In celebration of National Farmworker Awareness Week and in light of a recent claimed attack on two Black North Carolina farmers, it is important to recognize the farmworker justice movement as part and parcel to liberation movements for Black and brown people in this country.
In January of this year, farmer Eddie Wise and his wife Dorothy Wise say they were violently forced from their land by armed Federal Marshals after being forced into debt by the USDA and Farm Service Agency. But this terrorism is not unfamiliar to Black farmers in North Carolina. Nor is the dispossession the Wises claim they suffered an injustice distinct from the history and vision of the farmworker movement; the struggle for rural Black farmers and the struggle for the rights and dignity of Latino farmworkers are deeply connected and interrelated.
The farmworker movement is a liberation movement dedicated to the empowerment, justice and rights of people who work the land in this country. But there is an ugly history rooted in the oppression of people of color who work the fields in this country — a history that has continued into the present and one that also deeply connects liberation movements of Black and brown communities.
Black folks were stolen from their own land and were forced to work stolen land. Local governments in the rural South have historically and presently worked to steal this land from Black farmers, which has forced them to sharecrop. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that this land was stolen “through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.”
Presently, large corporations, paired with the USDA (read: White People) continue their work to displace Black farmers and steal their land in a continuation of this terrorism.
Predominantly Latino/a farmworkers are then used to work this land in dangerous conditions and without basic human dignities. In short, Black and brown bodies are and have been reduced and recycled on the fields that your food is grown on.
The racist, capitalist system of agriculture in this country is designed not only to keep power and land out of the the hands of Black and brown people but also to divide and separate the struggles of our peoples.
Combating anti-Blackness, which is exemplified in the case of the claimed dispossession of the Wises is crucial to the farmworker movement. Fighting for the rights of Black farmers as well as the rights of Latino farmworkers must, then, be an integral part of the farmworker justice movement, as the prosperity of our communities depends on this historical and present connection.
