We are told is that not enough Minnesota farmers are black.
Let’s talk “root causes“ for a moment; i’m also told thatvery few farmers in Norway, Sweden and Germany are black, either…
20 thoughts on “Filed under “Things I Never Knew Were Problems“”
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Granted, if there was no history of racial discrimination in Minnesota there probably would be more black farmers in the state.
That is an undeniable fact.
So what do we want to do about it?
Should we discriminate against one group of skin-color people who never did anything remotely wrong in order to benefit other skin-color people who may not even claim to have been disadvantaged – in order to satisfy the privileged white liberals who write for or read the Strib – just so they can to feel good about themselves?
Greg makes good points.
Should we force black people to become farmers? Is there any real data to prove that “more” black people even want to be farmers?
Greg, I’d be interested in learning more about the history of race discrimination against farmers in Minnesota. Some links would be awesome.
I was taught that outstate Minnesota was settled in the 1800s by immigrants who obtained Land Patents from the federal government in exchange for payment and promise to work the land as homestead. I wasn’t aware there was a racial component to the program.
I was taught that after the homestead promise was fulfilled, farmers were free to sell to anybody but of course, most family farms were handed down for generations. I was not aware of any redlining or farmbusting practices to prevent Blacks from buying farms.
Growing up in outstate Minnesota among White farmers, I didn’t realize we were the product of racism. We thought we were the product of bad luck and hard work – bad luck the crops failed In The Old Country forcing our ancestors to leave, and hard work turning a savage wilderness into a bountiful homeland.
I guess I’ve got a lot of un-learning to do. I appreciate your help.
There probably was some significant degree of discrimination in the race for land out west, as about a quarter of cowboys in the Chisholm Trail days were black, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t seem that too many of them managed to get a quarter section of land and settle down. But that said, I’m not quite sure what we do today to correct that. Being the descendant of farmers who settled on the plains (and largely failed at the endeavor), and knowing the financial difficulties (at least until the past 15-20 years) of plains farming, solutions don’t seem to be easy.
You would, as Greg notes, simply create a new class of victims, and probably put a lot of people out on the land who have no idea how to farm it–OK, you’ve just created two new classes of victims, one of whites whose land was taken, and another of blacks who were sent out to farm country with no knowledge of how to make it work.
It’s really funny how many Asians and Hispanics are farmers on varied scales.
In fact, two of my current customers, both Hispanics, are farmers that parlayed their welding, metal and woodworking skills, into profitable side gigs during the winter.
Just look at the dark continent. It had been populated by thriving farming communities for centuries, I tell you! Farming is in their blood, inbred generational necessity.
Give them 40 acres and a mule, that should be enough compensation.
Boss you make excellent point. Visit any farmers market in the state and compare the number of Asian farmers versus black. How did that happen?
“Farmers of color”?
Identifying people as mere instances of their racial identity is fun! We need to do it more! Here, for example, is a “criminal of color”: https://twitter.com/CrimeWatchMpls/status/1449793004429058056?s=20
I have no doubt there was slavery in the Old South before the end of the Civil War in 1865. I could believe Blacks fled the Old South and rode the trails driving cattle North from Texas to Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska or Missouri in the period 1865-1886, after which the railroads put them out of business.
I could believe Democrats in the federal government required restrictive covenants as a condition of federally insured home loans during the 1930’s and 40’s. I could believe Democrats in the former slave states imposed Jim Crow laws and Whites only diners right up until 1965.
What I’m having trouble believing is that Minnesota farmers suffered from racial discrimination. I’m not saying it didn’t exist – I don’t know one way or the other – but it contradicts what I learned in history class. It feels more like Hollywood than history.
Can somebody provide me with links?
I guess the lesson here is not to believe anything you are taught in school.
My neighbor is an old sheep farmer, who told me that back in his father’s day, the local Baptist church board would decide who you sold land to.
My father-in-law who lived 10 miles north confirmed the practice through his Catholic church.
The object was to control what ethnic and religious groups lived (and married) where.
That was in the country. In the city, where I grew up along Selby Avenue, if you were black you couldn’t buy or rent a house 60 feet away, if it was on the south side of Selby or the west side of Lexington.
These practices were as pervasive as gravity. No one had the temerity to suggest, “oh gosh, there are no laws that dictate these things……those people just don’t choose to live south of Selby or west of Lexington”.
It is pretty obtuse to even bring these things up.
Discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, ethnicity and race was, like I said, as pervasive as gravity and trying to question that is just tossing gasoline on the progressive narrative.
I’m having trouble understanding how this topic lives as something to be taken seriously. The sole reason for that Red Star article – apart from the Squirrel! misdirection of everything the left has effed up over the past 9 months – is to create yet another guilt addiction for white people. Who cares about the number of black farmers in MN? Really, c’mon. I mean, how about the number of Italian farmers? Or Polish farmers?
In “Back to School” Rodney Dangerfield schools his business professor on how business is really done. He talks about who to bribe, how to schmooze the mob, the teamsters, the politicians and how to cut backroom deals.
Which is how business is really done.
In real business schools, we talk about formal systems and informal systems. The professor in the movies (and Joe up above) were talking about formal systems, how things are meant to work and how they are structured by law.
But that is only half the story.
The story of discriminations is the story of informal systems, how things really worked in the social and cultural world.
We have passed all the laws to make the formal systems work correctly, but the lib-tards have latched onto what they believe is the informal system with Critical Race Theory and the conservatives are playing right into their hands by saying, “hey, everything is cool.”
We conservatives have lost our culture, our nation and perhaps our freedom because we made a huge mistake by not embracing the full cause of cultural discrimination….
Now, with the left taking sides with the wealthy against the working and middle-class, we have a golden opportunity to grab generational majority….and all we have to do is acknowledge that we as a political force and we as a nation have made mistakes and the way forward is self-improvement and opportunity, not racial and gender bean counting.
And to do that, we have to be believed – and to be believed, let’s not deny the past.
Sorry, this and all we have to do is acknowledge that we as a political force and we as a nation have made mistakes and the way forward is self-improvement and opportunity makes zero sense to me. I’m not saying I disagree or that it is wrong, but that it so vague as to be meaningless.
Policies, please.
I haven’t discriminated against anyone based on their race.
There is no black person who is poor because I am modestly well off.
Racial guilt is the path to destruction, because it never, ever ends. It never ends because you have people who have not experienced racial oppression demanding satisfaction from people who did not oppress them.
People who complain about experiencing “generational racism” or “historical racism” are talking about things that have happened in the past to other people, and things that are in the past, do not exist.
Honestly, this is a very stupid Strib article. It’s not skin color, it’s culture. There are very few Italian-American farmers in Minnesota. The Italians who came to MN came to work in the iron mines. Proportionately there are very few Irish Americans who came to Minnesota to farm (The Scotch-Irish are a different culture, I’m talking the “green” Irish. There were a few Irish farming colonies near Green Isle and Graceville but these were the exception rather than the norm. Plus they were an attempt to get the Irish out of urban slums. But it did not work real well. The Irish came to the cities, farms meant poverty to them.
African Americans did not come to Minnesota to farm, this was not a climate that they were accustomed to. Germans, Scandinavians, New Englanders, Poles,
Czechs, etc. were used to this climate and came here to farm. You don’t see a lot of South Carolinian whites move this direction either. It was culture. There are not a lot of Native Americans who farmed in a European style. Their culture in Minnesota was more hunter/gatherer.
The Strib sells newspapers by guilting gullible white people and reinforcing a certain story line. It’s the old joke of the New York Times headline “World Ends Tomorrow, women and minorities hurt most.”
This is a story focusing on skin color and missing the massive cultural differences (not superiority/inferiority, DIFFERENCES). The same is true for a lot of other RACIST stories. It’s not skin color it is culture.
I thought it was hilarious that the blacks they could find farming were operating a marijuana grow, and were unable to get a loan because the woman had skipped out on a whopping education loan.
Lol…best the Strib could do?
No, BPCT, WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACISTS, that is the story!
If you got any other info from the story, you are misreading it.
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BPCT, it strikes me as well that if you’re applying for a farm loan, you not only ought to have a decent credit record, but also ought to consider growing something that’s unequivocally legal, and where errors in your business won’t bring the DEA in.