Black Farmer Calls Out Liberal Racism In Powerful Facebook Message

[steve2470]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/black-farmer-calls-out-liberal-racism-in-powerful-facebook-message_us_5925a027e4b0650cc020eb4d

I wanted to get my friends' take on this article. It's also being hotly debated elsewhere on DU, but this is NOT a callout thread, far from it.

Thank you my friends!


Steve

on edit, the FB post:

https://www.facebook.com/sylvanaqua/posts/1036321936499106:0

A message to Charlottesville about Lee Park from your local Black farmer:

I know some folks are really feeling themselves about this whole Love Trumps Hate counter-rally to Richard Spencer's punch-worthy shenanigans in Lee Park. I'd like to appreciate it, but frankly I just don't.

I've lived in several cities and visited many more before Charlottesville. I like this town for its natural beauty, it's small size, the friendliness of its people, and its food. But folks, here's something else: Charlottesville is by far the most aggressively segregated place I've ever lived in or visited. And that seems a strange thing to have to say about a town that hosts a public university.

I say "aggressively" for two reasons. One, because of how assertive police (and the citizens who summon them) are here with racial profiling. It got so bad in 2014 - 2015 that I stopped renting farmland on estates where I could be easily seen from the road, and I stopped making food deliveries into wealthier neighborhoods because of how often police would "happen by" and sometimes even question me five or ten minutes after I got a strange look from a passerby (usually someone jogging, but occasionally someone in a car). I'm not a paranoid kinda guy, but this happened way too often to be a coincidence.

It isn't Richard Spencer calling the cops on me for farming while Black. It's nervous White women in yoga pants with "I'm with Her" and "Coexist" stickers on their German SUVs.

Second is the sheer degree of cultural appropriation going on with businesses in the city proper. It's little things - e.g. shops and other businesses incorporating wide swaths of hiphop culture into their branding while having not a single Black owner, partner, employee, or vendor. And those businesses are KILLING IT here. This is a town where Blackness advances White-owned brands and subjects Black-owned businesses to inspection by law enforcement.

Do you really think that problem comes from people like Richard Spencer?

Check out C'Ville Weekly's Instagram feed when you get a moment, and try not to notice that the few depictions of Black people are limited to sports, singing, criminal justice, or single parenthood. White people, meanwhile, are represented as political activists, chefs, cogs in the gig economy, musicians, dancers, people who get married, visual artists, songwriters, architects, landscapers, thespians, artistic directors, wedge-heel-wearing rugby players, dog lovers, farmers, firefighters, and people who play with their kids in cul de sacs.

Richard Spencer is not the editor of C'Ville Weekly.

Truth is, as a Black dude, I'm far less bothered by the flag wavers in this picture than this town's progressives assuming its race problem has nothing to do with them. The former is a visual inconvenience. The latter could leave my daughters without a father.

So please, put down the candles and instead ask yourself: why is my city like this? Why is life like this for Black people in my wonderful city? The answer is a lot closer to home than Richard Spencer or Lee Park.


*end of quote*

[irisblue]

1. Thanks for the whole FB post. Huffpo is a problem to navigate.

And yeah, now having read the FB post, I can get how GD would freak out.

[IronLionZion]

2. GD Needs to freak out

It's a difficult topic for some to even think about without getting defensive and emotional.

[steve2470]

3. another article

Here's an article from The Root about it:

http://www.theroot.com/farmingwhileblack-black-va-farmer-says-nervous-white-1795498504

When discussing the dangers of “____ while black” in this white-settler colonial project known as the United States, the media focus is typically on expensive shops, wealthy white enclaves, airports, parks, city sidewalks, predatory hypermarkets—you know, any place where white people are known to click their heels three times—9-1-1—and lock all the Negroes away.

Now Chris Newman, the owner of Sylvanaqua Farms in Albemarle County, Va., has broken down the dangers of farming while black so that it can forever and consistently be broke.

In a Facebook entry that has since gone viral, Newman posted an image of white supremacists gathered at Charlottesville, Va.’s Lee Park and waving that filthy rag of a Confederate flag in protest of the City Council’s vote to remove a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

White supremacist Richard Spencer also led a lynch mob in support of the statue. Wielding torches in a nighttime ritual reminiscent of a Ku Klux Klan rally, the mob chanted, “We will not be replaced”; “Blood and soil,” which is a Nazi rallying cry; and “Russia is our friend.”