The Biden Administration insulted farmers around the country recently when it launched a program which would specifically discriminate in giving aid only to non-white farmers. Now those white farmers are fighting back with a lawsuit which accuses the program of violating their constitutional rights and being racial discrimination. White Midwestern farmers are suing the Department of Agriculture to challenge the so called “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021”
Farmers challenge USDA
This discrimination in aid is intended to right alleged wrongs that have supposedly seen black farmers discriminated against by their white counterparts and previous legislation.
The act is concerned that farming in America is overwhelmingly white, a fact which it aims to change by making it easier for black farmers to acquire more land at the expense of white competitors.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are all farmers who would have qualified for the federal loan forgiveness program if not for the fact that they are white.
Aid which would have gone to these farmers who have been negatively affected by Covid-19 will instead be withheld in an attempt to lessen the percentage of whites in agriculture.
Covid-19 has been economically harmful to many independent farms, which have struggled to make profits amid difficulties in harvesting and transporting crops.
The massive preponderance of whites as a percentage of farmers means that far more will be harmed by this act than will be helped, minority farming being relatively uncommon in most of the country.
Aid only for the “socially disadvantaged”
The Department of Agriculture announced that it has begun a review of the complaint but that, pending the results of that review, it will proceed with the debt relief program for minority farmers.
The lawsuit from the farmers argues that the sort of discrimination implemented by the act violates the United States Constitution by specifically excluding otherwise eligible citizens purely on the basis of their race.
The Department of Agriculture alleges that the act is necessary to address “systemic racism” in farming due to the lack of targeted relief for black farmers in the past.
The wording of the legislation spells out the racial classifications for aid eligibility. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indians are all mentioned specifically as being “socially disadvantaged”
The lawsuit will challenge this, claiming that it is clearly a case of the United States abandoning the principle of equality under the law.
With all of the other areas in which the federal government has embraced discrimination against whites, however, the farmers still face an uphill battle in attempting to make the government admit to any wrongdoing.
