Renowned Black Marxist Historian, Author, Scholar, Activist, Public Intellectual, and Teacher Dr. Gerald Horne On the Historical Nexus of Race, Class, and the Foundational Political Economy of Racial Capitalism Rooted in the Doctrinal Hegemony and Praxis of White Supremacy in North America

Gerald Horne interviewed by NYC Marxist Studies Collective: The Historical Roots of Whiteness

Activist News Network

May 21, 2024  

 

#Whiteness #GeraldHorne

April 19, 2024: 

Gerald Horne interviewed by NYC Marxist Studies Collective on the historical roots of "Whiteness" and its ongoing impact on current events in Haiti, Africa, the Ukraine, and Palestine & other relevant topics.

 #GeraldHorne#NYCMarxistStudiesCollective #Whiteness

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esnsFrrOVwk:

 

Writer, Public Intellectual, Scholar, Historian, Philosopher, and Activist Eddie Glaude, Jr. On the Major Questions, Challenges, Responsibilities, and Contradictions, In Struggle With the Murderous Obstacles Of Our Time As We Fight on a Political, Ideological, Moral, and Ethical Level For Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Self Determination in the 21st Century

Eddie Glaude, Jr. — We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For 

With Clint Smith

Politics and Prose

May 2, 2024 

VIDEO:  

Watch author Eddie Glaude's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.  We are more than the circumstances of our lives, and what we do matters. In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker, Glaude shows how ordinary people have the capacity to be the heroes that our democracy so desperately requires, rather than outsourcing their needs to leaders who purportedly represent them. Based on the Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard University, the book begins with Glaude’s unease with the Obama years. He felt then, and does even more urgently now, that the excitement around the Obama presidency had become a disciplining tool to narrow legitimate forms of Black political dissent. This narrowing continues to undermine the well-being of Black communities. In response, Glaude guides us away from the Scylla of enthusiastic reliance on elected leaders and the Charybdis of full surrender to a belief in unchanging political structures. Glaude weaves anecdotes about his own evolving views on Black politics together with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Sheldon Wolin, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. Narrated with passion and philosophical intensity, this book is a powerful reminder that if American democracy is to survive, we must build a better society that derives its strength from the pew, not the pulpit. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the author of several books, including Democracy in Black and the New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, winner of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Book Prize. He frequently appears in the media as an MSNBC contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline: White House. A native of Moss Point, Mississippi, Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University. Glaude is in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collections Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award and most recently Above Ground. His poetry collection, Above Ground, was recently published on March 28th. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series "Crash Course Black American History." Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.

 

PURCHASE BOOK HERE:

  

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9... 

Historian, Scholar, Activist, Writer, and Public Intellectual Robin D.G. Kelley On the Abject Failure of the UN To Dismantle The Global Colonial Order And Thus Allow Israel, South Africa, and the United States To Evade and Ignore the Application of the Genocide Convention to Their Nations

https://hammerandhope.org/article/robin-kelley-israel-south-africa

https://hammerandhope.org/
 

1948: Israel, South Africa, and the Question of Genocide

 
The UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order foreclosed the application of the Genocide Convention to Israel, South Africa, and the United States.

 

by Robin D. G. Kelley
Hammer and Hope
Number 3
Spring, 2024

PHOTO: Palestinians gather around a statue of Nelson Mandela after South Africa files a landmark case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Ramallah, Jan. 10, 2024. Photograph by Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images.
 

"If the United Nations decides to amputate a part of Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, no force on earth could prevent blood from flowing there. … [O]nce such bloodshed has commenced, no force on earth can confine it to the borders of Palestine itself.”
— Dr. Mohamed Hussein Heykal Pasha, Egyptian delegate to UN Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, 1947


South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) instituting proceedings against Israel for violating the UN Genocide Convention sent U.S. officials into a frenzy. More than 200 members of Congress signed a bipartisan letter condemning the charges as “grossly unfounded and defamatory.” On Feb. 6, 2024, Representatives John James, a Black Republican from Michigan, and Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz introduced a bill meant to punish South Africa. The bill falsely asserts that the governing African National Congress (ANC) supports Hamas and accuses ANC leaders of antisemitism for “expressing concern of ‘escalating violence’” and describing the war on civilians in Gaza as “genocide.” The bill makes no mention of the more than 30,000 Palestinians killed and at least 72,000 wounded in Gaza in the course of more than 160 days, the roughly 1.9 million displaced people, and at least 399 Palestinians killed by settlers and Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since Oct. 7. The Biden administration must know that the ICJ’s finding of a plausible risk of genocide implicates the U.S. as a party to Israel’s crimes. But rather than withhold its financial and military resources and do what is required of UN member states — act decisively to stop the genocide — the Senate voted to send Israel a whopping $14 billion to finish the job, more than triple the aid the U.S. typically sends Israel every year. Bipartisan fealty to Israel, no matter the consequences, is unsurprising. The apoplectic tone of the attacks on the case has much to do with who filed the complaint with the ICJ, however.

The ANC and its allies that make up the tripartite alliance (the Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions) have for decades been declared enemies of both the U.S. and Israel. Before the end of formal apartheid in 1994, South Africa, Israel, and the U.S. formed a very different tripartite alliance committed to the defense of racial capitalism, apartheid, and Zionism. The U.S. and South Africa in particular have maintained strong economic ties since the early 20th century. By 1948, South Africa’s mining and manufacturing sectors had absorbed considerable flows of American capital. As white “republics” built on the exploitation and disenfranchisement of Black labor, they shared a mutual defense of racial segregation and a zealous opposition to communism. Anticommunism, especially during the Cold War, provided ideological cover for the suppression of all opposition movements. Just as the U.S. promoted Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” it regarded South Africa as its closest ally on the African continent. All three nations allied to suppress communism and “terrorism” — namely, the forces fighting for the liberation of Palestine, against apartheid, and for revolutionary change in the U.S. — through joint counterinsurgency, shared intelligence, arms sales, and mutual military buildup.

The insurgents built their own ties with one another. Black solidarity between the U.S. and South Africa predates World War I, and their respective connections to the Palestinian liberation movement can be traced to the early 1960s. Their ties deepened in the 1970s, when the UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, passed a resolution declaring that “zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the ANC, and sought to expel Israel and South Africa from its body. (They managed to suspend South Africa in 1974, which lasted until the ANC came to power 20 years later.) Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem following the 1967 war came to resemble the colonial violence in southern Africa, especially as the PLO, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and other armed groups escalated their resistance. The PLO and the ANC maintained strong ties, and decades after the downfall of apartheid, the ANC’s solidarity with Palestine has not wavered. The ANC has consistently supported the BDS campaign since 2012.

PHOTO: Demonstrators protesting for freedom and equality, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1952. Photograph via Popperfoto/Getty Images.

It might feel like a moment of poetic justice to watch the victims of the old tripartite alliance lead efforts to protect Palestinians. But one wonders, given Israel’s documented history of ethnic cleansing and a 17-year siege that has turned Gaza into a massive concentration camp, why it has taken so long for any country to ask the ICJ to investigate Israel for violating the Genocide Convention. Article II of the convention defines the term to mean any effort to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members, imposing “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” which includes preventing births. I am not interested in debating whether Israel is, or has ever been, guilty of genocide. I believe the evidence for genocide dating back to the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) is irrefutable. Instead, I contend that the UN’s failure to dismantle the colonial order, buttressed by Cold War imperatives, foreclosed the application of international law, particularly the Genocide Convention, to Israel, South Africa, and the United States. While the U.S. has occasionally used its veto power in the Security Council to shield both Israel and South Africa from accountability to international law, during the first decade of the UN’s existence it rarely had to. Israel not only had the votes in the General Assembly but also, similar to South Africa, never had to face charges of genocide. More than two decades would pass before the General Assembly treated both countries as pariah states. Perhaps because the Holocaust became the paradigmatic case of genocide, the threshold of proof was very high — arguably too high. The convention turned into a tool of last resort, rendering it a deeply flawed instrument to prevent genocide.

The state of Israel, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention were all “born” in 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the light of the recently formed United Nations. This was also the year South Africa officially became an apartheid state, although the policies introduced by the largely Afrikaner National Party did not radically depart from three centuries of colonialism, mineral extraction, and exploitation of African labor. Nevertheless, apartheid seemed anachronistic in an era of African independence and civil rights. Israel and South Africa were both settler-colonial regimes founded on violent dispossession that maintained some form of military rule over subject populations at a time when colonialism was said to be dying and the UN was supposed to usher in a new world order. Dr. Fayez A. Sayegh, renowned scholar and rapporteur of the special committee established under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, underscored in a 1970 essay the incongruity of Israel’s settler-colonial project “in a historical era marked by universal rejection of colonialism in principle and near-total liquidation of colonial empires in practice.” But despite the various charters, declarations, and conventions that confirmed human equality and condemned discrimination, the UN was founded on the principles of what the historian Mark Mazower calls “imperial internationalism.” Its principal architects represented nations that still held colonies and/or practiced racial segregation. It was a South African prime minister, General Jan Smuts, who added the phrase “human rights” to the UN Charter. Unsurprisingly, Smuts’s elevated role as statesman did not sit well with the Black majority back home. The Non-European Unity Movement, a multiracial coalition with ties to the Workers Party of South Africa, issued a statement in July 1945 informing the world that South Africa’s nonwhite population “live and suffer under a tyranny very little different from Nazism,” and thus “it is ludicrous that this same South African Herrenvolk should speak abroad of a new beginning, of shaping a new world order, whereas in actuality all they wish is the retention of the present tyranny in South Africa, and its extension to new territories.”

PHOTO:  A “Net Blankes, Whites Only” sign, South Africa, Oct. 7, 1977. Photograph by Andrzej Sawa/Sunday Times/Gallo Images/Getty Images.

W. E. B. Du Bois and Mohandas Gandhi tried in vain to persuade the UN’s architects to declare colonialism a crime against humanity. If this were not done, Du Bois warned: “There will be at least 750,000,000 colored and Black folk inhabiting colonies owned by white nations, who will have no rights that the white people of the world are bound to respect. Revolt on their part can be put down by military force; they will have no right of appeal to the Council or the Assembly; they will have no standing before the International Court of Justice.” Du Bois’s appeals went nowhere because the UN was designed to recognize nations and not peoples. Only nations had standing, which meant an attack on colonialism was an assault on the sovereignty of the colonizing nations. During its formative years, the UN distinguished “civilized nations” from the rest, a hierarchy consistent with its founding commitment to preserving the Anglo-American alliance over the freedom of 750 million people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.

The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide could have been an instrument for victims of colonial violence to seek relief and justice. The convention was the brainchild of Raphael Lemkin, the distinguished Polish Jewish jurist credited with coining the term “genocide” by combining genos, the Greek word for “race” or a group of people claiming common descent, with cide, the Latin suffix for “killing.” The word first appeared in print in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, followed by the Genocide Convention, which came before the United Nations in 1946. After two years of debate, the General Assembly approved the convention on Dec. 9, 1948, ratified by some member states in October 1950, and put it in force the next year.

Lemkin’s best-known work focused on the Nazi extermination of Jews and Poles and the Armenian genocide under the Ottoman Empire, but colonialism was an important frame of reference. He considered past massacres of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade examples of genocide and directed students to study Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo and Germany’s genocide against Namibia. His definition of genocide was far more expansive than what ended up in the final draft of the convention. He deemed the destruction or erasure of culture an act of genocide, but his resistance to reducing genocidal acts to distinct categories led him to hesitate calling it “cultural genocide.” Yet an early draft by the ad hoc committee did mention “cultural genocide,” which it defined as “any deliberate act committed with intent to destroy the language, religion or culture of a national, racial or religious group” through banning the use of specific languages or “destroying, or preventing the use of, libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, places of worship or other cultural institutions and objects of the group.” Since acts of erasure and destruction are common features of colonialism, the inclusion of the phrase would have left more Western nations vulnerable to the charge of genocide. Little wonder the U.S., France, Canada, and the Netherlands were among the most fervent critics of the phrase.

PHOTO: Paul Robeson with W. Alphaeus Hunton of the Council on African Affairs on his right at a UN Security Council meeting, Lake Success, N.Y., 1950. Photograph via Bettmann/Getty Images.

Lemkin had some blind spots, notably underestimating the structural violence and racist subjugation required to maintain the settler state, especially within modern herrenvolk republics such as the United States and South Africa. He would come to recognize this order of structural violence as genocide by the end of his life, but not during the convention’s formative years. In 1951, when William L. Patterson, a Black Communist and the executive director of the Civil Rights Congress, and Paul Robeson submitted a 240-page petition to the UN charging the United States with committing genocide against Black people, Lemkin accused the authors of being “un-American,” bent on sabotaging the U.S. Senate’s ratification of the convention and diverting “attention away from the crimes of genocide” perpetrated in the Soviet Union. The provocatively titled We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People documented hundreds of incidents of anti-Black violence — from police killing to lynching — just in the six years since the end of the war and drew on the convention to argue that systematic violence and terrorism was state policy. In a letter to The New York Times, Lemkin claimed the authors confused “genocide with discrimination.” Contending that the numbers of those killed or harmed were so low that the case for genocide must rest on “serious mental harm,” he then poses a rhetorical question: “Can one be guilty of genocide when one frightens a Negro? Obviously not, because fear alone cannot be considered as serious mental harm as meant by the authors of the convention; the act is not directed against the Negro population of the country and by no stretch of imagination can one discover in the United States an intent or plan to exterminate the Negro population, which is increasing in conditions of evident prosperity and progress.”

A vast majority of African Americans begged to differ. In fact, Black journalists recognized the applicability of the Genocide Convention in the U.S. before the release of We Charge Genocide. On Oct. 21, 1950, The New York Amsterdam News ran an article headlined “UN Law May Be Hard on Dixie,” arguing that the “lynching of Negroes in the United States [and] race destruction in the Union of South Africa” would be considered crimes of genocide. Southern senators also understood the implications immediately. Having consistently opposed a federal anti-lynching law, they believed that the convention would be used to prosecute lynchers and would not support it without assurances that it could not be used against the U.S. for treatment of its own citizens. The U.S. did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988. Meanwhile, Lemkin changed his mind, influenced by Ruth Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics (1940). According to his biographer, Lemkin’s unfinished manuscript Introduction to the Study of Genocide included “the lynching of African Americans … [as] acts of genocide in the United States legitimized by race thinking.”

South Africa joined the U.S. in refusing to ratify the convention and did not become a party to the convention until 1998. The apartheid government would not agree to pass complementary domestic laws, prosecute perpetrators of genocide in domestic courts, or extradite people wanted for the crime of genocide. Its position was predictable. The 1948 election of the largely Afrikaner National Party was considered a retreat even from General Smuts’s United Party — actual Nazis made up the new regime. National Party leader John Vorster declared in 1942, “We stand for Christian Nationalism which is an ally of National Socialism”; he later served as prime minister from 1966 to 1978. The deepening fascist turn should be understood as a response to heightened Black opposition during the 1940s, when African miners waged a massive national strike in 1946, and the ANC Youth League pushed its parent organization to support mass uprisings against consumer and transportation racism. The National Party promised separation of the races and the complete disfranchisement of all nonwhites. Once in power, it passed a slate of apartheid laws — what the journalist and Communist activist Brian Bunting wryly called “South Africa’s Nuremberg laws.” During the first three years alone, under prime minister Daniël F. Malan, the new regime expelled Indians from Parliament, curtailed Coloured voting rights, outlawed interracial marriage, excluded nearly all Africans from receiving unemployment insurance, assigned every person to a racial category defined by the state, designated race groups to specific locations, required Africans to carry passes to monitor and control their movement, and under the Suppression of Communism Act effectively outlawed every opposition movement in South Africa.

A Nazi-led apartheid government did not diminish South Africa’s standing in the UN. In 1946, before the National Party came to power, India filed a complaint against South Africa for passing a law severely limiting where Asians could purchase land, arguing that it violated the UN Charter’s prohibition on racial discrimination. In its defense, South Africa — with support from the U.S., the U.K., Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the Netherlands — invoked a separate clause in the UN Charter prohibiting member states from interfering in the affairs of another nation. India prevailed, but South Africa simply ignored the resolution and in 1948 passed even more draconian anti-Asian legislation as part of a slate of apartheid measures. In December 1950, the General Assembly passed a resolution condemning apartheid but referring only to anti-Indian discrimination. South Africa continued to enjoy the protection of the Security Council until 1960, when the council adopted a resolution deploring the police killing of 69 unarmed African protesters in the township of Sharpeville. Three years later came the first meeting of a Special Committee on the Policies of Apartheid. In 1966, the General Assembly declared apartheid a crime against humanity. The main source of tension between the apartheid regime and the UN, however, was South Africa’s occupation of Namibia.

Illustration of the German garrison of Windhoek attacking the Herero people, from Le Petit Journal, Feb. 21, 1904. Image via Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images.

Like Israel with its occupation of Palestine, South Africa ruled Namibia as a colony in an era of decolonization. But as legal scholar Noura Erakat observes, unlike the case of Israel, the UN had recognized since at least 1946 that South Africa’s occupation of what was then called South West Africa violated international law and chose to use “the legal infrastructure within the United Nations to shepherd Namibia to independence.” A German colony since the 1880s, Namibia was the site of the first 20th-century genocide: Between 1904 and 1908 German settlers massacred between 40,000 and 80,000 Herero people (about 80 percent of their population) and 10,000 Nama people (about half of their population). During World War I, South Africa occupied the colony and held it as a League of Nations mandate after Germany’s defeat. Instead of restoring Indigenous land rights, the South African government encouraged German and white South African settlement, forcing the Africans into the largely uninhabited territory around the Kunene River. After the collapse of the League of Nations during World War II and the creation of the UN, Namibia was supposed to become a UN Trust Territory. But South Africa refused to enter a trusteeship — the Smuts government and subsequent regimes wanted to annex Namibia outright. The Africans wanted freedom. In 1947, a delegation of Nama leaders petitioned the UN secretary-general to demand the immediate return of their lands and restoration of their sovereignty. When the UN rejected South Africa’s request to annex the territory, the Parliament under Malan passed the South West Africa Amendment Act (1949), moving further toward illegal annexation by giving white settlers in Namibia representation in Parliament. The General Assembly asked for an advisory opinion from the ICJ, which issued separate opinions in 1950, 1955, and 1956, all declaring South Africa’s refusal to allow Namibia to be placed under trusteeship illegal. Because the opinions were not enforceable, South Africa continued to defy international law, imposing apartheid laws and tightening repression. In 1966, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution ending the mandate and launching a new trusteeship in preparation for Namibia’s independence, but South Africa refused to leave. In 1960, the newly formed South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) launched an armed struggle for independence.

PHOTO:  Palestinian women waiting for rations at a refugee camp, Gaza, 1956. Photograph by Burt Glinn/Magnum.

Israel signed and ratified the Genocide Convention promptly and without reservations. Unlike that of South Africa, Israel’s founding was treated by much of the world as an unmitigated triumph. Zionists believed it fulfilled the dream of a Jewish state in Palestine, authorized by God Himself in accordance with the Hebrew Bible. For survivors of the Holocaust, Israel became a safe haven for Jewish resettlement and the vehicle through which Germany could pay reparations. Labor Zionists looked to Palestine as a potential socialist promised land. In fact, the international Communist movement’s support for Zionism and Israel’s ruling party, the Mapai or Workers Party, obscured Israel’s formation as a settler-colonial state. Moshe Dayan, a military hero in the Nakba, harbored no illusions: “Before [the Palestinians’] very eyes we are possessing the land and villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived. … We are the generation of colonizers, and without the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home.”

By 1947, the creation of some kind of Jewish state in Palestine was a fait accompli; the question was whether it would be one binational state or two separate states. The British planned to withdraw and transfer the responsibility for determining Palestine’s future to the United Nations. A majority of Zionists wanted a state of their own and believed all the land, Eretz Israel, belonged to them. Yet they accepted UN Resolution 181, passed on Nov. 29, 1947, dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The partition plan set aside 56 percent of the land for a Jewish state and 44 percent for the Palestinians. Arab leaders were never consulted and did not agree to the plan. Palestinians argued that the partition was illegal and unjust, and asked that the matter be referred to the ICJ for an advisory opinion, but pressure from the United States blocked it.

Mapai Party leaders publicly accepted the terms of the agreement but secretly prepared to wage war to expel the Palestinians and seize additional territory. The British were on their way out, so the narrative that the war for Israel’s independence was an anti-imperialist struggle begs credulity. The pretext for war was the presence of Arab armies dispatched either to protect the borders with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt or ostensibly to protect Palestinian villages outside the designated boundaries of the Jewish state. But the Arab states had financial and geopolitical interests in limiting Israel’s expansion that were not necessarily shared with Palestinians. Jordan’s King Abdullah I, for example, wanted to annex the West Bank — which the partition plan designated as part of the Palestinian state — and made a secret agreement with the Zionists not to intervene in the war in exchange for the West Bank. Moreover, David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader who became Israel’s first prime minister, knew the Arab armies posed no serious threat. Nevertheless, he used fear to mobilize Jewish support and sway world opinion by making public statements comparing Arabs to Nazis and warning of “a second Holocaust.” In private, he used language similar to that of colonial officers preparing for a campaign. The man who in his younger days fashioned himself a “Zionist Lenin” wrote in his diary on Jan. 1, 1948: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family — we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

PHOTO: Members of the Haganah in an Arab village captured during its campaign to take or destroy Palestinian property, c. 1948. Photograph by Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum.

Under Ben-Gurion’s leadership, Israel’s militias — the Haganah, Irgun, the Stern gang, the Palmach — waged a deliberate, well-organized campaign to terrorize, kill or injure, and dispossess Palestinians; raze their villages; take or destroy their property; and above all take their land. The architects of the campaign laid out a military strategy across four different plans, the most consequential and far-reaching being Plan D, or Plan Dalet. Adopted on March 10, 1948, the “plan” entailed using terrorism as a strategy of elimination. Zionist paramilitary groups were instructed to raze villages “by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble,” and to encircle others, conduct searches, and force people to flee; when faced with resistance, “the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.” From December 1947 to July 1949, Zionist militias drove three-quarters of a million people, 80 percent of the Palestinian population, from their land; destroyed or emptied over 500 villages; and demolished homes, sometimes setting them ablaze or blowing them up while families were still inside. Men were lined up and shot, women killed and raped, children shot, a pregnant woman bayoneted. Wholesale massacres in the villages of Deir Yassin and Tantura are etched in Palestinian collective memory. The cruelties are legion. In Haifa, the militias rolled barrels of explosives and large steel balls into Palestinian neighborhoods, followed by a generous stream of oil and gasoline, which they then set alight.

By the armistice of 1949, the state of Israel occupied 78 percent of Palestine. Western nations accepted Israel’s new borders, but the Arab states refused to recognize the state of Israel unless it allowed Palestinian refugees to return — an impossibility, because the point of the forced population transfer was for Israel to maintain demographic dominance. The roughly 160,000 Palestinians remaining within Israel’s borders were placed under military administration until 1966. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon reluctantly absorbed tens of thousands of Nakba survivors, though the responsibility for providing necessities like food, shelter, and education fell to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

The Nakba must be understood as both a crime against humanity and organized armed robbery. Israelis seized land and homes. They also stole furniture, rugs, jewelry, money, radios, and other valuable items. As the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha shows, in Jaffa (now part of Tel Aviv), Acre, Lydda, and other cities, Palestinian-owned businesses were left intact so that they could be taken over by Israeli entrepreneurs. Tens of thousands of acres of olive and fruit groves that Palestinians had owned and cultivated produced enough fruit to account for nearly 10 percent of Israel’s foreign currency earnings from exports in 1951. Arabic place names were changed to Hebrew, and to ensure the erasure the Jewish National Fund (JNF) planted forests on the land of destroyed Palestinian villages. Israeli settlers seized or destroyed personal archives and appropriated a massive body of literature in Arabic, part of which ended up in Israel’s National Library. Being forced to leave behind precious texts and artifacts to live in a tent or a refugee camp is what is meant by “cultural genocide.” To be displaced from the land of one’s family and ancestors, from the deep social bonds of the village and its churches, mosques, and schools, from ancient olive trees that have anchored Palestinian culture, is also cultural genocide.

In contrast, in 1947, the U.S. military government in West Germany passed a law for the purposes of restoring property seized from Jews under Nazi rule. In 1952, the German government agreed to pay restitution for what historian Marilyn Henry categorizes as “identifiable assets, including machinery, real estate, business enterprises, and cultural properties.” Palestinians received no such compensation. Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 transferred all property owned or used by Palestinian refugees to the state of Israel, and then denied their right to return or reclaim their losses. Even Palestinians living inside Israel’s 1948 borders are declared “present absentees” if they are not physically on their property and ineligible to reclaim it. Another 1950 law transferred confiscated Palestinian land and private property to Israel’s Development Authority, which turned over much of it to the World Zionist Organization’s Jewish Agency for Israel and the JNF to support migration to Israel and forestation on Palestinian land. A land acquisition law passed in 1953 empowered the state to confiscate Palestinian land for military use and Jewish settlements.

Destruction caused by Israeli strikes in the village of Khuza‘a, near the border fence between Israel and the southern Gaza Strip, Nov. 27, 2023. Photograph by Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images.

Just five years into Israel’s history it had begun to resemble South Africa. So where was the UN Charter? The invocation of the Genocide Convention? The outrage of member states? Criticism came almost exclusively from Arab states. In October 1950, Egypt’s UN ambassador, Mahmoud Bey Fawzi, complained that Israel had conducted a “large-scale military operation” to drive Bedouins from a demilitarized zone near Jericho and decried the deteriorating conditions for Palestinian refugees. “While we are pondering and debating here,” he told the Security Council, “many thousands of fellow human beings in Palestine are subjected to a most inhuman treatment, expelled from their homes, and forced to seek shelter elsewhere against the cold and the hardships of a speedily approaching winter.” In response, Israeli ambassador Abba S. Eban dismissed Egypt’s “atrocity stories” as “unsubstantiated by any creditable source.”

The atrocities continued, and the UN began to take notice. In 1956, retaliating against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalize the French- and British-owned Suez Canal Company, Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt. Israel took advantage of the war to occupy Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Ben-Gurion wanted to annex Gaza but did not want to bring 300,000 Arabs, 215,000 of whom were Palestinian refugees, into the state of Israel. On Nov. 3, 1956, Israeli armed forces invaded the city of Khan Yunis and summarily executed 275 people, more than half of them Palestinian refugees. Similar atrocities were committed in Rafah on Nov. 12, when Israeli forces invaded a refugee camp and killed at least 111 Palestinians; evidence from some eyewitnesses counted 197 dead and 23 disappeared.

Whether or not these massacres were part of a new ethnic cleansing campaign, this time the Palestinians refused to flee. Zionist dreams of taking Gaza had to wait. The UN — backed by both the Soviet Union and the U.S. — forced Israel to pull out.

A few months before the massacres in Gaza, Raphael Lemkin had helped Muhammad H. El-Farra, chief of the UN Section of the Arab States Delegation Office, with an article accusing French officials of committing genocide against Algerians. Published in 1956, “Algeria and the United Nations” is a 56-page indictment detailing atrocities, torture, psychological warfare, and cultural erasure. The evidence compiled led El-Farra to conclude that under French colonial rule the “conditions of life have been deliberately inflicted on the Arab populations to bring about their destruction.” In a short piece in Africa Today, he summarized the case against France and described the situation on the ground: “Entire villages are shelled, bombed, or burned; acts of genocide are committed against the inhabitants of towns and villages; an indiscriminate campaign of extermination is now taking place; civilians are machine gunned daily by ground forces; summary executions of patriots falling into the hands of French soldiers are likewise carried out. … These are acts of genocide committed against people whose only crime is their love for liberty and their desire to preserve their own culture.”

El-Farra was writing not simply as a UN official but as a Palestinian born in Khan Yunis. He grew up in Jaffa, was active in various Arab youth organizations, and left in December 1947 to attend college in the U.S. just as the Nakba unfolded. He recalled fleeing Jaffa under Israeli gunfire, unsure about the fate of his family. He managed to escape the worst of the fighting, but his family’s property was confiscated and his brothers dispersed. He could not return right away, and it haunted him. In 1952, while pursuing a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he took a research job at the UN information department and worked his way into the Syrian and then Jordanian diplomatic corps.

El-Farra regarded Israel’s war and occupation of Palestine as an ongoing genocide that began in 1948, and he devoted the rest of his life trying to stop it. In his 1987 memoir, he asked why Israelis “kill in cold blood” innocent civilians, women, farmers, schoolchildren, and the like. His answer: “It is because they feel that only through the complete destruction of the people of Palestine can they have safety and security in the beloved Palestinian homeland.” El-Farra believed the UN was a critical, if flawed, vehicle to stop genocide and possibly bring peace. But it wasn’t the only vehicle, he pointed out: “Israel has thus left the Palestinians no other choice but to resist. What else is left for a man who lost everything? Is he to surrender his values and heritage? Should he and his accept being a people without a country, without a future? This would mean their complete destruction, and this is why they have resisted occupation.”

The “complete destruction” of a people is the consequence if genocide is not stopped. And there are genocides happening all around us. In Sudan, the indiscriminate killing, torture, rape, and brutality conducted by the Rapid Support Forces constitute an imminent threat of genocide, on a scale that should compel the UN to use all of the powers at its disposal to stop it. Our chants of “Cease-fire now” should ring in every conflict zone, and the lessons of Palestine, South Africa, Namibia, Vietnam, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, India, the former Yugoslavia, and others ought to be remembered: colonialism and its rapacious destruction of the world through dispossession, extraction, racial ordering, war, and partition is what got us here.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Robin D. G. Kelley is a professor of American history at U.C.L.A. and the author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

Hammer & Hope is free to read. Sign up for our newsletter, donate to our magazine, and follow us on Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Fundamental Crisis and Foundational Contradiction Facing the United States During the Upcoming Presidential Election Year of 2024: Fascism guided, informed, and enabled by the Doctrines and Practices of White Supremacy and Global Capitalism--PART 18

THIS IS THE ONGOING TYRANNY OF RACIAL CAPITALISM IN THE UNITED STATES:

IMAGE: Illustration by Marco Ventura.

“...The use of debt to gain control of ever more land in the United States is almost as old as the country itself. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson endorsed usurious lending to Indigenous peoples as a colonial land-grabbing scheme. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they; have to spare and we want,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to future president William Henry Harrison, “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” During the Civil War, Black enslavement would be abolished in name, only to be supplanted within a decade by debt slavery in the form of sharecropping. Instead of sharing in the crop yields of the farmland they worked, landless Black laborers—many of whom were tenant farmers on the same lands where they had once been enslaved—were ensnared in a cycle of perpetual debt and poverty. Under the Black Codes, a series of oppressive laws passed throughout the South during Reconstruction, African Americans could be arrested for breaking or attempting to renegotiate labor contracts and saddled with fines they were forced to work off. Attempts to escape debt servitude were met with white terror violence. Black sharecroppers involved in unionizing efforts and other acts of dissent were massacred in 1919 in Elaine, Ark.; in 1931 in Camp Hill, Ala.; and in 1935 in Lowndes County, Ala.

The government’s reversal on its promise to give millions of newly emancipated Black folks 40 acres and a mule stood in contrast to its land-giveaway policies for white citizens. The Homestead Act of 1862 took some 270 million acres of territory that had been taken from Native Americans—10 percent of all US public lands—and reallocated it in 160-acre parcels to 1.6 million Americans, almost all native or foreign-born whites, the ancestors of roughly 45 million living American adults who continue to reap generational wealth from that land grab. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 also put free and low-cost public lands into the hands of an overwhelmingly white cohort of owners. Despite being denied these sorts of government handouts, emancipated Black farmers had acquired 3 million acres by 1875, a figure that would rise to 12 million by 1900. Land ownership by Black farmers reached its peak in 1910, when they owned between 15 million and 19 million acres.

In the 20th century, mechanization and industrialization transformed farms from “labor-intensive to capital-intensive operations,” as the historian Pete Daniel writes. Debt became endemic, with farmers borrowing money during planting season and recouping the funds when crops were harvested and sold. “If you don’t get your money on time, then you’re not going to be able to be successful,” Lucious Abrams, one of the six original Pigford litigants, told me. “In order for you to have a successful crop, you need to start the first of the year putting out your lye and fertilizer, preparing your land, and seeing what type of nutrients you need to put out there. If you get your money in May or June, it’s almost time to start gathering your crop again.” For Abrams, the USDA’s loan disbursements often didn’t come in time: “They just stretch it out, and you don’t get your money till late. You don’t get enough money to operate—just enough to hang yourself.”

Abrams’s experience was not unique. As the House Committee on Government Operations concluded in a 1990 report, the USDA “categorically and systematically denied minority farmers access and full participation in the multitude of Federal Government programs designed to assist them” and therefore is “directly responsible for the loss of land and resources these farmers have experienced.”


A 1996 USDA-commissioned study found that “97 percent of disaster payments went to white farmers, while less than 1 percent went to black farmers,” and that white men were given thousands more in loan packages than Black men. The agency’s Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) in 1997 determined that the USDA “took three times as long” to process Black farmers’ loans as those of white farmers, and even when a loan was approved, it often “never arrives…making it impossible for the farmer to earn any money from the farm…”

—Kali Holloway, "How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land”, The Nation, November 1, 2021


https://www.thenation.com/.../black-farmers-pigford-debt/

Racism and Discrimination
Farming

Feature
November 15/22, 2021, Issue


How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land

Black people own just 2 percent of farmland in the United States. A decades-long history of loan denials at the USDA is a major reason why.

by Kali Holloway
November 1, 2021
The Nation

In 1883, less than 20 years after emancipation, Curtis Gentry bought nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including ribbon cane, corn, and peas.

“He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra money to the household.

Gentry’s children continued to farm after their father’s death, and each subsequent generation was trained in the ways of tending to their inherited land trust. When Atchison married Gentry’s grandson Allen in 1953, the young couple were given charge of nearly 280 acres of farmland, which included amenities built by those who came before. “We had a ribbon cane mill that made syrup. We had a saw mill. There was an old still that they had used to make whiskey back in those days,” Atchison said. “I loved farming, because you have to come to understand the land.”

The History of the United States as the History of Capitalism

In 1959, the Atchisons bought another 39 acres, and two years later, they built a house in which they would raise eight children. The couple sold vegetables and produce to loyal customers, most of whom worked in nearby factories and plants. In 1981, just after the Atchisons were certified as United States Department of Agriculture pig breeders, they received a letter from the USDA notifying them that they qualified for federal loans to buy “farrowing pens for the sows to have their little babies in,” Atchison said. She and Allen had spent years helping neighbors build their own farrowing pens, which had been paid for with USDA farm subsidies. “Helping Mr. Waldruf and Mr. Jones and Mr. Scott, we saw that the loan program had worked for them. So we went down to the USDA to get the money to build ours,” she said.


Related Article:

The Nation

Biden’s Buddy Tom Vilsack Is No Friend to Farmers
by Emily Berch


But there was a crucial difference. “They were white, and we were Black,” Atchison explained. When she and Allen went to the local Farm Service; Agency office in 1981, the FSA representative, a white man named Mr. Byrd, told them there were no loan applications available, Atchison said. On a return visit, Byrd told the couple he saw no reason they needed to expand their farm.


The Atchisons made multiple follow-up trips to the FSA office, but each time, Byrd informed them they would have to wait until local white farmers received their USDA loans before the couple could even apply. From the early 1980s to the 1990s, the Atchisons were denied USDA subsidies not only for farrowing pens and pig feed but also for equipment, fertilizer, and land purchases. “We had several years of trying to go back and get loans that was supposedly available. And, of course, he would just tell us that there was no money or that it was all gone,” Atchison said. “It happened several years, year in and year out. He would tell you, ‘Oh, come back in the spring. Maybe there will be some [money] then.’” Once, when they finally succeeded in filling out an application, “Mr. Byrd tore up our application and threw it in the wastebasket. I gave him a little piece of my mind, and he told me, ‘Nigger, ain’t no money here for you.’”

The couple got no response to multiple complaints they sent to the USDA’s civil rights office in Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan had gutted the office in 1983, after which, staffers later admitted, they “simply threw discrimination complaints in the trash without ever responding to or investigating them.” Back in Alabama, Byrd kept his position as the agency’s local loan gatekeeper.


Since 1965, multiple federal agencies—most notably the USDA itself—have issued reports citing, as the US Commission on Civil Rights put it that year, “unmistakable evidence that racial discrimination” within the Agriculture Department “has served to accelerate the displacement and impoverishment of the Negro farmer.” Through discriminatory loan denials and deliberate delays in financial aid, the USDA systematically blocked Black farmers from accessing critical federal funds. “If you are Black and you’re born south of the Mason-Dixon Line and you tried to farm, you’ve been discriminated against,” Lloyd Wright, the director of the USDA Office of Civil Rights under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and a Black Virginia farmer, told me. The debts Black farmers consequently accrued cost them millions of acres, which were then snapped up by white buyers. In 1920, the number of Black farmers peaked at nearly 1 million, constituting 14 percent of all farmers. But between 1910 and 1997, they lost 90 percent of their property. (White farmers lost only 2 percent in the same period.) As of 2017, there were just 35,470 Black-owned farms, representing 1.7 percent of all farms. The land Black farmers lost, some 16 million acres, is conservatively estimated to be worth $250 billion to $350 billion today.


In 1997, facing mounting debt, Bernice Atchison signed on as a plaintiff in Pigford v. Glickman, a class-action lawsuit against the USDA brought by Black farmers alleging that the agency had discriminated against them and failed to respond adequately to discrimination complaints. In the consent decree issued two years later, and in a second settlement in 2010, the USDA agreed to provide claimants with foreclosure relief, priority consideration for future federal farm loans, access to the agency’s land inventory, and billions of dollars to cancel the wrongful debt and interest charges that resulted from the agency’s discrimination. But the promised resolution never came. Instead, the USDA continued to seize Black farmers’ land through foreclosure, and the Justice Department under George W. Bush and Obama poured millions of dollars into fighting claims and denying payouts. Many surviving Pigford farmers are deeper in debt today than they were before the lawsuit.

Speaking out: Bernice Atchison in 2004, preparing for a congressional hearing. Atchison has been a public critic of the Pigford settlement. (Courtesy of Bernice Atchison’s family)

Atchison was among those who never received debt cancellation. She has become one of the most visible and vocal Pigford plaintiffs and has testified about the failures of the settlement before Congress. Atchison and her family have lost more than 250 acres since the 1980s. She still farms the 60 acres that remain, raising “enough to fill up my three deep freezers” and to share with her kids. ;Allen died in 1992, amid the couple’s battles with the USDA.

In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed the coronavirus relief package, which includes $4 billion in debt relief for “socially disadvantaged farmers,” a designation that includes Black, Native American, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Islander farmers. Despite the diversity of that coalition, the bill was ;attacked by conservatives like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham as slavery “reparations,” though economists at Duke University and Harvard Law School reported that the measure offers a “pittance” compared with the land’s true value.

Also lost in the discussion of the bill was the fact that it offers debt cancellation only to farmers who have outstanding USDA loans. But because of the agency’s racist lending policies, few Black farmers ever received USDA money in the first place. Wright estimates that only 8 percent of Black farmers would benefit from any USDA loan cancellation program. Nonetheless, at least 13 lawsuits have been filed by white farmers arguing that the law unconstitutionally permits “reverse racism.” Injunctions issued in those cases by judges in Tennessee, Florida, and Wisconsin have effectively stalled debt relief.

“Black farmers have been denied services by the Department of Agriculture for 150 years. Now that a little bit of money is supposed to go to people who have been harmed for the last century and a half, white farmers have suddenly decided it’s inappropriate for one group to get money that another group does not,” Wright told me. “I tell folks that we didn’t get 40 acres and a mule. Neither did Black farmers get debt relief under Pigford. So this [the halt in payouts] is consistent with all of the other promises that have been broken.”

The USDA has vowed to fight those lawsuits, but many doubt they will ever see fairness from “the last plantation,” as the USDA is known among Black farmers. Atchison told me that she is not hopeful her acres will be returned.

“The land has been resold a couple of times since it was originally sold. I don’t know whether it can ever be retrievable,” she said. “If I had gotten those loans, just think about where we would be today. Think about the assets that I would have today. That was generational wealth. Our wealth was taken away.”

Working the land: A Black farmer in Tennessee in 1970. The number of Black farmers peaked at 1 million in 1920. (Robert Abbott Sengstacke / Getty)

The use of debt to gain control of ever more land in the United States is almost as old as the country itself. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson endorsed usurious lending to Indigenous peoples as a colonial land-grabbing scheme. “To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they; have to spare and we want,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to future president William Henry Harrison, “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” During the Civil War, Black enslavement would be abolished in name, only to be supplanted within a decade by debt slavery in the form of sharecropping. Instead of sharing in the crop yields of the farmland they worked, landless Black laborers—many of whom were tenant farmers on the same lands where they had once been enslaved—were ensnared in a cycle of perpetual debt and poverty. Under the Black Codes, a series of oppressive laws passed throughout the South during Reconstruction, African Americans could be arrested for breaking or attempting to renegotiate labor contracts and saddled with fines they were forced to work off. Attempts to escape debt servitude were met with white terror violence. Black sharecroppers involved in unionizing efforts and other acts of dissent were massacred in 1919 in Elaine, Ark.; in 1931 in Camp Hill, Ala.; and in 1935 in Lowndes County, Ala.

The government’s reversal on its promise to give millions of newly emancipated Black folks 40 acres and a mule stood in contrast to its land-giveaway policies for white citizens. The Homestead Act of 1862 took some 270 million acres of territory that had been taken from Native Americans—10 percent of all US public lands—and reallocated it in 160-acre parcels to 1.6 million Americans, almost all native or foreign-born whites, the ancestors of roughly 45 million living American adults who continue to reap generational wealth from that land grab. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 also put free and low-cost public lands into the hands of an overwhelmingly white cohort of owners. Despite being denied these sorts of government handouts, emancipated Black farmers had acquired 3 million acres by 1875, a figure that would rise to 12 million by 1900. Land ownership by Black farmers reached its peak in 1910, when they owned between 15 million and 19 million acres.

In the 20th century, mechanization and industrialization transformed farms from “labor-intensive to capital-intensive operations,” as the historian Pete Daniel writes. Debt became endemic, with farmers borrowing money during planting season and recouping the funds when crops were harvested and sold. “If you don’t get your money on time, then you’re not going to be able to be successful,” Lucious Abrams, one of the six original Pigford litigants, told me. “In order for you to have a successful crop, you need to start the first of the year putting out your lye and fertilizer, preparing your land, and seeing what type of nutrients you need to put out there. If you get your money in May or June, it’s almost time to start gathering your crop again.” For Abrams, the USDA’s loan disbursements often didn’t come in time: “They just stretch it out, and you don’t get your money till late. You don’t get enough money to operate—just enough to hang yourself.”

Abrams’s experience was not unique. As the House Committee on Government Operations concluded in a 1990 report, the USDA “categorically and systematically denied minority farmers access and full participation in the multitude of Federal Government programs designed to assist them” and therefore is “directly responsible for the loss of land and resources these farmers have experienced.”

A 1996 USDA-commissioned study found that “97 percent of disaster payments went to white farmers, while less than 1 percent went to black farmers,” and that white men were given thousands more in loan packages than Black men. The agency’s Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) in 1997 determined that the USDA “took three times as long” to process Black farmers’ loans as those of white farmers, and even when a loan was approved, it often “never arrives…making it impossible for the farmer to earn any money from the farm.”

 

RELATED:

More from Kali Holloway:

“Feel-Good” News Story or Poverty Propaganda?
October 1, 2021


Black Women Olympians Showed Us What It Means to Be Excellent—and Human
August 19, 2021


Our ‘Racial Reckoning’ Is Turning Out to Be a White Lie
July 19, 2021



The CRAT study also found that Black farmers who appealed “well in advance of planting season” to their local FSA office for loans were often falsely informed that no applications were available or were denied critical information required for the application to be processed. In 1998, the USDA’s National Commission on Small Farms reported that Black farmers were subjected to “indifference and blatant discrimination…in their interactions with USDA programs and staff.”


Local control over USDA loan disbursement is at the heart of the problem, Wright and others said. Three- to 11-person elected panels called county committees essentially control every aspect of FSA financial aid distribution at the local level, including hiring the staffers in agency offices. “The county committee system is set up to take care of their family, their friends, and themselves. And Blacks are not one of the above,” Wright told me. “They need to eliminate the county committees and…[hire staffers] federally like the rest of the government. Local control is great in most environments, but it has never worked for Black folks.”

The USDA’s horrific treatment of Black farmers also results from a civil rights department that has consistently failed in its responsibilities to the farmers it serves and to its own employees. Allegations of racism against employees have dogged the agency since the 1970s.


“We’ve had racial epithets. We’ve had people called ‘nigger.’ We’ve had women assaulted. We’ve had women be retaliated against for making complaints,” said Lawrence Lucas, a high-level USDA staffer for nearly two decades and a former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees. “The culture at USDA is the reason why Black farmers are having the problems they’re having now.”

Bitter harvest: Bernice Atchison on her farm. She and her husband Allen were denied USDA loans throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. (Courtesy of Bernice Atchison’s family)

The problems with Pigford began even before the consent decree was approved. More than 40 civil rights organizations and plaintiffs, including Timothy Pigford, filed letters with the US District Court objecting to the proposed settlement agreement, and in March 1999, hundreds of debt-saddled farmers trekked to Washington, D.C., to register their opposition in person. USDA lawyers and the lead attorney for the class, Alexander Pires, testified that every farmer would get full debt cancellation under the consent decree they had negotiated, which set up a two-track system. Track A offered, in Pires’s words, a “virtually automatic” $50,000 payment to farmers, even if they lacked documentary evidence. This was ideal because most farmers did not keep records, Pires testified, noting he had waived the discovery process during negotiations for the same reason.


Track B offered unlimited money if farmers had documents to back up their debt claims, but the more stringent “standard of proof was not burdensome,” USDA lawyers testified. And if neither track appealed to a farmer, attorneys claimed, they could opt out of the decree and file their own lawsuit.


Plaintiffs responded with a litany of objections. The consent decree did not compel the USDA to return wrongfully seized farmland, nor did it direct the USDA to punish employees who discriminated. (The USDA explicitly refused Judge Paul Friedman’s request to add a sentence stating it would make future “best efforts” to ensure employees followed anti-discrimination laws.) Farmers argued that $50,000 “won’t even buy a medium-sized tractor,” as Pigford complainant Vernon Breckinridge put it. (Class counsel admitted to guesstimating that the $50,000 figure would suffice for Black farmers based on the $37,500 payment that Tuskegee experiment victims received, though the agricultural economist Donald McDowell had calculated fair compensation at $250,000.) Plaintiffs also questioned class counsel’s decision to negotiate away discovery, which meant that the USDA was under no obligation to provide Black farmers with information, including from the farmers’ own files. If an arbitrator ruled against a Black farmer, the farmer got no money at all and had no right to appeal.


“If I were a mass murderer [who] was found guilty of the most heinous crime in the world, I have a right to appeal,” James Morrison, of the National Black Farmers Association, said at the hearing. “Are you telling me the farmer who has spent his entire life farming, who has been denigrated, who has been castigated, who has seen nothing short of pure hell, cannot have any opportunity to control what his fate is going to be based on?”

Over those protests, Judge Friedman approved the consent decree in April 1999, writing in his opinion that it was “a good first step.” Class counsel had estimated the number of complainants would hit 2,000. Instead, more than 22,000 Black farmers applied and were deemed eligible to join the class.

Five years later, it was clear the consent decree had failed. A 2004 investigation by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that 9 out of 10 Black farmers had been “denied any recovery.” An estimated 64,000 farmers were rejected because they missed the court’s original filing deadline, even though they submitted claims before the court’s “late claims” period. Another 9,000 had their claims refuted and got nothing. Just 10 percent of 173 eligible Track B filers were granted compensation. Of Pigford’s 22,700 claimants, just 371 got any kind of debt relief.

Under the Bush administration, the USDA “aggressively fought claims by African American farmers, contracting with United States Department of Justice lawyers who spent at least 56,000 staff hours and $12 million contesting individual farmer claims for compensation,” the EWG study found. In many cases, local FSA employees of the USDA simply contested Black farmers’ claims of racial discrimination.

Justice undone: J.L. Chestnut, a civil rights lawyer and Pigford class-action attorney, raised concerns about the settlement after seeing the number of rejected claims.

“The government is holding up progress with technicalities; and the same USDA agents that discriminated against the farmers in the first place are now being called upon to respond to and reject applications from Black farmer class members. The adjudicators are not making fair and consistent rulings which has caused many of the rejections,” J.L. Chestnut, a Black civil rights lawyer and a Pigford class-action attorney, said in 2000 after seeing the number of rejections. His law partner added that Black farmers should go “into the streets to fight for justice in this case. Do not trust the judge, the lawyers, the adjudicators, the monitor or anyone else to resolve this case.”

A major barrier to compensation was the consent decree’s “specifically identified, similarly situated white farmer” standard, which required Black farmers to locate a white farmer “in their county who applied for the same benefit program at the same time, with the same acreage, the same type of crop, the same credit history, and received a higher payment or better treatment than the African American farmer.” The USDA had some of this information in its files, but agency lawyers denied Freedom of Information Act requests from Black farmers and their attorneys. Without those details, Pigford farmers were forced to rely on public records and guesswork. One Black farmers’ advocate described applications getting rejected for misspellings of white farmers’ names and other minor issues.

“When they gave away discovery we was already sold out, because then you put the burden of proof back on the farmers—but you already had evidence that discrimination transpired all over the country over the years,” Abrams told me. “Al Pires and them, the last thing they told me was I had to go and find a similarly situated white farmer. How can I do that other than break into their fancy USDA offices, go through all the files, and then have the police be out there to take my behind to jail?”


In October 2000, just two weeks before a major filing deadline, Pires and his team admitted to the court that they were way behind. To ensure that “counsel’s failings should not be visited on their clients,” Judge Friedman added stipulations to ensure that claims would not be excluded from review. Less than six months later, he noted that the lawyers had “failed to meet the minimum requirement” on timely filings “even once,” which he labeled a “disturbing trend.” Less than two weeks later, after class counsel made what Judge Friedman called “the remarkable admission that they never had a realistic expectation of meeting” target dates, the court began to charge them daily fines for tardiness. Instead of improving submission rates, “counsel drastically increased the rate at which they withdrew petitions,” a move that, Judge Friedman wrote, “bring[s] into question Class Counsel’s fidelity to their client” and was “bordering on legal malpractice.” The US Court of Appeals would in 2002 also issue an opinion stating that Black farmers, as a result of class counsel’s incompetency, had experienced a “double betrayal: first by the [USDA], and then by their own lawyers.” Fearing for the fate of Black farmers, in 2001 Judge Friedman asked the American Bar Association Committee on Pro Bono and Public Services to “assemble a team of pro bono lawyers to assist Class Counsel on an emergency basis.” The effort made little difference.

“I went through two or three of those type of lawyers after Pires and them left me,” Abrams told me. “You sign up, they keep you for about a month, and then next thing you know, they drop you. Then a new one comes in, does the same thing.”

Generational wealth: Bernard Bates as a child on his family’s farm in Nicodemus, Kan., with his grandfather, who homesteaded 200 acres there, and other family members. (Courtesy of Bernard Bates’s family)


Bernard Bates had lost 950 acres of land, including some 200 acres originally homesteaded by his grandfather, who settled in Nicodemus, Kan., years after his own father fled the South after the Civil War. Bates told me that after a few difficult years in the 1980s, he tried to get a USDA loan but was denied an application. He joined Pigford, but his lawyer was of little use. “When we hooked up with Pigford, I thought we would have some help,” said Ava Bates, Bernard’s wife. “But in the end it was just a runaround. The lawyer lied all the way through. When we got back home and [Bernard] would try and get in touch with her, they would never answer their phone. They promised us a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t worth a hoot.”


In 2012, the former president of Bates’s local credit association signed an affidavit affirming that the lender’s board of directors, the federal land bank, and the local USDA office had colluded “to get Bernard out of farming” and that it had been decided they would “rather foreclose, even if they lost money, rather than to take Bernard’s money.” To this day, he has not gotten debt cancellation or his land back.


Attorney Tracy McCurty, the director of the Black Belt Justice Center and the co-organizer of a campaign to cancel the Pigford farmers’ debt, said there was a “ray of hope” in 2010, when Obama authorized $1.25 billion in debt cancellation funds for Black farmers who had been left out of the original class-action suit, a settlement that became known as Pigford II. But McCurty, Wright, and multiple farmers told me that because of poor oversight, much of the funding was squandered.


“Some of the attorneys informed the farmers that the agreement stated in black and white that ‘You’re going to get debt relief, so you really don’t need to continue to pay on this. Go ahead and buy feed and fertilizer and start farming,’” Wright told me. “So some of the farmers who could’ve struggled and paid their debts didn’t, because they were advised they didn’t have to. They ended up with interest and penalties accumulating for that five years, and it was so steep now they couldn’t pay. So many of them lost land that they otherwise would not have.”


Pires and his team were paid $15 million. After the second Pigford settlement, Judge Friedman granted a second team of lawyers a requested $90 million in attorneys’ fees and expenses. “They might have lined their pockets, but they didn’t do anything for the farmers,” said Everlyn Bryant, a Pigford legacy farmer from Arkansas. She and her late husband got $50,000—far short of the debt relief her family needed. They lost 900 acres to USDA foreclosure. “Even after the consent decree was done, I was telling the attorneys that $50,000 for a real farmer is nothing. It won’t even pay the diesel bill for one month.”

“Since the Pigford debacle, because farmers have these enormous debts, their credit is ruined with USDA. Their credit is ruined with other traditional lenders,” McCurty said. “How is it that these elder farmers in their 70s and 80s, who’ve suffered for over 30 years, are still having to present themselves pro se in federal court to delay foreclosure proceedings?”


“One of the things that really hurt was that I went across the country and talked with all these Black farmers. And this was supposed to make them whole again—and everything I told them was a lie,” Abrams told me. Living under the threat of foreclosure, his wife had a nervous breakdown; he has suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney failure. “I thought that Pigford was going to make them whole again while they was living. A lot of them have died.”


The family trust: Three generations of Bernice Atchison’s family at work on her farm in Alabama. (Courtesy of Bernice Atchison’s family)


In December 2020, President Biden nominated Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, infuriating many of the Pigford litigants. Lucas, the former president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, said at the time that he was flooded with calls from Black farmers who worried that the appointment of Vilsack, who they believed had “shown such arrogance and indifference to civil rights,” confirmed their fear that they would never see justice. When Vilsack left the Agriculture Department at the end of Obama’s term in 2016, he presented a rosy picture of the strides the USDA had made to improve conditions for Black farmers and to end systemic racism within the agency. But according to Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki, who conducted a two-year analysis of Vilsack’s claims for The Counter, an investigative newsroom focused on food, the former agriculture secretary and his team distorted data to cover up the USDA’s continued failure to serve Black farmers. (Vilsack also made headlines in 2010 for firing Black USDA employee Shirley Sherrod based on false allegations.) ;After Vilsack asked Wright to return as head of the Civil Rights Office in 2009, his first task, Wright told me, was to tackle the 14,000 Bush-era discrimination complaints that had gone unaddressed, of which, he and his team determined, 4,000 had merit. Many of those complaints exceeded the two-year limit on receiving compensatory relief, so Wright and others attempted to find a fix. “We drafted a bill to extend the statute of limitations, and some members of the Congressional Black Caucus found the money to pay for it, and that bill passed twice in the House,” Wright said. But the bill hit roadblocks in the Senate. “My office didn’t have the same contacts in the Senate as we did in the House. I found out that not only were we not being helped by Secretary Vilsack, but that he may have been putting sand in the gears. He gave me zero help in trying to get it done.”


The Counter’s investigation found that those farmers never had their unwarranted debts settled. “USDA actually foreclosed on some of them and attempted to foreclose on others before their cases were resolved—despite a moratorium, mandated as part of the 2008 farm bill, on exactly this practice,” Rosenberg and Stucki reported. In fact, from 2006 to 2016, the USDA foreclosed on “Black-owned farms at a higher rate than on any other racial group…. The agency was more than six times as likely to foreclose on a Black farmer as it was on a white one,” they wrote.


“They just can’t assume that every time they aren’t successful it’s because of discrimination,” Vilsack would later state. “I think you can do a service to your client by not only fighting hard for them, but also explaining why they didn’t get the help that they thought they were entitled to, and it wasn’t anything to do with the color of their skin or their culture or whatever.”


“The reason why we do not trust Tom Vilsack is because during his administration, farmers continued to lose their land,” Wright told me. After all, the discrimination that spurred the Pigford lawsuit isn’t in the past. A Politico study revealed that the USDA “granted loans to only 37 percent of Black applicants last year in one program that helps farmers pay for land, equipment and repairs but accepted 71 percent of applications from white farmers.”


Wright is not hopeful Black farmers will ever get their due. “Trump was able to pay farmers these soybean payments when the product price went down because China was not buying soybeans,” he said. “If you want to do something, you get it done. If you don’t want to do it, you do process. And all the Department of Agriculture has done since this administration got in is process, as it relates to people of color.”


The USDA has said it plans to fight the lawsuits that are currently holding up debt cancellation payments to Black farmers. But in August, the agency failed to appeal one of the preliminary injunctions by the appointed deadline. McCurty, who has been aiding Black farmers with legal issues for years, believes that winning the court challenges is a long shot in any case. She has pushed for Senator Raphael Warnock, who proposed the $4 billion in debt cancellation in stand-alone legislation in February, and Senate cosponsor Cory Booker to seek more creative solutions. In September, Booker announced plans to include debt erasure for Black and other minority farmers in the budget reconciliation package that Democrats are currently drafting.


In order to sidestep the lawsuits that are preventing the funds allocated by the Covid relief act from being disbursed, the proposed bill would amend the American Rescue Plan by eliminating any mention of “socially disadvantaged farmers.” Instead, the bill’s provisions include 100 percent loan cancellation to USDA farm loan borrowers who fall under the category of “economically distressed.” It also allots $1 billion to debt restructuring for farmers. And just over another billion is divided among various services, including $350 million to those “determined to have suffered discrimination in Department of Agriculture farm lending programs.”


Wright, McCurty, and Lucas, who are advising Democrats on how to move forward with the bill, caution that history shows that if the USDA doesn’t explicitly make provisions for Black farmers, they are almost certain to be discriminated against yet again. To that end, Wright has suggested that “historically underserved farmers” should be one qualifier of eligibility for full debt cancellation, and that the $350 million allotted to victims of USDA discrimination be raised to $1 billion.

But whether any reconciliation bill will be passed at all remains to be seen. And every few months, another Pigford legacy farmer dies without seeing the federal government, or this country, do right by them. “Martin Luther King once said to tell Black folks to wait is the same as saying ‘never,’” Wright told me. “I’m not optimistic that they’ll get relief from any of these provisions, although I’m convinced that the president really intended that these programs be fairly implemented. The last plantation hasn’t caught up yet with that.”


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Kali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and the director of the Make It Right Project, a new national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Time, AlterNet, Truthdig, The Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story, and numerous other outlets.

 

IMAGE: Illustration by Marco Ventura.

 

https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-fundamental-crisis-and-foundational_23.html

 

All,

THE REAL NEXUS BETWEEN 'RACE AND CLASS' IN AMERICAN POLITICS TODAY IS THAT THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF WHITE SUPREMACY AS A MAJOR IDEOLOGICAL, STRUCTURAL, INSTITUTIONAL, SYSTEMIC, AND MATERIAL FORCE AND REALITY WITHIN THE LARGER CONTEXT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM ITSELF IN ALL OF ITS DIMENSIONS IS AS ALWAYS INEXTRICABLY CONNECTED AND MUTUALLY DEPENDENT FORCES IN THE UNITED STATES

THUS WHAT REALLY NEEDS TO BE OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGED AND SAID TODAY BECAUSE IT IS THE WHOLE DAMN TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH IS THE FOLLOWING:

This country is in much deeper trouble than it actually thinks it is. The most fundamental and horrifying fact is that in the last two elections in 2016 and 2020 a whopping 58% of ALL WHITE VOTERS nationally across the board in every single individual class group from the poor to the working class to the middle and upper middle classes as well as the wealthy throughout the entire country have voted overwhelmingly for Trump TWICE and still support him for the presidency in 2024.

 

THE MOST IMPORTANT, TERRIFYING, BUT ALMOST NEVER PUBLICLY COMMENTED UPON FACT IS THE FOLLOWING:

Trump has won more votes over the course of two elections than ANY OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FROM EITHER PARTY IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Trump received a total of 137 million votes in the last two elections (63 million in 2016 and 74 million in 2020) which is a record previously held by Barack Obama who received 134 million votes combined in 2008 and 2012. The huge difference of course is that Obama only received these many votes because 95% of black voters and 70% of Asian and Latino voters voted for him. I keep trying to remind people that Obama (like every other Democratic party candidate in the last 60 years (!) received only a paltry 41% of the white vote (43% in 2008 and an even more dismal 39% in 2012). For example Hilary Clinton only received 37% of the white vote nationally in 2016 and Biden only received 42% of the white vote in 2020. This means of course that Obama, Clinton, and Biden between them only received 40% of the national white vote in this country in the last four elections. This means that ALL of them lost the white vote by a landslide. Reminder: The largest national voting demographic in the country are white Americans who constituted 65% of all American voters in 2020 and were 70% of voters from 2008-2016. Which means as always that the white share of the voting public is larger that ALL OTHER racial/ethnic groups--male and female combined!

BTW the single largest voting bloc in the entire country is WHITE FEMALE VOTERS who make up 33% of all voters in the U.S. today—WHITE MALE VOTERS now stand at 32%.

ANOTHER ABSOLUTELY HARROWING STAT THAT SHOULD NEVER BE IGNORED: In the last 70 years of presidential elections since 1952 (a total of 18 elections overall and counting) a majority of white voters have voted for a Democratic party candidate ONLY ONCE (1964).

What all this means in a larger sense is that because the GREAT MAJORITY OF WHITE AMERICAN VOTERS IN GENERAL SINCE 2016 HAVE ACTUALLY IN FACT openly supported and most importantly have continued to vote for Trump FAR MORE THAN ANY OTHER CANDIDATE IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY we are all in very big trouble come 2024 and that the actual political prospects for what happens not only to the presidency but even more importantly Congress (as well as civil society in general) is the worse than at any time since the horrendous 1980s…

Kofi

 

"What's Past is Prologue..."

"What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?”

Important talk by Robin D. G. Kelley on "What is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?" recorded November 7, 2017 at Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. Sponsored by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities:

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--gim7W_jQQ&feature=emb_logo 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/--gim7W_jQQ

 

http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2017/01/dr-charles-w-mills-on-political.html

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES

(Originally posted on January 5, 2017):

Thursday, January 5, 2017

Dr. Charles W. Mills on the Political Dynamics of Race and Class in the United States in the 21st Century and the Fight Against Trump's Attorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions

https://www.thenation.com/…/what-is-the-left-without-ident…/

A BLAST FROM THE VERY RECENT PAST...

Race and Ethnicity
The Left
That’s Debatable

What Is the Left Without Identity Politics?

Four writers consider the question dividing the Democratic Party by Walter Benn Michaels, Charles W. Mills, Linda Hirshman and Carla Murphy

Whose Identity Politics?
by Charles W. Mills
December 16, 2016
The Nation

Dr. CHARLES MILLS
(b. January 3, 1951--d. September 20, 2021)

The causes of Donald Trump’s stunning electoral victory will be debated for years: FBI director James Comey’s October 28 letter about Clinton’s e-mails, her “basket of deplorables” comment, the Democratic campaign’s neglect of the Rust Belt states, and so on. But the pernicious and enduring role of identity politics was crucial.

I refer, of course, to the white racial identity politics that has shaped the United States from its birth.

Needless to say, this is neither the standard narrative nor the usual framing. For the orthodox white left, now claiming a cheerless we-told-you-so vindication, identity politics is THEIR politics—particularistic, pandering to special interests, balkanizing; OURS, of course, are supposedly very different—universalist, general-interest, unifying. Not “recognition,” but redistribution; not “identity” but material inequality; not “race,” but class. The proletariat, Karl Marx informs us, is the universal class, subject to no racial or gendered categorizations, whose emancipation is going to free everybody. In a somewhat diluted non-revolutionary form (social-democratic redistributivist capitalism), this vision still informs white mainstream left-liberal thought today.

But if it was wrong even in Marx’s time and Marx’s world, it is even more mistaken in the United States of the 21st century. American capitalism (white supremacist from the start) created heterogeneous structures of subordination that had different effects on white workers than on black and brown workers. White working-class identity politics—even as a junior shareholder in the overarching system of white supremacy—would pay off for its subscribers in multiple ways: not just in terms of greater political input and civic/social recognition than their non-white counterparts, but also in the form of material access to better jobs, better (segregated) neighborhoods, a better education for their children, and far greater wealth (through racially discriminatory mortgages and state transfer payments, the racialized implementation of the GI Bill, and so forth). The so-called identity politics of people of color has always been reactive, recognizing whiteness as an illicit set of entitlements to these political and economic advantages.

White working-class identity politics is a junior shareholder in the overarching system of white supremacy.

Doesn’t the white working class have legitimate grievances? Of course it does. But these must be separated from illegitimate grievances about diminished white privilege, both identitarian and economic. After all, the non-white poor and working class are hurting worse, and (for the most part) they didn’t vote for Trump. Achieving a genuine universalism responsive to the interests of both the white and the non-white disadvantaged will require an admission of whites’ differential historic positioning in the political economy, and how the prism of race has always refracted their perception of their group interests. As plutocracy and the New Gilded Age of inequality consolidate themselves, the white left needs to ask itself whose identity politics brought us to this point in the first place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

Charles W. Mills (1951-2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He was the author of numerous groundbreakingbooks on  race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017).