“As a white farmer, I feel like MOSES is calling me racist with all this talk about anti-racism. I am not racist just because I’m white. Why is MOSES pushing this social agenda?”
Answer by Organic Specialist Chuck Anderas:
To help answer this question, let’s look at an email I recently received and have permission to share. It shows the lived experience of a Black woman in the Midwest:
“At this rate, I don’t think [I will] ever get land… It’s been my dream to live on a farm since I can remember and I have no idea why. I love to grow in life and love and plants. I love outside. I love the hard work and rewards. I am making farmer friends and get invited to visit, yet have to have a white woman ride with me as I’m scared to drive alone to rural areas… I want an urban house with enough land to grow and share food and life and love because I don’t want to not be around people who look like me even though the people who look like me are hurting and suffering… I don’t want a farm in the rural area where I am disconnected from my community and my kids and grandkids have to be called n***** or something. So, here in Minnesota, how do you dream when you know the white world don’t want nothing but death for you… Where is the hope for me? A farm. To live and die on. To teach my grandkids about planting and growing and harvesting and food and seeds and land and life…”
One striking aspect of that email that I’ve heard repeatedly from farmers of color is the fear of rural areas. That fear is based in a long and violent history, and is real to this day. We shouldn’t dismiss that fear. It’s time for our rural communities to reckon with our history and current systems that benefit white people. I am not sure how else to respond to people of color when they share that deep pain with me except to say I’m committed to doing whatever I can to change that. So, MOSES will keep trying to get our community of farmers to reckon with this, to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), to listen and learn, to try to overcome land access barriers for BIPOC, and to hold ourselves accountable for how we benefit from and uphold systemic racism.
When I responded to the question above that I received from a white farmer, I explained that MOSES is involved in the process of becoming anti-racist and doing this work because it’s the right thing to do. The system as it exists is unjust. We strive for a world that is just—not only for those who currently farm. We have to examine who gets to farm, who has access to land, who has true agency in the food system, who is welcome and safe in rural places, who benefits from structural racism, and how we choose to either uphold or dismantle structural racism in our communities and organizations.
The definitions of the words we use are important. I use “racism” to refer to systemic and policy issues and not the way individual people feel about Black people. I am white, and acknowledging that racism is a problem in our society that we should work to fix isn’t about me as an individual. What it does mean is that I acknowledge I’ve benefited from being white.
As an example, my mom’s side of the family emigrated here from Sweden in the early 1900s. They moved to Chicago and my grandpa got a job at a young age in a machine shop. He eventually owned his own shop, and my family moved from the city out to a suburb in the 1950s. At that time (and still to this day but in less overt ways), Black people were systematically denied home loans. When Black people started fleeing the violence of the Jim Crow south between 1900 and 1970 in the Great Migration, they came to cities like Chicago and Minneapolis. When they arrived, federal and local policy only allowed them to rent in certain neighborhoods. Black people who moved into white neighborhoods were met by mobs, and the police would not protect them. At the same time, my family was building generational wealth through homeownership.
Family wealth disparities by race persist to this day because of that legacy. It doesn’t mean that my family didn’t have to work hard; it just means that it was never harder for me and my family because we were white. It doesn’t mean that white family farmers aren’t facing unfair competition from unregulated agribusiness, for example, and that your life and work aren’t hard. But being white does mean that you get to do that work. You might be “land rich, and cash poor,” but BIPOC have been systemically denied the right to even be “land rich.”
There is a huge racial divide in who has access to land. First of all, I have to acknowledge that this entire continent was stolen from Native nations. There has been a systematic removal of Black people from agricultural land since emancipation. Emancipated slaves never received their 40 acres and a mule. Despite that, by 1900, Black farmers owned around 15% of U.S. farmland. Today, that stands at less than 2%. The reason that number has fallen so drastically is because of violence and discrimination. In U.S. law, racial discrimination can only be prosecuted if you can prove the offender had discriminatory intent. This is intentionally an almost- impossible legal standard to meet.
The 1996 case of Pigford v. Glickman makes clear just how blatantly the Farm Service Agency was discriminating against African-American farmers. However, the settlement for each farmer was too little to undo the damage that had been done by decades of discrimination and most of those farmers never got back their land.
If you look into the facts of the history of agriculture and landowners in the U.S., you’ll find the reasons why 98% of farmland here is owned by white people. It’s not a personal attack on white farmers. It just means we have a lot of work to do because it matters who farms and it matters who is safe in our communities.
MOSES is organizing interested farmers around the issue. We recently put out a survey to take small first steps to see who wants to do the work, and to get folks organized. We are looking to partner with other organizations as much as possible.
If you’d like to be part of the farmer-led anti-racism work we’re organizing, please take this survey.
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Chuck Anderas, MOSES
Chuck@mosesorganic.org
Before joining our team, Chuck was an organic inspector and certification agent with MOSA, and had experience working on small-scale fruit, vegetable, and livestock farms. He has a degree in agricultural education from the University of Minnesota. He and his family just bought a small farm near MOSES.