past 90 years has disproportionately affected African-American farmers. Had the Agriculture Department provided loans and other assistance to everyone equitably, the landscape of the United States would look quite different.

We do not deny the accuracy of the claim that some fraud has occurred. In any sign-up program with tens of thousands of participants and billions of dollars at stake, a few people will try to cheat the system. Those who do should be punished.

The article is not really about those few proven cases, however. It is instead an effort to depict the settlement, without providing any real evidence, as a “runaway train” of fraud.

The settlements, work on them by organizations like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and Secretary Tom Vilsack’s support of them, should be lauded, particularly since challenges faced by minority and women farmers persist.

RACHEL SLOCUM

Minneapolis, April 30, 2013

The writer is a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The letter was co-written by nine additional academics, from the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Michigan and Kansas State University.