Deconstructing the Premier of the Black Farmer Documentary

It's been a while since I last wrote an update for you our followers on this page. As you can see, it was once a fundraising page, but now it is used for updates. The two photos here are with permission from Heather Malaika Hicks who attended her first Summit.

November 8 and 9 were special days in Roanoke Rapids, NC as we prepped for the 16th Annual Land Loss Summit. It was a stellar program with people I'd followed over the last few months and years. So, on Friday afternoon Shoun and I showed the first half of the film and then on Saturday we showed the second half of the film. Each slot included a conversation with the attendees about what they saw in the documentary and what they'd recommend for us.

Even though I had seen it all the way through several times with an eye toward micro changes that I'd suggest to Shoun, I also watched it from two perspectives, one because I was there when we filmed the farmers laughing, crying, and pondering those bitter days of the fight for their land, and second as a viewer as if I were seeing it for the first time. Frankly, both were painful.

Seeing it with both sets of eyes and ears was deeply moving. Despite my familiarity with their stories, those stories brought on laughter and then, surprisingly, the stories brought on tears as moments that caught me off guard.

The audience was very friendly at the Summit. They understood the deeper, underlying message of racism in America, living while Black, and even farming while Black. White people seem to be moved differently than are Black people. White people are stunned and experience the burden of disbelief that people are so brutally mistreated. By and large, African Americans say in different ways, "Of course, that's the way things go." They way things generally go.

So, Shoun and I heard compliments. We heard suggestions. We were validated by words of "you have it all there." "Work on two or three things and you have it," or something like that.

So, we anticipated showing it, we showed it, and we learned from showing it, all with a sense of what needs to be done between now and when we formally put it out in the real world.

That we look forward to finishing it. The farmers and families told us their stories. We want to do well with our obligation to do well with their stories and for those stories and the telling to make a difference in small spaces and places and bigger, larger places and places.

Reflections on Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has taken on a new complexion this year for those who live at our house. That would be Buddy, Charla, and me. To say that gratitude fills the air would be an understatement. While Charla is the go-to person for getting things done, I am the go-to person for pondering things. She tolerates and most times engages me around things that are deeply meaningful to us both.
At the top of the gratitude list would be Charla. Her "let's just get the job done" mentality has been more than evident for a long time. She drove Shoun and me from Denison, Texas, to Huntsville, AL with stops along the way to interview farmers. That was a lot of hours and a lot of miles. Then, from June 19 until now, she has been faithfully taking care of me. Lest that sound like something goofy, she has been the one who managed the doctor schedule, cleaned out ports, woke up with me during the night, and sat with me and grieved and wept, wondering when wellness would be amongst us again.
She, Buddy, me, and recovery have organized our lives since June 19 around illness. Long ago and far away, I would engage students, especially in the course, Special Topics in Family Therapy, or whatever it was called, in the notion of how illnesses become the organizing principle for families. They tell us what to do, when to do it, how to do it. So, five and a half months later, I am saying thank you to her for keeping me sane, for taking care of me when I could not take care of myself, and nurturing our relationship along the way. As we gently tell illness and surgeries to step back, that we can now handle things, I am simply overwhelmed with thankfulness for her.
On another note, I am thankful for my cancer diagnoses, cancer of the kidney and small cell lymphacytic lymphomena, because they remind me that nobody died and made me king of the universe. I find myself identifying with those who struggle with cancer and with those who are cancer survivors and those who do not know if nor when it will read its ugly head again. I am thankful to a God who heals and who is there with us in the healing. I am thankful to a God who loves, even when healing is not in the cards. I do not know how it is decided who gets well and who gets sick and transitions to the other life. All I know that God is present in the ER and the OR with all of us regardless of the outcome. I am thankful for the marvels of modern medicine. Without MRIs, CT scans, robotic surgical techniques, and those who make those things work, I would have less time on this earth than I actually have now.
No, I do not know how God and modern medicine dance. I am grateful for an attending Father, and I am grateful for attending physicians and their fellows.
In a few minutes five of our grandchildren will burst through the door. Two will travel an hour and a half to get here. Their parents and youngest brother will stay home and nurse their viruses. I am grateful for a son who knows that I do not need what they have. The youngest three will come through the front door. Buddy will greet them as he always does. The oldest grandson is already here. He came in last night and is asleep in the guest bedroom. I am thankful for all seven of them. I want to grow old and to watch them grow up.
I am grateful for an organization, its leaders, and its mission to make the world a better place for those who are farming while Black. BFAA invited Charla and me into its midst in 2005 and we have been there ever since. Gary Grant and his family invited us in and we have become family with them and they with us. I am grateful to be able to write, develop, and advocate for African American farmers. I am grateful for Shoun Hill as we have partnered and developed the documentary of those courageous 15 farmers who faced down the USDA and DOJ back in the late '90s. I am thankful for African American farmers and their families across this country who have trusted me with their stories. I recognize the fact that it's people who look like me who work in positions of power who have harmed them at times irreparably. They trusted me anyway. That trust will be evident when you see the documentary.
My heart weeps for those who died in this battle long before they saw justice arrive at their doorsteps. May God have mercy on their souls and may they rest in power. I am thankful for those hundreds of people who have contributed to the BFAA cause, focused on the documentary. Your support and friendship, frankly, blew me away.
I am thankful for my church, imperfect as it is, and its people who desire to serve the Lord in this region known as Texoma. I long for some things with my fellowship that may not happen in my lifetime.
I am thankful for friends who keep me honest, for other friends who join me in political, social, and justice-oriented things. That fellowship of head and heart keeps my mind moving, my agenda sharpened, and my faith strong.
And, finally, I am grateful for those follow me on Facebook and on this blog. Your encouragement in doing so moves my heart and inspires me to write more.

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

For those of you who have followed me on these pages, you know of my interest in African American farmers and their families.  No, I am not a farmer, and, no, I am not African American. Why, you might ask, do you work in this area?  The short verse is that I work in this area because their stories of struggle and resilience when fighting against the USDA and the DOJ are painful to watch, difficult to grasp, and inspiring to see.  Once I began to hear their stories in 1994, their words, expressions, challenges, and pain served to transform the way I see things in the world and the way I try to live my life.

You may have seen an article or two that I've written such as the one co-authored by Edward Robinson, “We Didn’t Get Nothing:” The Plight of Black Farmers, or the most recent one, Land Gains, Land Losses: The Odyssey of African Americans Since Reconstruction. In those articles you would find information about how freed people came to own land, and some even before Freedom, and how against all odds, they became prodigious land owners, coming to own land even faster than white people at the time. There were enormous road blocks toward buying land and then there were enormous road blocks with keeping the land. Two major challenges of land ownership historically have been the heir property challenges, and then for farmers who choose to work with the USDA, the "lender of last resorts," there have been other challenges with keeping the land. It is amazing how people in positions of power can make a decision to do nothing, decide to change the farm/home plan, deny, postpone, foreclose of farmers needlessly, fail to offer disaster relief when white farmers are getting it, fail to offer other services when white farmers are offered the services, and other egregious acts of discrimination.

All of that became more apparent upon reading
Dr. Henry Louis Gates' latest volume, Stony the

Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow," released just this year.  The book is a heavy read in places, a painful read in other places, and a smooth, narrative read in still other places. Rather than recount the history of Reconstruction, he goes about exploring the social and intellectual history of a sordid time in American history. White people and white institutions used a plethora of strategies to regain from African Americans all that they had prior to Freedom and Reconstruction. White Supremacy led whites down the road of using "science" to prove that Blacks were less than whites, that they come from different species, and that they could never handle leadership, responsibility, and the obligations of the vote.

Whites used literature and art to characterize and vilify a people who had just a few years prior earned their freedom. Each chapter has its own images that are discussed in each chapter. They are hard to see, images from mocking a people's individual and collective physical appearance via pejorative characterizations, comparison of brain sizes for whites versus Blacks, or images of alligators hunters using Black children for bait, and other egregious types of images.

Once African Americans fully grasped what the white world was attempting to do, a movement toward developing the "New Negro" set in or even the "New New Negro." These were attempts by Black artists, authors, business people, land owners, and others to develop more appropriate images in keeping with how Blacks really looked and lived rather than white supremacy's characterizations.

Of note is the Harlem Renaissance, a short-lived time in Harlem where Black artists, musicians, and writers converged around developing the "New Negro." A curiosity is that some did not consider the blues or jazz to typify this time and intentions.

Under girding it all was the machinations of white supremacy.  Reconstruction for the white world was that of Redemption from the Lost Cause.  State Senates and Houses of Representatives which were led by way too many people of color, those seats and states had to be regained. After all, how could a freed Black person be expected to live and represent an entire state even when that state had a minority of White people? While it is true that a minority of freed people could read since it was against the law to learn how to read and write during slavery, it was an overstatement that freed people had no abilities to lead the county or state in which they resided.

So, as stereotypes fostered fear and incompetence and all manner of other things, all at a societal level for freed persons, the same phenomena played out in the world of farming while Black. The peak of Black land ownership was 1910, and from that time until now, African Americans have lost land at a higher pace that white farmers.  "Maybe they are just bad farmers," I have heard white people say.  No, they were good farmers. They had worked the land during slavery.  They knew how to farm. As some have said, "It is in my DNA." Or, another said, "My blood is on this land." Or as a farmer's wife said in our documentary recently, African Americans were intended to work the land but never to own the land.

In my writings, I assert that African American farmers have lost much of their land to heir property problems, a problem that exists when a distant cousin in another state with no attachment to the land sells his or her portion at an elevated price, forcing the entire land to be sold to the highest bidder. Secondly, I assert that machinations of the USDA with its tentacles into farming at the local level via the FSA work to disenfranchise Black farmers.  The law is color blind but people are not.  The county committee system is the best of democracy and the worst of democracy.

For those who want to feel challenged, read Gates' book and then read my two articles and place them alongside each other. It would be a painful learning journey, but one that America needs to take. White America would do well to learn what our Black sisters and brothers experienced then and now.  Frankly, Black land loss at the hands of discriminating folks did not end with Reconstruction. It is going on now.  That's a post for another day.

Needles, Phobias, and Stories

Long ago and far away I had a needle phobia, a serious needle phobia. It was real, complete with sweating, dreading, and pain far beyond what was really there in those nerve endings.  During my masters internships, I had the opportunity to sort through it. Apparently, there were some unconscious associations that were truly hidden deeply in my unconscious mind, and when those connections were made (that story is for another day), the phobia disappeared.

Now, after five months of two surgeries, multiple blood tests, a bone marrow aspiration, a partial nephrectomy, a gall bladder removal, and a diagnosis of small cell lymphacytic lymphoma, I feel all needled out, but tomorrow there will be at least one more, and there will be more down the road. 

Several people have made those penetrations and procedures bearable including, number one, hands down, is Charla.  She has been my number one supporter, cheerleader, and advocate. Of late we have discussed vicarious PTSD and the suffering of the caregiver. A distant second would be my medical team, those phlebotomists, technicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and physicians, and the front line staff. 

Tomorrow I will show up for labs.  In that lab will be a large group of phlebotomists and some will recognize me and I will recognize them. I have my story of journeying to their place of work. They have their stories of journeying to their place of work from other countries. 

A goofy thing I do is to say to each person before she or he sticks the needle in my arm is the line, "I like to live in the pain-free zone. Can you help me live in that place?"  They usually say something after a chuckle like, "I don't know. You tell me." It lightens the moment and allows me to engage them and their stories. I will inevitably affirm their use of that needle. 

Tomorrow I hope to see Achal.  She is a very competent phlebotomist and is kind and gracious.  She immigrated to this country from South Sudan. She had wanted to go to college, if I remember her story correctly, and play volleyball. However, she chose to honor the request of her family, or the demands of her family, and thus she became a worker in the medical world.  She has lived in America several years.  When I asked her, "Has American been good to you," she replies with "there is no perfect place" and something about taking the good with the bad. 

I think America is not terribly welcoming these days to immigrants, especially those who are brown skinned. I do not know how much more difficult that it would be for people like her if they were trying to coming to American under the current administration. Check out a few things about the white nationalism that is lurking in the White House and is shaping policy.  It's all over the news these days.  

So, I'll be happy to see Achal or Amir or the guy from the Philippines whose name I cannot remember, the guy who put my blood in something like 17 vials a while back.

They have their stories of struggle and resilience.  Charla and I have our stories of struggle and resilience these last five months.  Our stories overlap and connect. That's what I like about hanging around with humans. We get to swap stories. 

Stories are our habituations.  We live in and through them. They give us meaning and purpose. 

As these good people do their jobs well, they are creating shalom, and some measure of justice, in making the world a better place, one procedure at a time.

Tomorrow is the Day We Have Anticipated

Tomorrow is the day that Shoun Hill and I have been planning for over the last two years. It is with both anticipation and excitement that tomorrow we premier the Black farmer documentary. We will engage the farmers in a discussion of the film and what the interviewees have brought to the film. We will show half of it tomorrow and the second half on Saturday. What do we expect? I am not sure. Some know it is coming, and some have come just to see it. Others do not know it is coming and will see it as well for the first time.

For those of you who have followed this page, you know that it has been over two years in the works. Shoun, Charla and I have traveled from Texas, to New Jersey, to Maryland, and to DC, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama.

BFAA funded the initial stages of the work, and you, friends, and family funded a very large sum of money for its completion. Without you and BFAA, this project would not have occurred. Along the way, we faced opposition as some farmers or family members did not want to be interviewed, legal counsel for the DOJ rebuffed us, as did legal counsel for PIgford I and a number of others.

Still, we found extraordinary stories from the farmers who prevailed as David against Goliath between 1997 and 1999. The stories brought their pain to surface. Shoun, Charla, and I walked into sacred spaces in hearing their stories and honoring their stories. It is impossible to get every story and every nuance of a story in a documentary of an hour and forty minutes. That has been Shoun's burden. My burden was to negotiate itineraries, times, and places, and whether or not a farmer and family would engage with us.

With each burden came a huge amount of respect for the lived experiences of these brave people. They believed that their cause was just. They believed that they were fighting for themselves and for the movement.

Therein lies the burden and the challenge for Shoun and me. We believe in their stories. We believe in the movement that they started. We believe that justice is still being denied.

It is for the cause of justice that we have made this documentary.