Tag Archives: black

U.S. defends minority farmer debt relief despite legal fight

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) is defending efforts to wipe clean government-backed loans to farmers facing decades of discrimination, despite a temporary restraining order on the debt relief plan issued by a U.S. District court last week.

A USDA spokesperson said the agency will be ready to process payments on an estimated $4 billion in debt relief for 17,000 Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian farmers once legal battles are resolved. It planned to start the payments in June.

“USDA will continue to forcefully defend its ability to carry out this act of Congress and deliver debt relief to socially disadvantaged borrowers,” a USDA spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The spokesperson said the government cannot appeal the restraining order, which pauses payments until the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin rules more broadly on a lawsuit over whether or not the debt relief program discriminates against non-minority farmers.

For decades, USDA employees and programs have discriminated against socially disadvantaged farmers by denying loans and delaying payments, resulting in $120 billion in lost farmland value since 1920, according to a 2018 Tufts University analysis. The Biden administration’s loan forgiveness program is aimed at addressing those systemic inequities.

The lawsuit, filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on behalf of 12 white farmers, aims to halt the debt relief by claiming it excludes farmers on the basis of race. It is one of several lawsuits filed after the USDA detailed plans to implement the minority farmer debt-relief provision, which is part of the American Rescue Plan Act that Congress passed in March.

Judge William C. Griesbach, U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, granted the temporary restraining order on June 10.

“The obvious response to a government agency that claims it continues to discriminate against farmers because of their race or national origin is to direct it to stop,” Griesbach said in the decision.

Some Black farmers are not surprised the relief has stalled, having seen previous government anti-discrimination efforts underdeliver.

“Talk is cheap. I can’t buy grain with it. I want to know when you’re going to help some farmers,” said Lloyd Wright, a Virginia farmer who served as the director of the USDA’s Office of Civil Rights in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Wright said Black farmers have been promised relief from federal discrimination in the past, only to be repeatedly disappointed. He suggests eligible farmers continue paying on loans, so they do not end up behind if the program is permanently blocked.

(Reporting by Christopher Walljasper; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Biden eyes grants, federal purchasing to narrow racial wealth, home ownership gaps

By Andrea Shalal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will announce steps on Tuesday to narrow the large and persistent racial wealth gap that divides Black, Latino and white Americans, although he will stop short of a cancellation of student loan debt demanded by civil rights groups.

Biden, a Democrat, will call for billions of dollars in grants and investments to benefit poor minority communities, as well as a big increase in federal procurement from small, disadvantaged businesses, and a crackdown on housing discrimination, administration officials told reporters.

He will unveil the measures during a visit to the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where hundreds of Black Americans were massacred by a white mob 100 years ago. They are part of a broader push to reverse systemic racism, and build on executive actions he took during his first week in office, one the officials said.

Administration officials said they had no further news about any plans to cancel high levels of student debt.

KEY STEPS

The measures include:

– Expanding federal contracting with small, disadvantaged businesses by 50% to some $100 billion over five years, harnessing the buying power of the federal government, the world’s single biggest purchaser of goods

– Using $10 billion of Biden’s infrastructure plan – which must still be passed by Congress – to revitalize communities like Greenwood that suffer from persistent poverty, historic disinvestment and the ongoing displacement of longtime residents

– Targeting $15 billion in competitive grants to reconnect minority neighborhoods cut off in the past from schools, jobs and businesses by the building of highways

– Spending $31 billion to support minority-owned businesses

– Publishing new rules by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to aggressively combat housing discrimination

– A new inter-agency push to use standards, enforcement and regulatory action to reduce the gap in appraised values in minority and white communities that nearly doubled between 1980 and 2015, according to research by the University of Pittsburgh

– A new tax credit for development and rehabilitation of homes in minority neighborhoods to close the gap in pricing on the open market

WHY ARE THESE MEASURES NEEDED?

– Racial disparities persist over generations, limiting opportunities for wealth creation for Black and Latino families and reducing their ability to pass on property to their children.

– Data from the Survey of Consumer Finances show that the median Black household had a net wealth of $24,000 in 2019, or nearly 90% less than the median white household.

– Home ownership rates are much lower in communities of color, with just 49% of Latinos and 45% of Black Americans owning their own homes, compared with 74% of white Americans.

– The home ownership rate for Black Americans has declined 5% since 2001, compared with a 1% drop for white Americans, and is now the same as in 1968, the year the Fair Housing Act was passed by Congress.

– The Biden administration has not set any specific targets for home ownership rates, an administration official said, adding that closing the current gap “will take significant effort and time.”

– The COVID-19 relief plan, already passed by Congress, included $10 billion in mortgage relief for some 2 million borrowers who are seriously delinquent, many of whom are homeowners of color.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Arizona voting curbs remain as U.S. Supreme Court takes Republican appeal

By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a defense by Arizona Republicans of two voting restrictions in the state that were ruled unlawful by a lower court as disproportionately burdening Black, Hispanic and Native American voters, meaning the measures will remain in place for the Nov. 3 election.

The measures prohibit absentee ballot collection by third parties and the counting of ballots cast at the wrong polling precinct. The justices will hear appeals of a January ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidating the provisions as violations of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 U.S. law that barred racial discrimination in voting.

Both measures will stay in place for the upcoming election because the 9th Circuit put its decision on hold pending Supreme Court action on the appeal filed by the state, Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and the state Republican Party.

Brnovich praised the court’s agreement to hear the appeal, adding, “As we contend with a politically polarized climate and battle a global pandemic, we must sustain the cornerstone of our government and ensure the true will of the electorate is heard.”

The Arizona dispute involves a Republican-backed 2016 state law that made it a crime to hand someone else’s completed early ballot to election officials, with the exception of family members or caregivers. Community activists sometimes engage in such ballot collection to facilitate voting and increase voter turnout. Critics call the practice ballot harvesting.

Ballot collection is legal in most states, with varying limitations. Twenty-six states allow voters to designate someone to return their ballot for them, 10 allow family members to do so, while the rest require voters to return their own ballot or are silent on the issue.

The case also involves a longstanding state policy that discards provisional ballots cast in-person at a precinct other than the one to which a voter has been assigned. In some places, a voter’s precinct is not the closest precinct to their home. Provisional ballots are those cast when a voter does not appear on that precinct’s voter rolls.

Nearly 30,000 out-of-precinct ballots were tossed out during the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Arizona, court filings said.

The Democratic National Committee and the Arizona Democratic Party sued the state’s Republican officials in 2016 over the provisions.

The 9th Circuit ruled that both Arizona voting measures had a discriminatory impact on racial minorities in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The 9th Circuit further found that the ballot collection prohibition violated the U.S. Constitution’s 15th Amendment, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, noting that “false, race-based claims of ballot collection fraud” were used to convince Arizona legislators to pass the law.

The case, which began in 2016, is part of a wave of voting-related litigation ahead of the November election in which President Donald Trump is seeking a second term.

It touches upon issues including voting by mail that Trump has seized upon in his attacks on the integrity of the election. He and some fellow Republicans have asserted, without evidence, that a surge in mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic will lead to election fraud, which is exceptionally rare in the United States.

The court took action in the case three days before it begins its new nine-month term short one justice after the Sept. 18 death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. President Donald Trump has nominated federal appeals court judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ginsburg.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)

U.S. COVID-19 death analysis shows greater toll on Black, Hispanic youth: CDC

(Reuters) – A disproportionate percentage of U.S. COVID-19 deaths have been recorded among Black and Hispanic people younger than 21, according to a U.S. study, a reflection of the racial and ethnic make-up of essential workers who have more exposure to COVID-19.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that from Feb. 12 through July 31, there were 121 deaths among people younger than the age of 21 in 27 states.

Hispanic, Black, and non-Hispanic American Indian/Alaskan Native people accounted for about 75% of the deaths in that age group, even though they represent 41% of the U.S. population aged under 21.

The researchers looked at data from 47 of 50 states. Among the 121 deaths, 63% were male, 45% were Hispanic and 29% were Black.

Deaths among children younger than one accounted for 10% of the total, 20% of the deaths were among one-to-nine-year olds, while those aged between 10 and 20 years accounted for the rest.

A quarter of the 121 deaths were in previously healthy individuals with no reported underlying medical condition, while 75% had at least one underlying medical condition, including asthma.

The researchers said children from racial and ethnic minority groups, whose parents were likely to be essential workers, could also be over represented because of crowded living conditions, food and housing insecurity, wealth and educational gaps and racial discrimination.

The study appeared in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The findings of this study could be limited by incomplete testing and delays in reporting COVID-19-associated deaths, among other things, the researchers said.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

For U.S. blacks, Latinos, no sign of a broadly rising tide

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police have opened a broader discussion about racial inequality in the United States.

The U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s was a watershed when it came to formal de-segregation in housing, education, the workplace and public spaces. But more than a half century later, stark divisions remain in how the benefits of a $20 trillion economy are distributed among the largest racial and ethnic minorities and the country’s white majority.

An array of government programs has attempted to address the issue, including anti-poverty efforts, affirmative action to boost college enrollment, and preferences in contracting for minority-owned businesses.

But black and Latino families on average continue to earn less, have higher unemployment, and are harder hit when economic shocks like the coronavirus hit.

Graphic – Black vs white unemployment:

“The downturn has not fallen equally on all Americans, and those least able to shoulder the burden have been the most affected,” Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said this week.

That gap is most apparent in family net worth estimates. Black and Hispanic families accumulate proportionately less in real estate, stocks, business assets and other forms of wealth than white families.

Graphic – After decades, wealth gap remains:

Over time, that creates lower inheritances for children and more constraints when it comes to funding education or training – a dynamic that can help perpetuate the problem.

Some Fed officials have pointed to deep-seated racism as drag on the U.S. economy.

“By limiting economic and educational opportunities for a large number of Americans, institutionalized racism constrains this country’s economic potential,” Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic said on Friday, calling for an end to racism as both a moral and economic imperative.

“The economic contributions of these Americans, in the form of work product and innovation, will be less than they otherwise could have been. Systemic racism is a yoke that drags on the American economy.”

The lack of progress after so many decades has led some to argue that a massive generational transfer, sometimes referred to as reparations, is needed to undo a legacy that has roots in slavery, but continued to compound through the era of formal segregation and beyond.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Heather Timmons and Sam Holmes)

U.S. minority students concentrated in high-poverty schools: study

U.S. minority students concentrated in high-poverty schools: study
By Alex Dobuzinskis

(Reuters) – Segregation in U.S. public education has concentrated black and Hispanic children into high-poverty schools with few resources, leading to an achievement gap between minority and white students, a nationwide study showed on Tuesday.

Stanford University Graduate School of Education professor Sean Reardon and his team crunched hundreds of millions of standardized test scores from every public school in the United States from 2008 to 2016 to reach their conclusions.

The findings reinforced previous studies illustrating that poverty, linked to continuing segregation, is a key mechanism accounting for racial disparities in academic achievement.

“If we want to improve educational opportunities and learning for students, we want to get them out of these schools of high-concentrated poverty,” Reardon said in presenting his findings at Stanford on Tuesday.

“Part of the reason why we have a big achievement gap is that minority students are concentrated in high-poverty schools, and those schools are the schools that seem systematically to provide lower educational opportunities,” he said.

African-American and Hispanic students tend to score lower on standardized tests than white students, and closing that achievement gap has posed a persistent challenge for educators.

The U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation was a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In the decades that followed, public education officials wrestled with how to integrate schools in the face of opposition by residents and politicians in many regions.

This history became a point of contention between Democratic presidential candidates during a televised debate in June, when U.S. Senator Kamala Harris criticized former Vice President Joe Biden for his 1970s opposition to court-ordered busing to reduce segregation.

In a working paper released on Monday, Reardon and his team compared different levels of racial disparities between schools in New York City and those in Fulton County, Georgia, to explain how segregation affected student performance.

The school attended by the average black student in New York City over a recent span of eight years had a poverty rate 22 percentage points higher than that of the average white student. There researchers found white students performing 2-1/2 grade levels above black students on average.

By comparison, the average black student attended a school with a poverty rate 52 percentage points higher than the average white student’s school in Fulton County, where an achievement gap of four grade levels separated black and white students.

Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles and not affiliated with the Stanford study, endorsed the methodology Reardon’s team used but said its findings reveal only part of the picture.

“It’s really misleading to talk about whether race or poverty is most important, because a lot of the poverty is caused by race, and that’s something that people need to keep in mind,” Orfield said.

For instance, discrimination against minority parents is a factor in why those families are more likely to struggle with poverty, Orfield said by telephone.

The Stanford research data is publicly available at the website edopportunity.org.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Editing by Steve Gorman and Darren Schuettler)