Conor Friedersdorf has a post about the conservative fixation on the Pigford settlement, which offers money to black farmers and those who attempted to farm during a period in which the USDA was discriminating against blacks. There are a couple of things I find extraordinary about the right's obsession with this case.
The first is that Andrew Breitbart and friends have alleged that the Pigford settlement is Barack Obama "paying off" black voters. I find the concept of needing to bribe the most loyal Democratic voters in the country to vote for the first black president to be mystifying. Then again, this is a website whose writers openly speculate that the narrowing of the New Black Panther case is an explicit quid-pro-quo between the Obama administration and a black hate group. The second Pigford II settlement was passed by unanimous consent. Why Republicans in the Senate are so eager to help Democrats "buy" the votes of their most loyal constituency is unclear.
So the two main theories frequently posted on Breitbart's for why black people like Obama are that he's (a) bribed them through "stealth reparations" and (b) because black people have the kind of racist views of whites espoused by the NBPP, which is why Obama needed them to get out the black vote and can't prosecute them now. There isn't a non-racist version of these theories.
Friedersdorf notes that there were about 94,000 Pigford claimants despite the fact that there aren't that many black farms. As the Congressional Research Report on the subject explains:
These statistics, however, failed to recognize that many farms are operated by more than one farm operator. In 2002, the Census of Agriculture collected data for a maximum of three principaloperators per farm. The 2002 Census enumerated 29,090 African American farm operators. Thisstatistical change more accurately captured the actual number of operators, that is, those who areactually engaged in farming.
The settlement also applies to blacks who applied for USDA funds to farm but didn't already have farms of their own. The U.S. government spent a long time handing out billions to whites who wanted to build farms while witholding it from blacks who applied. So it's not surprising that the numbers are larger than the actual number of farms or even farm operators--some of the applicants are people who never got to farm because the USDA was only giving loans to whites. According to the CRS report, "As of November 2010, 15,642 (69%) of the 22,721 eligible class members had final adjudications approved." That suggests that regardless of the number of applicants, the government is successfully screening out fraudulent or non-meritorious claims. I haven't read Foster's piece, but the numbers Friedersdorf posts are incomplete.
Friedersdorf notes that there's something odd about the fact that conservatives weren't outraged about the original discrimination in the Pigford case. Well there's a reason for that--much of the discrimination in Pigford occurred after President Ronald Reagan had abolished the civil rights office in the USDA, despite the agency's long history of discriminating against blacks. Then as today, many conservatives believed remedies to racial discrimination to be worse than the discrimination itself.
Part of why I find the Republican obsession with Pigford so fascinating goes beyond what Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to as the possibility that somewhere, someone black is getting away with something. The Pigford case is a perfect example of how racism distorts what many conservatives imagine is a perfect American meritocracy in which whites just happen to end up on top most of the time. It's not just about opposing remedies to discrimination, it's about denying the reality that for decades "affirmative action" was a whites only program.
