The Dem's Jim Crow 2.0

The Biden Administration’s Covid Relief bill contained racially discriminatory programs, including a five $billion program brazenly titled the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act. In Black US farmers awaiting billions in promised debt relief By ROXANA HEGEMAN and ALLEN G. BREED reports:

BOYDTON, Va. (AP) — There was a time when Black farms prospered.

Just two generations out of slavery, by 1910 Black farmers had amassed more than 16 million acres of land and made up about 14 percent of farmers. The fruit of their labors fed much of America.

Now, they have fewer than 4.7 million acres. Black farms in the U.S. plummeted from 925,000 to fewer than 36,000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest farm census. And only about one in 100 farmers is Black.

What happened?

They were able to overcome the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule” to the newly freed slaves — a military order, later rescinded. But over the last century, they faced one obstacle after another because of their race.

Farmers needed loans to expand, to buy seed, to bridge the time between harvests. But lenders — chief among them, the USDA — often refused to give them money, and often rushed to foreclose. Suppliers and customers undercut them. Laws of inheritance led to the breakup of homesteads.

And so the Jim Crow era went, led by “liberal” Progressive Democrat Party policies. All of the hideous details are documented by Richard Rothstein in his book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

So there is no doubt that black farmers (and black Americans generally) were victims of a horrendous injustice perpetrated by their own government, retarding and/or halting the progress blacks were making after slavery was abolished and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendements were passed theoretically guaranteeing all Americans equality before the law. 

Reparations are a valid and just way to compensate victims -- actual victims. Black farmers were victims of their own government’s racist laws. Having been screwed out of just reparations right after the Civil War, blacks got screwed again by the same faction that, before the Civil War,  wanted to keep them enslaved. 

Yes. Show me an actual victim of government’s discrimination, and I'll show you someone who deserves government compensation. But this program promising $billions of handouts to black farmers is not about reparations. It makes no evidence-based distinction or judgement about who deserves these payments, or who is responsible. It makes no distinction between victims and non-victims. It simply assumes that if a farmer’s skin color is “of color”, that farmer is ipso facto a victim. It reaches back many decades, and more than a century, to justify this new racist program even though many, if not all, of the victims are long dead. All you need is black skin, and you are assumed to be a victim, with or without evidence. If you are white skinned, you are unfairly and arbitrarily excluded in direct violation of the 14th Amendment. The program is broadly group, not individual, oriented. It paints with a broad collectivist brush. It is collectivist, not individualist. It is identity, not equity, politics. It is not justice. It is injustice -- the one of the worst forms of injustice. It is racist. 

Having first championed slavery and then compounding their evil with a new evil, the Jim Crow era, the Democrats are now posing as the champions of their own victims by bringing back Jim Crow under the guise of reparations. Jim Crow laws are defined as any state or local laws that enforce racial segregation and discrimination. This farm program certainly fits that definition. Strictly speaking, the program is not segregation. It most certainly and explicitly is legalized racial discrimination. There is no way to sugar-coat this abomination. No "cause", no matter how "good", can justify racist government policies. The Democratic Party -- the party of slavery, segregation, eugenics, lynching, and racial identity politics, is acting true to its form and history. It is engaged in neo-Jim Crow, or, in their own terminology, Jim Crow 2.0.

So how should reparations work? It should be decided through the courts, the last bastion of evidence-based, objective decision-making and judgement -- the Pigford cases is a good model of how discrimination damages should be pursued. The last place for reparations to be decided is through the legislature. Keep politics out of it, as much as is humanly possible.

The COVID black farm provision, which was sponsored by Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, violates basic principles of justice and equity. A person’s moral standing is determined by his own actions and choices. No one is born with pre-packaged grievance, victimhood, guilt, sin, or responsibility for past events. And that goes for farmers black, white, or other. An individual’s moral and legal standing is not determined by that person’s body chemistry, be it blood, genes, or skin pigment, or by the actions taken historically by people deemed to be of the same group identity. That would be racist and bigoted, and anyone who believes in such identity-based judgement is thinking like a savage, not an Enlightened, civilized human being. But that is the implicit assumption embodied in the Democrats’ farm bill, which was snuck in without debate or transparency as part of their massive COVID relief bill. It assumes farmers with white skin are guilty, or less “deserving,” without evidence, by virtue of being born with “white” skin, and assumes black farmers are victims, and thus “deserving,” by virtue of being born with black/dark skin. That is the very definition of legalized racial discrimination -- that is, Jim Crow.

The farm bill, currently halted by a federal court, is one of several unconstitutional discriminatory programs embedded in the Biden Democrats’ $1.9 trillion “Covid Relief” package. If it looks like Jim Crow, and walks like Jim Crow, and talks like Jim Crow, and sounds like Jim Crow, you’ve got yourself Jim Crow 2.0.

Related:

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein 

There is No Parallel Between the Private Right to Discriminate Against Gays and Jim Crow Laws

Racism— by Ayn Rand

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: Oakland Reprises the Confederacy.

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Why Leftists Still Get Away w/ Racism & Socialism... -- by Yaron Brook