J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, “said a lot of wild things during his Sunday morning media blitz,” Mother Jones commented here. “But one of his comments … described a federal program that has distributed nearly $2 billion to mostly Black farmers who experienced discrimination as ‘disgraceful,’ suggesting that it is racist against white people.”
The reaction from the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA) was about what you’d expect. “He owes us an apology,” they said, and called his remarks “disgraceful, deplorable, dumb, degrading, and disrespectful to the nation’s Black farmers.”
I don’t know anything about that program, but don’t need to, because I’m not running for office or courting the black farm vote. The point is, Vance is, and he doesn’t either. Mother Jones says it was established under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and applicants don’t have to be black, but NBFA says 85% of them are.
Reuters describes it (here) as remediation for race, gender, or identity-based discrimination by USDA personnel that “resulted in being turned down for USDA loans, receiving poor loan terms or other outcomes that resulted in the loss of land, homes or other assets.”
Vance claims programs like this are “special treatment” and said, “I don’t think we should say, you get farm benefits if you’re a Black farmer, you don’t get farm benefits if you’re a white farmer,” which is laughable, because white farmers get billions in federal subsidies every year, with some individual farmers getting millions (see story here).
Maybe he thinks of black farmers as people plowing with mules on the acreage awarded to them after the Civil War which Lincoln’s successor stole back from them (see article here).
It’s often said the most important campaign task of a vice presidential candidate is “do no harm.” Vance is doing lots of harm, in ways like this, and there are reports that Trump regrets picking him and is “pissed” at the people who talked him into it (see story here).
The kerfuffle over black farmers must be especially irksome to Trump, because he thought he was making inroads with black voters, and now he’s stuck with a running mate who’s driving them away. As NBFA’s president said, for his group, thanks to Vance’s stupidity, supporting the Trump-Vance ticket is now “off the table.”
