At a time when finding reasons to celebrate may seem a little more challenging than usual, it feels especially important to say, “Happy Black History Month!”. Happy Fannie Lou Hamer month and George Washington Carver month. Happy Booker T. Whatley month. Happy Karen Washington and Black Urban Gardeners (BUGs) Month. Happy Shirley Sherrod and Soul City month. Happy SNCC, Federation of Southern Cooperatives and Land Loss Prevention Project month. Happy Adell and Rasper Ammons month. These are a few of the Black food and farm activists, leaders and organizations I feel honored to know, including my Gramma and Grandaddy. I’m sure each of you can add your own influential names to this powerful list.
Black farmers have spent generations fighting for more than just inclusion. They have been battling against complete erasure. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs were a useful tool to move the needle towards some remedy for many farm families like mine. Although DEI efforts, like the many we currently see disintegrating, sparked needful services, initiatives and recommendations that benefited not only Black farmers but ALL small, family farmers. But now we are reminded that DEI “programs” were just that… programs. A plan for reform—not a structural change. A band-aid that can easily be ripped off, as we are witnessing. The rug can simply be pulled out from under us over and over again. The narrative of DEI has replaced that of civil and human rights and what is owed, particularly to Black and other marginalized farmers for years of systemic oppression and discrimination. The extinguishing of DEI initiatives gives us an opportunity to recenter our conversations back to the core of civil and human rights, which gives us foresight and alignment towards moral clarity and political will.
Here’s an example of the erasure that’s happening in real time. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) implemented the REGstats (Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Program Statistics) tool to track and make participation data of their programs and services public. A tool like this became needful in identifying progress made to increase program access for marginalized groups as well as to determine where gaps may still exist. This is one example of the good work that happened at the USDA during the last administration. This tool is no longer accessible to the public on the USDA or Farm Service Agency (FSA) website. [Update: The REGstats tool has been restored, but much of the data is unavailable and has marked “Redacted.”] The Biden administration, and even administrations before his, openly admitted and documented historical discrimination by the USDA; the last administration made great strides over the past few years to move the needle towards repairing harm. It feels important to acknowledge and bear witness to those efforts, so that our struggles are acknowledged, and those efforts are also not invisibilized.
I was a member of the USDA’s Equity Commission (EC) and, in another example of erasure, that work is no longer publicly available on the USDA website, including our final report, which involved years of collective work and input from Commission members and the public. The make-up of this Commission represented a broad stroke of the American rural, food and farming landscape, demonstrating the true purpose of DEI initiatives, which exist to broaden the scope of experience, expertise and lessons from the field and deepen the reach of engagement. Many of the people on that Equity Commission come from a lineage of people who literally helped build this country. We come from people who are some of the hardest working people who grow our food, get it safely and efficiently on our plates. Our work will live on thanks to the histories we come from and to many organizations like ours who will ensure that folks will continue to have access to this report.
Deleting websites does not change the history of the work that has been done; it is now part of our collective memory and resistance and we can still do our part to circulate the knowledge through our own networks of community and resistance even if they delete, ban and censor from the centralized place.
Before becoming co-director of Farm Aid, I was a children’s librarian at a small public library in Eastern North Carolina, so I am familiar with book banning and efforts to censor access to the stories of marginalized people and communities. This, to me, makes ensuring access to the EC report all the more vital. I’d also like to share some critical books and resources that uplift the stories and realities of Black farmers that remain on my desk and bookshelves, especially during this time.
- Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica White (not pictured because I let someone borrow it. I want it back ASAP) 😉
- Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by Francesca T. Royster
- Farming While Black by Leah Penniman
- The Courage to Hope by Shirley Sherrod
- The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty
- Matching Skin by Shirlette Ammons
- White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy by Rev. Dr. William Barber II
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monae
- Octavia Butler’s Parable series
Buy from your local bookstore! Invest in paper copies! Read and activate during these times. Build your own library. Exchange materials, have kitchen table discussions and share what we know. Censoring our voices does not hinder our intellectual curiosity and freedom to question, disrupt and demand. Banning books does not erase them. Deleting websites does not change the history of the work that has been done; it is now part of our collective memory and resistance and we can still do our part to circulate the knowledge through our own networks of community and resistance even if they delete, ban and censor from the centralized place. Black History Month gives us an opportunity to not just be reminded of this, but to reactivate towards this end!
Read the now-deleted final report from USDA’s Equity Commission below:
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