African-American Farmers and Fair Lending: Racializing Rural Economic Space
![handle is hein.journals/stanlp12 and id is 339 raw text is: African-American Farmers
and Fair Lending: Racializing
Rural Economic Space
by
Cassandra Jones Havard
In the con
small farm p
core dem
I. INTRODUCTION principles-
The relationship of the
federal government to the and neuti
economic development of the
minority-owned farm as a business ultimatelj
raises issues of political authority.3
The United States Department of app
Agriculture's (USDA) loan
qualification scheme allows locally
elected farmers-who, with few exceptions, are white-to
make substantive decisions regarding an applicant
farmer's creditworthiness. For many African-American
farmers, this structure has resulted in a sustained lack of
access to USDA's low-cost funds and, eventually, to land
loss.4
The congressional decision that local farmers are
able to make the best determinations concerning borrower
eligibility for federal agricultural loan funds leads to
concerns as to whether Congress' federalism objective of
delegation of authority to local constituents can ever be
met. As an issue of political authority, the balance of
Cassandra Jones Havard is Associate Professor of Law at
Temple University Law School. Professor Havard holds a B.A.
from Bennett College and a J.D. from the University oJ
Pennsylvania. The author dedicates this article to the memory of
her father, Robert Fulton Jones, a beloved street lawyer for
the African-American farmers of central and southern Alabama.I
*a
ii
power in the USDA loan scheme
ltext of between the federal government and
local citizens is unique and uneven.
Olicy, tWO The USDA process-calling for the
icratic election of local representatives
among the population of farmers
ederalism within a particular county-gives
elected farmers both critical
ity- are discretion regarding loan eligibility
and an opportunity for self-
lawed as aggrandizement. Racial minority
farmers' lack of access to credit-the
by-product of this long-standing
federal scheme-provides fertile
ground for challenging the devolution of authority to local
landowners. In the context of small farm policy, two core
democratic principles, federalism and neutrality, are
ultimately flawed as applied. The ideal of federalism-
that state and local governments can share power with the
federal government-is lost when programs are not
monitored for compliance with stated goals and
objectives. The presumed neutrality of the USDA's
process for disbursing federal funds raises questions about
the congressional purpose given a result that is, at best,
described as the deleterious sacrifice of land owned by
minority small farmers.5 Negative biases that should not
color a neutral governmental process have been given the
aura of federal approval.
This article focuses on how to measure loss when
racial discrimination dominates economic policies and
results in identifiable economic injustice.6 More
importantly, it draws a nexus between credit availability
and intergenerational property transmission. This article
concludes that the loss of African-American owned
VOLUME 12:2 2001
[T]he rules and the law may be
color-blind, [but] people are not.
-J. L. Chestnut, Plaintiffs' Attorney
Pigford v. Glickman.2
333](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/stanlp12&div=29&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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African-American Farmers and Fair Lending: Racializing Rural Economic Space
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