Lisée: «Nègres blancs d’Amérique» 55 ans après

2023/04/04 Leave a comment

Lisée on the history and the context of when the book was written, and its questionable relevance today in terms of current challenges:

L’auteur était le plus souvent debout. En l’absence de chaise ou de table, il écrivait penché sur le lit superposé du haut. Il n’avait pas de stylo, c’était interdit. Il usait ses bouts de crayon à mine, sans rien avoir pour les aiguiser. En haut de chaque page subtilisée à la cantine, il écrivait, en anglais, « Notes for my lawyer », seule façon d’avoir le droit de mettre quoi que ce soit sur papier. Il ne savait pas d’où venait sa soudaine fluidité d’écriture. D’autant qu’il sortait d’une grève de la faim d’un mois qui lui avait soustrait 25 kilos. Il pouvait écrire de jour comme de nuit, l’ampoule ne s’éteignait jamais.

« La fatigue provenait moins de la faim que du bruit infernal qui régnait dans la prison, a-t-il raconté. À toute heure du jour, il se trouvait des détenus pour taper à corps perdu sur les murs métalliques des cellules ou pour improviser des rythmes assourdissants de tam-tam. D’autres hurlaient jusqu’à épuisement leur terreur ou leur désespoir. D’autres encore s’ouvraient les veines et déclenchaient par leur acte un tumulte ahurissant. Un Noir mit le feu à ses vêtements et chercha ainsi à s’immoler. Un autre se jeta tête première du deuxième étage de notre section. Un troisième fut battu à mort par les surveillants dans sa cellule. »

C’est ainsi qu’est né l’essai québécois le plus lu au monde. Celui qui fit scandale, lors de sa publication il y a 55 ans. Celui dont le titre seul, aujourd’hui, peut mettre fin à des carrières journalistiques ou universitaires, scandaliser le CRTC, pousser une commission scolaire anglophone de Montréal à apposer un autocollant pour cacher le mot offensant dans chaque exemplaire d’un manuel.

Pierre Vallières et son camarade Charles Gagnon occupaient cette cellule de la prison des hommes de New York, surnommée The Tombs, Le sépulcre, en septembre 1966, pour avoir « troublé la paix » en manifestant devant l’édifice de l’ONU en faveur de l’indépendance du Québec. Les deux prisonniers sont surtout accusés d’avoir organisé, plus tôt cette année-là à Montréal, des attentats du Front de libération du Québec.

Vallières noircit donc les pages « avec la fébrilité de celui qui sait qu’il peut être déporté à tout instant et qui profite de chaque minute de libre expression qu’il lui reste encore ». Il pond donc en deux mois 90 % d’une oeuvre qui fera 540 pages chez l’imprimeur. Les deux tiers des feuillets sont déjà sortis de la prison lorsque l’extradition vers Montréal se produit.

Paniqué à l’idée que le dernier tiers sera saisi par des policiers québécois, qui eux lisent le français, Vallières offre un troc aux agents américains de l’immigration venus le saisir au sortir de sa prison : il ne résistera pas physiquement à cette nouvelle arrestation si les agents remettent les pages restantes à son avocat. Si ces agents n’avaient pas tenu parole, rapporte Vallières, le livre n’existerait pas. L’auteur est absent du lancement, le 14 mars 1968, car emprisonné et en procès pour les attentats qui lui sont attribués.

Vallières tenait à son titre, mais l’idée n’était pas neuve. Comme le rappelle Daniel Samson-Legault dans sa méticuleuse biographie de Vallières, Le dissident, chez Québec Amérique (que je recommande chaudement), l’expression avait été utilisée avant lui par Marie-Victorin, les journalistes Jean Paré, Yves Michaud et quelques autres pour décrire la condition des Canadiens français.

Vallières la reprend à répétition dans l’ouvrage et s’en sert comme d’un synonyme d’« opprimé ». Il l’associe d’ailleurs à toutes les victimes du capital, y compris aux ouvriers blancs américains. « C’est en anglais que ce concept se formula spontanément dans ma tête. White Niggers of America. Les Noirs américains furent les premiers, et pour cause, à saisir ce que pouvait être, sur les rives du Saint-Laurent, la condition particulière des Québécois francophones. »

Il ne dit pas à quels Noirs il fait référence, mais on sait que le leader noir américain de l’époque, Stokely Carmichael, qui viendra à Montréal, n’a rien à redire sur cette appropriation sémantique. De même, après avoir trouvé le titre très drôle, Aimé Césaire, inventeur du concept de « négritude », dira que Vallières avait bien compris qu’il ne s’agissait pas que de couleur de peau. Vallières use avec autant de liberté du terme « esclavage », une condition qu’il dit retrouver chez tous les dépossédés. On est dans l’hyperbole, pas dans la nuance.

Le livre fait fureur. Environ 50 000 exemplaires vendus au Québec, presque autant aux États-Unis, sans compter les versions allemande, espagnole et italienne. Brusquement, en 1969, l’auteur, l’éditeur — le poète et futur ministre péquiste Gérald Godin pour la maison Parti pris — et même la dactylo sont accusés d’avoir, en publiant l’ouvrage, fait oeuvre de sédition. Un crime passible de 14 ans d’emprisonnement.

Le ministre de la Justice de l’Union nationale, Rémi Paul, fait saisir tous les exemplaires en circulation, y compris celui du dépôt légal à la Bibliothèque nationale du Québec. L’accusation n’aura pas de suite. Le livre reprendra sa carrière en 1972, une fois passée la crise d’Octobre (pendant laquelle les felquistes le font lire à leur otage britannique, James Cross).

Faut-il le relire aujourd’hui ? Seulement si on veut prendre la mesure de la dépossession dans laquelle étaient plongés les Québécois du début des années 1960. Vallières décrit le délabrement et l’insalubrité de son quartier, Jacques-Cartier, sur la Rive-Sud (en forçant le trait, nuance son biographe, mais même…). Le récit biographique du jeune révolté reste poignant, celui de sa recherche intellectuelle, entre Teilhard de Chardin, Sartre, Marx et le Che, est fastidieux, mais ne manque pas de sincérité. Son appel à la violence révolutionnaire, au moment du formidable essor du Québec social, syndical, laïque, culturel et politique de 1966, était, même à l’époque, une erreur et un leurre.

Le problème n’est pas que Nègres blancs d’Amérique ait mal vieilli. Il fait simplement partie de l’histoire. Il est dans notre rétroviseur. Il a peu — rien ? — à nous dire sur le Québec d’aujourd’hui ou de demain. Son titre, seul, résonne comme un cri de liberté, comme l’audace de dire des choses avec des mots forts, en les détournant ou en leur faisant violence. Un doigt d’honneur aux censeurs d’hier et d’aujourd’hui.

Source: «Nègres blancs d’Amérique» 55 ans après

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McWhorter: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

2023/03/25 Leave a comment

McWhorter’s reflections always of interest, including these on the “performative” aspects of activism:

Various books I’ve been reading lately have me thinking about 1966. I have often said that the history of Black America could be divided between what happened before and after that year.

It was a year when the fight for Black equality shifted sharply in mood, ushering in an era in which rhetoric overtook actual game plans for action. It planted the seed for the excesses of today’s wokeness. I wouldn’t have been on board, and I’m glad I was only a baby that year and didn’t have to face it as a mature person.

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation. And in 1966 specifically, Stokely Carmichael made his iconic speech about a separatist Black Power, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he led expelled its white members (though Carmichael himself did not advocate this), the Black Panther Party was born, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the preferred term, the Afro went mainstream, and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (written with Alex Haley) became a standard text for Black readers.

I doubt most people living through that year thought of it as a particularly unique 365 days, but Mark Whitaker, a former editor of Newsweek, has justified my sense of that year as seminal with his new book, “Saying It Loud: 1966 — the Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.” Whitaker has a journalist’s understanding of the difference between merely documenting the facts and using them to tell a story, and his sober yet crisp prose pulls the reader along with nary a lull.

But one question keeps nagging at me: Why did the mood shift at that particular point? The conditions of Black America at the time would not have led one to imagine that a revolution in thought was imminent. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had just happened. The economy was relatively strong, and Black men in particular were now earning twice or more what they earned before World War II. As the political scientist and historian duo Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom noted in their book “America in Black and White,” “Before World War II, Black bank tellers, bookkeepers, cashiers, secretaries, stenographers, telephone operators or mail carriers were rare. By 1970 they were very common, though far more in the north than in the south.”

And as to claims one might hear that Black America was uniquely fed up in 1966, were Black people not plenty fed up in 1876, or after World War I or World War II?

What Whitaker so deftly chronicles strikes me less as a natural development from on-the-ground circumstances than as something more elusive for the historian: the emergence and influence of that mood shift I referred to. Carmichael memorably said: “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!”

The dramatic impact was obvious. But what did Black Power mean, and how much change on the ground did this kind of rhetoric ever actually result in? What were Carmichael’s concrete plans for action in the first place?

There was always a certain performative element in the man: not for nothing was he referred to as Starmichael. Whitaker recounts Carmichael’s proposing having Harlem “send one million Black men up to invade Scarsdale” — but really?

The N.A.A.C.P. head Roy Wilkins was infuriated at a crucial summit meeting between leading Black groups where Carmichael referred to Lyndon Johnson as “that cat, the president” and recommended publicly denouncing his work. This was a key conflict between an older style seeking to work within the only reality available and a new style favoring a kind of utopian agitprop.

Figures like Carmichael and Black Panthers Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown fascinate from a distance, with their implacable fierceness and true Black pride shocking a complacent “Leave It To Beaver” America. Plus their fashion sense — the berets, the leather jackets — was hard not to like. It all made for great photos and good television. But at the time, affirmative action and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, supported by those white “cats” responding to the suasion of people like Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr., were making a real difference in Black lives, central to encouraging the growth of the Black middle class.

This difference between mood and action is relevant to the historian Beverly Gage’s magnificent new biography, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book’s 800-plus pages are so Caro-esque in detail, context and narrative energy that I have dragged the hardback across the Atlantic and back; Gage somehow makes a page turner out of the life of a man with the stage presence of a toad.

Where Hoover comes in on the 1966 issue is a common observation of his, which was that the Black-led urban riots of the Long, Hot Summer, and the general change in mood from integrationist to separatist, was not solely a response to the frustrations of poverty. Of course, Hoover couldn’t get much further than seeing Black people as having simply given in to a general anti-establishment degeneracy, egged on by Communist influence. That was one part nonsense (the Communist one) and one part racism.

Hoover was bred in a Southern city (D.C.) at the turn of the 20th century, post Plessy v. Ferguson. He came of age embraced by a fraternity steeped in post-Reconstruction “lost cause” ideology about Black people. His late-career persecution of the Panthers with F.B.I. technology and tactics was nastier — and more reckless with people’s lives — than his earlier witch hunt against white Communists had been.

Yet, his sense that the new developments were not caused by socioeconomics was not entirely mistaken. Rather, I suspect that much of why leading Black political ideology took such a menacing, and even impractical, turn in the late 1960s was that white America was by that time poised to hear it out. Not all of white America. But a critical mass had become aware, through television and the passage of bills like the Civil Rights Act, that there was a “race issue” requiring attention.

It’s a safe bet that if Black leaders had taken the tone of Carmichael and the Panthers in 1900 or even 1950, the response from whites would have been openly violent and even murderous. The theatricality of the new message was in part a response to enough whites now being interested in listening.

The problem was that so much of the message, at that point, was a kind of Kabuki, as the Black essayist Debra Dickerson memorably put it a while ago. Savory, dramatic poses were often more important than plans. This was perhaps a natural result of the fact that the remaining problems were challenging to address. With legalized segregation, disenfranchisement and residential Balkanization now illegal, the question was what to do next and how. “Black Power” did not turn out to be the real answer: It all burned out early — Whitaker identifies signs that this would happen as soon as the end of 1966.

Daniel Akst’s lucid group biography, “War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance,” demonstrates people of the era engaging in action that brings about actual change. Following the lives and careers of the activists Dorothy Day, Dwight Macdonald, David Dellinger and Bayard Rustin, one senses almost none of the detour into showmanship that so infused 1966. While Carmichael made speeches that, to many, were suggestive of violence, and later moved to Africa, Rustin, for example, essentially birthed the March on Washington.

I hardly intend that Carmichael’s brand of progressivism has only been known among Black people. Today it has attained cross-racial influence, serving as a model for today’s extremes of wokeness, confusing acting out for action. One might suppose that the acting out is at least a demonstration of leftist philosophy, perhaps valuable as a teaching tool of sorts. But is it? The flinty, readable “Left is Not Woke” by Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum think tank, explores that question usefully.

Neiman limns the new wokeness as an anti-Enlightenment program, despite its humanistic Latinate vocabulary. She associates true leftism with a philosophy that asserts “a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power and a belief in the possibility of progress” and sees little of those elements in the essentializing, punitive and pessimistic tenets too common in modern wokeness. Woke “begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization,” she writes. “In the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.”

Neiman critiques pioneering texts of this kind of view, such as Michel Foucault’s widely assigned book, “Discipline and Punish,” and his essay “What is Enlightenment?,” in which he scorns “introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.” In this cynical and extremist kind of rhetoric, Neiman notes that “you may look for an argument; what you’ll find is contempt.” And the problem, she adds, is that “those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.”

All of these books relate to a general sense I have always had, that in 1966 something went seriously awry with what used to be called “The Struggle.” There is a natural human tendency in which action devolves into gesture, the concrete drifts into abstraction, the outline morphs into shorthand. It’s true in language, in the arts, and in politics, and I think its effects distracted much Black American thought — as today’s wokeness as performance also leads us astray — at a time when there was finally the opportunity to do so much more. I will explore what that more was in another column, but in the meantime, Whitaker, Neiman, Akst and — albeit more obliquely — Gage are useful in showing why 1966 was such an important turning point in the story.

Source: Today’s Woke Excesses Were Born in the ’60s

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Human rights commission acknowledges it has been dismissing racism complaints at a higher rate

2023/03/25 Leave a comment

More on the CHRC with a note of caution to those advocating for direct access to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, rather than going through the Commission from Cindy Blackstock, the main advocate for the First Nation children harmed by Canada’s discriminatory child welfare system:

The Canadian Human Rights Commission’s recent numbers show it has been dismissing racism-based claims at a higher rate than other human rights complaints — but the commission insists it’s working to change that.

Numbers the commission provided to CBC News show that in most of the past five years, it reported a higher rejection rate for claims based on racism than for other complaints.

The statistics released by the commission show that during the first three years of the 2018-2022 period, the commission dismissed a higher percentage of race-based claims than it did others.

The year 2020 saw the largest disparity. The percentage of racism-based complaints the commission rejected — 13 per cent — was almost double the percentage of other types of claims it rejected (7 per cent).

The commission accepted more racism-based claims in subsequent years, referring them either to mediation or to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Last year, for example, the commission dismissed only nine per cent of racism-based claims, compared with a 14 per cent rejection rate for other types of claims

The commission describes itself as Canada’s human rights watchdog. It receives and investigates complaints from federal departments and agencies, Crown corporations and many private sector organizations such as banks, airlines and telecommunication companies. It decides which cases proceed to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

The commission released the data after the federal government concluded recently that the commission had discriminated against its Black and racialized employees.

The Canadian government’s human resources arm, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBCS), came to that conclusion after nine employees filed a policy grievance through their unions in October 2020. Their grievance alleged that “Black and racialized employees at the CHRC (Canadian Human Rights Commission) face systemic anti-Black racism, sexism and systemic discrimination.”

“I declare that the CHRC has breached the ‘No Discrimination’ clause of the law practitioners collective agreement,” said Carole Bidal, an associate assistant deputy minister at TBCS, in her official ruling on the grievance.

A group of current and former commission employees who spoke to CBC News said they’ve noticed all-white investigative teams dismissing complaints from Black and other racialized Canadians a higher rate.

CBC has requested interviews with the CHRC’s executive director Ian Fine and interim chief commissioner Charlotte-Anne Malischewski. The commission has declined those requests because it says the matter is in mediation.

In a media statement, the commission has said it accepts the TBCS’s ruling and is working to implement an anti-racism action plan.

Véronique Robitaille, the commission’s acting communications director, said the commission has been compiling data in the course of that work. The latest figures, she said, show the commission is taking action to address the concerns.

“The following data … shows the results of our ongoing actions to address concerns related to the handling of complaints filed on the grounds of race, colour, and/or national or ethnic origin,” Robitaille said in a media statement to CBC News.

Robitaille said the percentage of race-based complaints referred to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has doubled between 2017 (9 per cent) and 2021 (18 per cent). In 2021, the commission said it implemented a modernized complaint process that modified how it screens complaints based on race, colour and/or national or ethnic origin.

‘Racism runs amuck’

The people behind the cases the commission dismissed in recent years say they’re still waiting for justice.

Rubin Coward is one of them. The former member of the Royal Canadian Air Force told CBC News that he filed a complaint with the commission in 1993 alleging he experienced racism and was repeatedly called the N-word while stationed at CFB Greenwood in Nova Scotia. His claim was rejected.

Now a Nova Scotia community-based advocate for military, RCMP members and seniors, he regularly helps people file human rights complaints. He said he’s noticed that the ones that have nothing to do with race tend to be more successful.

“I was severely disappointed but I wasn’t surprised,” said Coward, reacting to the news that the CHRC discriminated against its employees.

“Regrettably, I have had the opportunity of dealing with [the Canadian Human Rights Commission] for over 30 years now. I am not surprised racism runs amuck inside there because, in individuals that I have assisted over the course of the last 30 years, that’s precisely what they and I have run into.”

The experiences of people like Coward have prompted law sector organizations to call for changes to Canada’s human rights system.

Both former Supreme Court justice Gérard La Forest and the United Nations have called on Canada to give Canadians direct access to the without having to go through the commission.

“We believe it is time to heed the advice of Justice LaForest and the UN. It is time to finally move to a direct access model federally. The current model has not and is not working for racialized Canadians,” said the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers (CABL) in a 2021 letter.

Almost 30 other organizations signed the letter, which was sent to Justice Minister David Lametti.

The Canadian Association Labour Lawyers (CALL) has called for similar reforms.

“Right now, the commission acts as a gatekeeper, and the commission has demonstrated that it needs to get its own house in order before it starts determining whether other people’s claims are meritorious,” said labour lawyer and member of CALL Immanuel Lanzaderas.

CALL also calls for the cap to be lifted on the sum of penalties the tribunal can impose. Currently, the maximum that can be awarded to victims is $40,000.

As calls for change grow louder, some are urging caution.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission was a key player in the early days of a landmark discrimination case that resulted in the federal government agreeing in principle to cover $40 billion in compensation for people harmed by Canada’s discriminatory child welfare system. The settlement also required the federal government to reform the system that tore First Nations children from their communities for decades.

Cindy Blackstock represents one of the groups that launched that human rights challenge. She said the commission played a key role in making sure First Nations children received justice.

“If you are a person who is discriminated against or are part of … a group that’s being discriminated against, there aren’t a lot of options for you to get justice,” said Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society.

“I think we need to be really careful about not introducing ideas that may have the unfortunate side effect of gutting our human rights system when we need it the most.”

Blackstock said the fact that the commission discriminated against its own employees is still “disturbing.” She said the human rights system needs leadership with a track record of treating employees and the public with dignity.

In a statement, the commission defended its model, which triages complaints before they move to mediation at the tribunal stage.

“The commission’s model supports access to justice by working with complainants to articulate their experiences in a way that meets the requirements of the law, including identifying systemic discrimination,” said Malischewski.

“Commission mediators work closely with parties to empower them to reach speedy resolutions of their own design. When cases are referred to tribunal, commission lawyers regularly represent the public interest throughout the process, from the tribunal all the way to the Supreme Court.”

Source: Human rights commission acknowledges it has been dismissing racism complaints at a higher rate

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Black Torontonians ‘significantly’ more likely to face discrimination on regular basis, study finds

2023/03/23 Leave a comment

Of note:

Black people in Toronto are “significantly” more likely to face discrimination on a regular basis than white residents, according to a recent in-depth report on Torontonians’ day-to-day experience with microaggression and discrimination.

A research brief entitled Everyday Racism: Experiences of Discrimination in Torontoreleased Tuesday highlighted findings on discrimination pulled from the Toronto Social Capital Study published in November.

The first-of-its-kind report, led by the non-profit Toronto Foundation and Environics Institute for Survey Research, found that roughly 76 per cent of Black Torontonians experience racial discrimination at least a few times a month.

Source: Black Torontonians ‘significantly’ more likely to face discrimination on regular basis, study finds

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Ottawa says Human Rights Commission discriminated against its Black and racialized employees

2023/03/18 Leave a comment

Embarrassing, to say the least:

The federal government says the Canadian Human Rights Commission discriminated against its own Black and racialized employees.

The Canadian government’s human resources arm, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBCS), came to that conclusion after nine employees filed a policy grievance through their unions in October 2020. Their grievance alleged that “Black and racialized employees at the CHRC (Canadian Human Rights Commission) face systemic anti-Black racism, sexism and systemic discrimination.”

“I declare that the CHRC has breached the ‘No Discrimination’ clause of the law practitioners collective agreement,” said Carole Bidal, an associate assistant deputy minister at TBCS, in her official ruling on the grievance.

Source: Ottawa says Human Rights Commission discriminated against its Black and racialized employees

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Nicolas: Briser le silence… systémique

2023/03/17 Leave a comment

Of note:

Pour bien comprendre l’enquête du Devoir sur les plaintes pour racisme à la Ville de Montréal, rappelons d’abord le contexte. En 2016, une coalition de groupes de la société civile (dont je faisais partie) interpelle le premier ministre du Québec, Philippe Couillard, pour demander une commission sur le racisme systémique. Le terme « racisme systémique » est alors nouveau pour une grande majorité de Québécois. Nous sommes plusieurs à expliquer, tant bien que mal, ce que c’est, et ce que ce n’est pas, sur les tribunes qu’on veut bien nous offrir.

On parle des politiques et des cultures institutionnelles qui créent et reproduisent des inégalités sociales. En réponse, on nous accuse de faire le « procès des Québécois » et on mélange les mots « systémiques » et « systématiques »… une distinction que tout un chacun fait déjà très bien lorsqu’il est question d’enjeux politiques, avec lesquels on est déjà plus à l’aise.

On pointe les milieux où il reste tant à faire pour briser l’omerta sur le racisme systémique au Québec, notamment dans les domaines de la santé, de l’éducation, de la justice, de l’emploi. On nous rétorque qu’on peut résoudre la situation assez facilement sans s’embarrasser de tout ça. Utilisons des CV anonymes à l’embauche, organisons des foires d’emplois pour l’immigration en région, et le tour sera joué.

La commission provinciale sur le racisme systémique n’aura finalement jamais eu lieu. Mais l’idée aura fait son chemin dans la société civile, et fait évoluer les mentalités. Et quand George Floyd et Joyce Echaquan ont perdu leur vie devant les caméras, soudainement on était plus nombreux à avoir un mot pour nommer les choses.

La fin de non-recevoir à Québec ne découragera pas pour autant la mobilisation antiraciste. À Montréal, c’est l’ex-candidat de Projet Montréal, Balarama Holness, qui reprend la balle au bond, en 2018. À la Ville, on n’est pas plus pressé de nommer le racisme systémique et d’agir contre lui. Mais il existe une faille dans le système : les citoyens ont le pouvoir d’imposer un sujet de consultation à l’Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM) s’ils collectent au moins 15 000 signatures… à la main. Un groupe de jeunes rassemblés autour de Holness se relève les manches et réussit l’exploit.

Qu’on ne le perde pas de vue, donc : si la Ville de Montréal a reconnu l’existence du racisme systémique et s’est engagée à mettre en oeuvre les recommandations du rapport produit par l’OCPM, c’est parce qu’un mouvement citoyen lui a forcé la main. Il n’y a rien, mais absolument rien, dans la lutte contre le racisme à Montréal qui s’apparente à de l’enfonçage de portes ouvertes.

Dans la foulée de ce rapport produit au terme d’une consultation dont la Ville ne voulait pas, donc, on crée le Bureau de la commissaire de la lutte au racisme et aux discriminations systémiques. Plusieurs acteurs clés de la Ville de Montréal, bien sûr, n’en voulaient pas plus. Mais nous sommes au début de 2021, quelques mois à peine après George Floyd et Joyce Echaquan. Puisqu’il n’est pas exactement dans l’air du temps de nommer son malaise devant l’existence même du bureau, on concentre l’ensemble des critiques envers la personne qui le dirigera. Bochra Manaï encaisse, ne fléchit pas, et se met à l’ouvrage.

Son équipe a principalement un pouvoir de recommandations et d’accompagnement des différentes équipes de la Ville aux prises avec des problèmes de racisme. Nécessairement, dans le contexte, il est difficile de juguler les attentes des employés qui subissent du harcèlement raciste de la part de collègues, dans certains cas depuis des décennies. L’enquête du Devoir décrit une institution où les arrondissements, la ville-centre et les syndicats se passent la patate chaude des employés qui contribuent à un climat de travail toxique, sans qu’il y ait de véritables conséquences pour les fautifs. Les seules personnes qui devraient être ici surprises sont celles qui n’ont pas encore compris, après toutes ces années, le sens exact de l’expression « racisme systémique ».

Revenons donc à la question qui avait été lancée en 2016, soit l’importance de faire la lumière, de briser l’omerta et d’enfin agir contre le racisme systémique dans une foule d’institutions au Québec. L’administration municipale de Montréal s’est fait imposer ce travail, à la suite d’une mobilisation citoyenne, et on voit, notamment dans l’enquête du Devoir, ce qui se cachait. Des niveaux inouïs de harcèlement à caractère haineux, des employés qui se voient refuser des promotions sur le motif de la couleur de leur peau, des carrières brisées, des victimes dont la santé mentale finit par flancher, et bien sûr le tabou, véhiculé notamment par l’interdiction de parler aux journalistes.

Mais ce n’est pas parce que les projecteurs sont braqués sur la Ville de Montréal que les injustices y sont pires que dans les autres municipalités, ou que dans le secteur privé, les systèmes de santé et de services sociaux, d’éducation, de justice, etc. Simplement, Montréal a commencé à faire un travail qu’on refuse encore d’entamer ailleurs.

Lorsqu’on a un pied sur le terrain, auprès des communautés les plus affectées par le racisme, on a déjà entendu des centaines de témoignages semblables à ceux dévoilés par Le Devoir cette semaine, dans à peu près tous les secteurs d’emplois. Alors que le combat pour la liberté d’expression est très en vogue ces temps-ci, prenons un moment pour mesurer l’ampleur des mobilisations et de la résilience requises pour ne briser qu’une infime partie du silence sur le racisme systémique.

Source: Nicolas: Briser le silence… systémique

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , ,

McWhorter: Why Racial Discussions Should Also Focus on Progress

2023/03/14 Leave a comment

Agree:

I have argued recently that a useful and inspiring history of modern Black America need not be dominated by discussions of white racism. And having done so, it seems reasonable for me to explain, to at least a limited degree, what I would envision as a potentially better approach.

Specifically, I wrote about a draft curriculum of the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in African American studies. So what other topics might it have included, to counterbalance topics — clearly worthy, yet incomplete — such as reparations, Amiri Baraka and the Black Lives Matter movement?

Let’s try, for one, the notion of Black power. The good word would seem to be that we never really have any. But that isn’t true, and any valid chronicle of the history of what’s been happening to Black Americans since the 1960s must not pretend otherwise.

We have now had a two-term Black president, two Black secretaries of state, one Black (and South Asian) vice president and a Black secretary of defense. These were all borderline unimaginable goals a generation ago.

Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., was elevated in 2020 to become the Catholic Church’s first Black cardinal. He was the first Black president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as far back as the early 2000s — a time at which Dennis Archer was also the first Black president of the American Bar Association.

Lowe’s and Walgreens, two of the nation’s largest retailers, are run by Black chief executives. The reason you probably didn’t know that is because there are now enough Black chief executives to bypass the notion of firsts. This contrasts with 2000, when there were only two prominent Black chief executives of Fortune 500 companies — Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae and Lloyd Ward at Maytag — although that, too, was awesome progress over what had come before.

Successes of this kind should be held up front and center, not dismissed as footnotes or all but buried in equal coverage of remaining disparities — although those should of course be covered elsewhere in a curriculum. The question is how people like this achieved as much as they did despite the obstacles, largely but not exclusively racial, they all faced. We might ask why there isn’t more focus on that question.

I often sense that we are supposed to think of people like this with a certain formulaic admiration. They are what are sometimes called “Blacks in wax” (after, presumably, the museum in Baltimore): nice to know about but ultimately fluky superstars irrelevant to what some might say Blackness is really about. Is the idea that, because they have not usually dedicated themselves to political protest in deed or gesture, it somehow makes them less impressive or less important? That itself would be a radical proposition.

Something else: A modern history of Black America should include how Black English has become, to a considerable extent, a youth lingua franca since at least the 1990s. It is absolutely a fact that attitudes toward Black English can be influenced by racism. However, this is neither the most important nor even the most interesting thing about the dialect. Beyond its awesome grammatical structures, it is fascinating that such a dialect primarily confined to Black usage just 50 years ago now decorates the speech of countless Americans who are not Black at all. And that is because how Black people talk has become an integral part of how America talks.

In Black English, “I’m going to” can be rendered as the marvelously terse “Ima,” as in, “Ima go downstairs.” Thirty years ago, I overheard a white undergraduate woman use this phrase with Black male friends. Then, white people using it were generally ones especially identified with and situated within Black culture — i.e., with a substantially Black friend group. Today I hear white and Asian young people use “Ima” all the time; it is no longer interesting. A student of South Asian heritage wrote a paper for me recently chronicling how his texting with friends, most of whom are not Black, was couched considerably in Black English, as a default medium with no performance or ridicule entailed.

And dismissing this as cultural appropriation won’t do. It’d be like Jewish people complaining that non-Jewish people say “klutz,” “schmooze” and “shtick.” Black English’s transformation of mainstream English has likewise been inevitable, harmless and cool. It’s something great that has happened since the 1960s.

A true and healthy history of Black America should also cover, with the same ardor that it does the L.A. riots of 1992, the efflorescence of Black film starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 2000s. After the Blaxploitation film flame burned out rather quickly in the 1970s, Black movies came out here and there. But starting with the electrically odd, goofy, plangent and true “She’s Gotta Have It” by Spike Lee in 1986, and Lee’s titanic oeuvre of films in its wake, it started to get hard to see every Black film that was released. (I had to give up around 1999.)

The comedies were often of a kind that both taught and amused (“Barbershop”); the romances gave Black women especially equivalents to movies like “When Harry Met Sally” (“Love Jones”); the dramas gave us our forms of movies like “Terms of Endearment” (“Soul Food”); and the gangster pictures finally gave us our James Cagneys and Lee Marvins (“New Jack City”).

A line one often used to hear in response to the idea of progress in Black film was that there existed no Black producer who could greenlight a movie alone. But that’s no longer true, now that Tyler Perry rules his own filmic empire. Some think Perry does not really count because most of his films appeal more to the gut than to the intellect. But then the vast majority of films always have, and I for one have never seen a film of Perry’s without at least one immortal performance of some kind, including, frequently, his own. And they are indeed often damnably funny.

That Black movies are now ordinary is something our historiography should chart and celebrate, much as it should a two-term Black president. The prospect of a film like “Black Panther” even getting made on such a lavish budget, much less being an international sensation, would have sounded like science fiction as recently as the 1990s. The prospect of a high-budget sequel with a mostly Black cast being made even after the star of the original had died? It beggars imagination.

One last example: From the Florida A.P. draft, one might suppose that the thing most interesting about hip-hop is its usage as protest music, given that in the draft music is so dominatingly associated with social and political purposes, advocacy and empowerment. Certainly, protest is part of what the music is; its confrontational cadence is fundamental to the genre. But as to the idea of a hip-hop revolution whereby the music was always supposedly about to unite Black America into some kind of radical political consciousness: How has that panned out?

Hip-hop has been a glorious revolution, indeed — in music, period. Be it party music, protest music, political music, obscene music or Dr. Octagon, a genre that started as street fun in the Bronx has transformed the musical fabric and sensibility of America — as well as that of the whole world. (I once watched a teen rap in Indonesian in New Guinea.) No one denies this, of course. But it is this basic triumph that should center its coverage in a course and be offered as a topic of engagement to curious young people.

I suspect that the idea that a Black historiography would not just wave at but stare at positive developments will rub some the wrong way. But the idea that our history must elevate protest as the most interesting thing about us is peculiar.

It’s worth noting that not that very long ago, Black American movers and shakers were of a similar mind in celebrating the victories more than the — very real — obstacles. In 1901, an issue of the Black newspaper The Indianapolis Recorder listed all of the city’s businesses owned by Black people and crowed, “If after reading the facts and figures as succinctly presented an inspiration comes to any who may be considering embarking in some business enterprise or renews hope in those who are now struggling to attain success we shall feel gratified.”

If a Black man could write that in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson, surely today our curriculums on Black history can recognize more clearly what Black people have accomplished, continue to accomplish and accomplish more with each passing decade. Just because time moves more slowly than we wish it did doesn’t mean we should not recognize its motion. Relaxing the impulse to hold the spotlight on what white people are doing — or not doing, or should have done — can be, among other things, a way to recognize what Black people have accomplished in a nation that brought them across an ocean as slaves.

The protest-focused perspective is rooted, it seems to me, in a take on being Black that was memorably articulated by the writer Ellis Cose in the 1990s in “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” his widely discussed book about middle-class Black people’s sense of alienation: “Hurtful and seemingly trivial encounters of daily existence are in the end what most of life is,” Cose attested, in what he described as the story of what it’s like to be Black in modern America.

Cose’s Weltanschauung is one especially prevalent among academics, artists and journalists. But most people — and most Black people — are none of those three things. I have lost count of how many Black people told me back in the day that they did not share Cose’s take on what we now call “microaggressions” as the very fabric of our existence. Many do share it, to be sure, but their positions share space with those of the other millions of Black Americans who feel closer to the way I do.

The story of Black people in America is much more than the story of what’s wrong with white people. To pretend that this isn’t true, to downplay or ignore decades of progress and accomplishment and to portray political activism — however important and necessary, and it is both — as Black Americans’ main form of accomplishment, is to suggest that white people have already won.

Source: Why Racial Discussions Should Also Focus on Progress

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

Caste bullying at Toronto schools prompts vote over new protected category 

2023/03/09 Leave a comment

Of note, unfortunate that needed:

The Toronto District School Board is set to vote on a motion that would include caste as a protected category, alongside race, gender, sexuality and other identities. If passed, the motion would be the first of its kind in Canadian schools.

Toronto District School Board trustee Yalini Rajakulasingam brought the motion before a committee on Feb. 8. On Wednesday, the board will hold a final vote. Ms. Rajakulasingham, who is the trustee for Scarborough North, said parents who identified as members of oppressed castes told her about bullying, harassment and slurs their children faced.

The caste system is a form of social stratification that has existed in the Indian subcontinent for several thousand years. Historically, dominant caste groups have enjoyed greater rights and privileges vis-à-vis oppressed castes, who have been subjected to social ostracization, violence and exclusion from certain professions. Caste prejudice has followed some South Asians as they immigrated to countries such as Canada.

“We realized that even at [the TDSB’s] human rights office, there was no way to file a complaint under caste,” Ms. Rajakulasingham said. “It was being filed as either race or religion. And we know that caste is its own specific power structure. It doesn’t function like race. It is its own category.”

Ms. Rajakulasingam, whose parents moved to Canada from Sri Lanka as refugees in 1986, identifies as a member of an oppressed caste. The stories she heard from parents in her ward resonated with her own life experiences growing up in Scarborough.

On the lowest rung of the caste ladder in South Asia are the Dalits, who were previously pejoratively referred to as “untouchables.” When India gained independence from British rule in 1947, its new constitution, which was written by Dalit civil-rights activist Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, explicitly banned caste discrimination and established affirmative action for oppressed castes.

However, Dalit-rights advocates in India and abroad argue that prejudice against oppressed castes has continued into modern day South Asian societies around the world. India’s growing Hindu nationalist movement has targeted Dalits, along with Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

Vijay Puli, executive director of the Canada-based South Asian Dalit Adivasi Network (SADAN), said those attitudes have followed Dalit immigrants even though they have left India behind. “There is a lot of caste discrimination in Canada. Not just in schools, but in workplaces too. Casteist slurs are regularly used in schools. It happens through cultural practices, social settings and in rituals and traditions,” he said.

The TDSB’s proposal has drawn some opposition. A group called the Canadian Organization for Hindu Heritage Education (COHHE) has started a petition calling for a stop to the motion. The group says that adding caste to the list of protected identities is Hinduphobic. (The caste system has roots in Hinduism but exists in other communities.)

“There is little evidence or reports of ‘caste oppression’ in Toronto and for that matter Canada,” states the petition, which has more than 5,000 signatures. “Hence the declaration that ‘there is rise in documented anti-caste discrimination in the diaspora, including in Toronto’ makes the motion misleading, prejudiced and lacking in integrity.”

Ms. Rajakulasingam, who is Hindu, said she was confused by the allegation that the motion was targeting the Hindu faith. She said the motion did not single out any faith, but that it affected South Asian, African and Caribbean diasporas.

Jaskaran Sandhu, a Brampton resident and board member of the World Sikh Organization, said that caste dynamics exist in all South Asian communities. Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, singled out caste as a mode of oppression.

“As Sikhs, we are vehemently opposed to the caste system. We understand the importance of fighting caste oppression, wherever it exists,” Mr. Sandhu said.

Chinnaiah Jangam, associate professor at Carleton University and co-founder of SADAN, has faced death threats and online attacks because of his work on caste oppression and Hindu nationalism. In April of last year, SADAN held a consultation with TDSB board members and shared personal experiences of Dalit students in Toronto, Dr. Jangam said.

“An oppressed-caste girl in the 11th grade was told by her classmate that if she were a prostitute, she would not even get a penny because she had dark skin,” he said, outlining one such incident. “How can you say there is no caste-oppression in Canada?” he added.

In January, 2022, California State University made caste a protected category. In December, Brown University became the first Ivy League university to do so. The TDSB’s vote comes close on the heels of a historic decision by the Seattle City Council, which became the first jurisdiction in the United States to explicitly ban caste discrimination late last month.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of the U.S.-based civil-rights group Equality Labs, said, “This motion aligns TDSB with this movement for equity that has started in educational institutions and is taking the world by storm.”

Ms. Rajakulasingam said the best way to end a cycle of discrimination is to sensitize children.

“When we recognize oppression, and we begin to speak about it, students can heal and feel empowered by their identities. Like how we feel accepted by racial identity, we want students to feel accepted by whatever their caste location is,” she said.

Source: Caste bullying at Toronto schools prompts vote over new protected category

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Clark: Three Conservative MPs who saw no evil until after lunch

2023/03/02 Leave a comment

Good analysis and depressing reality that Pierre Poilievre is overly beholden to the more extreme elements in the party. And Max Bernier is already fundraising off this “discreet” repudiation of the AfD by Poilievre:

If you’re not familiar with the policies of the Alternative for Germany, the party represented by MEP Christine Anderson, you’re not alone. But the three Conservative MPs who met her for a long lunch last week didn’t get there by accident.

That is not to say the three MPs are racist. Leslyn Lewis, Colin Carrie, and Dean Allison aren’t known as that at all. They are the Conservative Party’s unofficial conspiracy caucus.

So when the Conservative Party issued a statement that said the three didn’t know Ms. Anderson’s views, and later two organizers of the three-hour lunch said the MPs knew a lot about who they were meeting, well, both of those things might be sort of true.

It’s easy to find out the AfD stands for anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and xenophobic views, because it can be quickly discovered on the internet, in newspapers or videos, or from many sources. But it also seems very possible that these three read about it and didn’t believe it.

Mr. Carrie apparently didn’t believe COVID-19 vaccines were safe, so, according to a Conservative source, he was one of the four MPs who did not go the Commons in person in the fall of 2021. Mr. Allison apparently didn’t believe public health officials who said the veterinary anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin wasn’t proven for treating COVID-19, and he gave a presentation about it to a group of Tory MPs. Last year, Ms. Lewis falsely claimed a then-undrafted World Health Organization treaty would give the WHO power to dictate all of Canada’s health care decisions in a pandemic. The three wink at the theory that the World Economic Forum is a cabal to control Canada and the world.

And guess what? Ms. Anderson shares a lot of their views about vaccine mandates and globalists. They saw her as an ally, and apparently chose not to see the rest. She tells people she is not xenophobic or anti-Muslim, although she doesn’t really eschew those sentiments. “I do not have problems with Muslims. I have a problem with Islam. I do not consider Islam to be a religion,” she told the right-wing website Rebel News.

Prominent AfD figures have played down the Holocaust and Nazi era, and spoken of immigrants as invaders. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs raised concerns about the three MPs meeting with Ms. Anderson. The AfD tends to target Muslims with its policies, but they include banning kosher meat and “non-medical” circumcision. Its politicians aren’t the advocates of freedom they claim to be.

So Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre did the right thing when he issued a statement to reporters who asked that criticized Ms. Anderson’s views as “vile.” That’s unequivocal. The party issued a statement saying the three MPs had not known about her views. Mr. Carrie took the extra step of tweeting that he regretted his mistake and will do better.

That didn’t settle it, however. Mr. Poilievre didn’t put his statement on his or the party’s social media or website, and critics accused him of try to keep it low-key with his own base.

But he probably got more criticism from the right – and Mr. Carrie got a helping of it, too – from people who accused him of backing down in the face of criticism from the media. Rebel News ran a piece that said Mr. Poilievre “panicked” and threw his MPs to the “media wolves.” They didn’t feel the Conservative Leader stood up for principle, but rather that he caved.

That is a message to Mr. Poilievre that he will pay a political price on his right wing if he distances the Conservative Party from extremists like the AfD. And, by the way, the People’s Party is waiting there.

It’s worth noting Ms. Anderson’s AfD evolved into what it is because of how it dealt with extreme elements.

Alternative for Germany came out in 2013 as an anti-European Union splinter from conservative parties, but its first leader, Bernd Lucke, quit in 2015 complaining the party was taken over by xenophobic elements under new leader Frauke Petry. In 2017, Ms. Petry lost a power struggle with the more extreme far right wing of the party, and later quit the party, too.

So if there’s a vein of folks in the Conservative Party that doesn’t want to see the extremism of some who claim to be allies, they should be warned. There is a line. If you choose not to see it at your lunch table, it just gets closer.

Source: Three Conservative MPs who saw no evil until after lunch

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USA: Black farmers worry new approach on “race neutral” lending leaves them in the shadows

2023/02/28 Leave a comment

Interesting discussion from both the substantive perspective (righting historical discrimination) and the politics that broadened eligibility and arguably entrenched discrimination:

Farmers of color across the country, who’d been promised debt cancelation as part of a special program to address racial disparity in lending, rejoiced when they received letters in 2021 in the mail that said their loans with the Agriculture Department would be canceled.

And then, for over a year, there was nothing.

Multiple lawsuits led by white farmers, who said the program discriminated against them for being white, stymied the race-targeted program.

The debt forgiveness was a congressional effort to help USDA make up for a history of discrimination. For decades, farmers of color have filed individual lawsuits, class action lawsuits and congressional testimony against the department. And for decades, rulings and reports have repeatedly concluded that USDA’s lending practices have been discriminatory.

Now, USDA is in the process of rolling out a second, newer, program passed by Congress as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But the $3.1 billion now appropriated as payments toward loans don’t just go to racial and ethnic minorities. They also go to some white farmers under a new category: “economically distressed.”

Economically distressed means farmers of any race who are behind on loan payments or on the brink of foreclosure.

And since this new program is now race-neutral, those who are particularly concerned about the disparate impact of lending practices on Black and other farmers of color say the move could hide the scope of the problem and lead to further disenfranchisement.

Farmers of color wonder if relief is being received as intended

In October, USDA began making automatic payments to the accounts of farmers who were 60 days or more delinquent. In some cases, payments were made without notifying the borrower: a pleasant surprise in some cases and procedural confusion in others.

However, advocates and producers complain there is a lack of clarity and transparency about who is getting the money.

“You lose a lot of the trust when there was very little trust in the beginning,” said Brandon Smith, a cattle rancher in Texas who received a payment and is an outreach coordinator for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. “No one’s trying to be ungrateful, but it’s just the trust and what was promised to them.”

As of Jan. 30, the USDA paid out more than $823 million for the Inflation Reduction Act program to farmers who were either delinquent on payments or on the verge of foreclosure.

“The steps we’ve taken so far are really for lack of a better analogy, to stop the bleeding,” said Zach Ducheneaux, administrator of the Farm Service Agency, the lending arm of the department.

He said the next step is to deal with 15,600 “complex cases,” including borrowers on the brink of foreclosure and those near delinquency.

“As far as I know, we haven’t had any foreclosures in our guaranteed loans since we started providing this assistance. That’s an ongoing process to clean up those complex cases,” Ducheneaux said. “And, of course, having a bankruptcy judge and other creditors make those even more complex.”

This case-by-case funding will include some $500 million in payments.

USDA has not outlined what it will do with the remaining over $1 billion allocated by Congress.

States with “Economically distressed borrowers” net high dollars

Data obtained by NPR show that Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Puerto Rico are receiving the largest amounts of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act towards economically distressed borrowers.

Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas also happen to be the largest states for FSA lending for what USDA labels “socially disadvantaged” producers – which are people of color and white women. Oklahoma leads the way in lending to those types of borrowers.

These were also the states that were expected to benefit the most from the original race-targeted program.

It is unclear, however, how many of these “socially disadvantaged” borrowers are people of color.

In the state of Oklahoma, out of 129,619 total producers in Oklahoma, 9.2% are American Indian/Alaska Native and 1.4% are Black or African American, and .4% Asian compared to 84.9% white, according to the self-reported 2017 Agriculture Census.

Puerto Rico, which has not recovered from the destruction caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017, also has a large percentage of socially disadvantaged borrowers.

It has a farming population of 8,230 of which 7% identify as Black, 90% identify as white, .8% as other and 1% as more than one race, according to the self-reported 2017 Census of Agriculture. About 99%, regardless of race, identify as Hispanic or Latino ethnic origin, making them socially disadvantaged.

“Economically, they are (also) disadvantaged. That’s not surprising to me,” said Iris Jannett Rodriguez, president of the coffee sector of the Puerto Rican Farm Bureau. “Many farms might have a lot of land but the land that is producing crops is really small.”

Almost any way you slice the numbers: looking at raw totals of borrowers and dollars, or average payments per borrower or loan, Puerto Rico – which is not among the nation’s top agriculture producers – consistently lands among the top recipients. With 820 direct loan borrowers receiving $72.3 million and two guaranteed loan borrowers receiving $1.3 million in payments, Puerto Rico ranks fourth in the nation for highest borrowers and IRA payments.

“Both Oklahoma and Puerto Rico have a large share of farm loans. Therefore, it is not surprising that they also have more distressed borrowers relative to other states,” said Marissa Perry, press secretary for USDA regarding the rates of payments made toward both states. “In the case of Puerto Rico, in recent years, a number of natural disasters have contributed to delinquencies.”

But advocates say they fear the money may now not be reaching all of the producers who benefited from the first program.

USDA officials say that since Congress did not make race a consideration for payments, it does not track that data. Nonetheless, some patterns stick out because some of the states with the highest number of USDA loan borrowers who are socially disadvantaged are getting the most of the IRA payments.

As a part of the American Rescue Plan, the early 2020 pandemic relief bill, lawmakers approved $5 billion toward debt relief and cancellation for minority farmers. The legislation was specifically targeting what was labeled “socially disadvantaged” farmers, or African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Pacific Islanders.

But the program was swiftly blocked by about 12 lawsuits, including one out of Texas led by former President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller and current state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. They argued the program was discriminating against white farmers for being white.

Lawmakers then repealed the program and passed a second one through the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act was absolutely a tough pill to swallow with regard to the overturning of American Rescue Plan [program],” said Dãnia Davy, director of Land Retention and Advocacy at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, however adding that some results have benefited her membership. “I have to say that a lot of our farmers ultimately have been very positive as they’ve received benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act that some folks didn’t even anticipate receiving. So it’s actually been a surprisingly positive response.”

The first program was specifically supposed to provide redress to farmers of color, many of who had been a part of class action lawsuits against USDA. Plaintiffs under Pigford v. Glickman, the lawsuit brought by Black farmers settled in 1999. However, tens of thousands missed out due to confusing paperwork and filing deadlines and near attorney malpractice, advocates say.

In 2010, Congress appropriated an additional $1.2 billion in a second round of payouts. But still, many did not receive them due to more denials of claims and deadline and processing issues. Plaintiffs fell even further behind on payments and legal fees — hurting their credit and bottom line for decades to follow.

“There are people who are still living from the first round of Pigford and they’ve never been made whole,” Davy said. “And a lot of times when people talk about Pigford, they think that Pigford addressed all of the racial discrimination that Black farmers faced, but it was really for a finite period of time.”

Smith says producers are happy about payments but upset there isn’t full loan forgiveness and confused about the rollout.

“They feel robbed about that part,” Smith said. “The law was passed almost six months ago and it seems like they [USDA] are a little sluggish.”

Much of the money remains to be doled out.

Smith said farmers who received notice in 2021 that their debt would be forgiven sat in limbo for a year, leading to many of them feeling like the department slow-walked the rollout of the original program, giving time for lawsuits to stall it.

“They were promised something by the government and then put on hold for over a year and a half,” Smith said. “They were told money was allocated to them during the pandemic. They were not able to use those funds. Now the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, they added more money to that pool but they aren’t doing debt forgiveness. They just had a couple of payments.”

In response to the concerns, USDA said they worked quickly to dole out the funds to farmers most at risk of losing their farms. The department is now in a more complicated phase, it said.

“This work requires diligence and time to make sure we are doing right by producers and fundamentally changing our approach to be better and in a long-lasting way,” said Dewayne Goldmon, senior advisor for racial equity to the Secretary of Agriculture. “I’m in this job to advance racial justice and opportunity – and we will keep mending and improving our approach at USDA to ensure Black farmers and any other farmers who have been left behind in the past are no longer left behind.”

Black farmers’ concerns over equity remain

Still, some farmers of color argue that they have still not benefited from a program originally designed to help them.

Eddie Lewis, a farmer in Louisiana, said he falls into that “complex case” category — he is delinquent $600,000. While he was poised to receive cancellation under the first program, the delay to get any payment under the new program is affecting his ability to get the capital he needs, he said.

“I would be the perfect candidate for a case-by-case basis. I’m a good farmer. I got good yields, I got good character. I got good credit,” he said. Lewis is in limbo, unable to secure other loans he needs because of the outstanding delinquency.

Advocates are also concerned that Black farmers who led the movement to get a debt-relief program will be left out of it.

In June 2022, Rep. Alma Adams, a North Carolina Democratic member of the House Agriculture Committee, sent a letter to USDA asking them to use money appropriated in another section of the COVID-19 relief package, also aimed at tackling inequity, to cover the costs of debt to Black farmers while litigation on the debt relief program continued.

Adams argued that according to USDA data, only 3,100 Black farmers would be eligible for the relief totaling less than $300 million. The most recent FSA report released in September shows the cost of 5,970 loans taken out by “socially disadvantaged farmers,” including white women, was $1.2 billion.

Advocates say the amount needed to cover the debt of farmers of color, and especially Black farmers, is so small that the funding should be appropriated — especially out of a multibillion-dollar program.

“Unfortunately, our folks have been so shortchanged that I think the numbers will probably bear out that there’s still a significant number of white farmers who not only benefited from the subsidies and the COVID benefits but now even IRA,” Davy said. “I think that program can’t truly be called a success for civil rights because you have to really intentionally address racial discrimination if you want to call it a success for civil rights.”

However, other farmers argue that the new, race-neutral program may be better at providing aid to those immediately struggling without triggering lawsuits. And many of them happen to be farmers of color.

In defense of the original race-targeted program, the government argued in court that white farmers were far less likely to be delinquent on their loans. The ratio of white borrowers who are delinquent on FSA loans in 2021 was 11%, compared to 38% of Black borrowers, 15% of Asian borrowers, 17% of American Indian and Alaskan Natives, and 68% of Hispanic borrowers.

Rod Simmons, a farmer in North Carolina, at first struggled with the department. He cited familiar problems, like a confusing application process and deadlines, as barriers he faced getting involved with the department’s programs.

When the pandemic hit, he lost 22% of his inventory. He was on the verge of liquidating his assets in order to get money to make the loan payments And then the Inflation Reduction Act loan payment came through, it amounted to two years worth of money he owed.

“My granddad had never seen any type of program in his time that made an impact for farmers like this one did,” Simmons said. “Now, the programs can be designed in a manner that will cater to those that need it versus those that want it. And there’s a big difference.”

Source: Black farmers worry new approach on “race neutral” lending leaves them in the shadows

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