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The Justice for Black Farmers Act: A Critical BIPOC Review
In a nutshell, the Justice for Black Farmers Act is a neo-Homestead Act that would transfer some 32 million acres of land (an area roughly the size of Connecticut) to African Americans in perpetuity, in addition to addressing the endemic racism in the United States Department of Agriculture, funding agricultural research in historically Black colleges, and making a number of long-sought amendments to the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921.
It’s a bill so loaded with oversights, anti-solidarity, and implied acceptance of settler-colonial agricultural ethics that it can’t even be viewed as incremental progress or a step in the right direction. Instead, the bill simply represents a coarse attempt to add Black people to an already broken agricultural system, largely at the expense of Indigenous people, while opening up a bonanza of cash to Black non-profits built into the legislation as power brokers.
Let’s discuss this thing in detail.
A “Black Homestead Act”
This phrase is not intended to flatter; the Homestead Acts were legislation designed to invade the American west and effect the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous people residing on lands that comprise much of today’s corn belt. As detailed in my book about the Homestead Acts:
