The Biden administration, which has made combating racism a centerpiece of its agenda, is pledging to reverse decades of discriminatory agricultural lending and subsidy policies that have left Black farmers at an economic disadvantage and is racing to deploy $5 billion in aid and debt relief to help them, the New York Times reported. At the center of this initiative is the Agriculture Department, an agency that has long been derided by Black farmers as the United States’ “last plantation.” Now the department is in the middle of a drastic overhaul, both of its personnel and of policies that it acknowledges have perpetuated inequality in rural America for years. President Biden’s agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, yesterday said that he would work to root out the vestiges of racism at his agency and to redress “systemic discrimination” that Black farmers had faced.
