Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Finally, an effort to end the legal theft of land from African Americans
FERN and The Nation
“In the 45 years following the Civil War, freed slaves and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South,” writes Leah Douglas, in FERN’s latest story, published with The Nation. “By 1920, there were 925,000 black-owned farms, representing about 14 percent of all farms in the United States.” Fast forward to 1975, though, and only 45,000 black-owned farms remained, in part because of an obscure legal provision that is only now being addressed by states. When black farms passed to the next generation, they often did so without a will and thus a clear title. If any descendants sold their stake in the land to, say, a developer, the buyer could prompt the sale of the entire parcel of land in an auction through what is known as a “partition sale.” Black farmers are still fighting to keep their land in places like Hilton Head, South Carolina, where such forced sales helped turn the island into a resort community for an increasingly white population.
Why no one talks about race and food
Civil Eats
“In recent years, writers who dare to look critically at the way food and race intersect have often been trolled, degraded, and threatened on and off of social media,” says Civil Eats, in a piece that invites several high-profile people of color in the food community to speak for themselves about the challenges of getting a seat at the proverbial table. In the words of Shakirah Smiley, founder of Nourish Resist, which trains young people to champion social justice through food: “People of color in food maintain a triple burden: They must be equally eloquent on the roots and recipes of their specific food culture, while remaining skeptical of grossly appropriative and derivative versions of said food and culture (hello weirdly racist Asian chicken salad, fried chicken joints in blackface, and straight up stolen Mexican recipes). All the while, dealing with the interpersonal and structural racism that limits their full potential within kitchens, dining rooms, fields, or editing rooms.”
Big seed companies accused of abusing farmworker rights
Investigate Midwest
Every year, GMO-seed giants DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto hire thousands of farmworkers to work company fields, selling the seeds they gather to farmers around the country in what has become an $11-billion industry. But both companies have increasingly hired contractors to recruit and track their workers’ hours — a practice that lowers their own liability. An investigation by Investigate Midwest, found that contractors, often one step from being farmworkers themselves, have a record of skimming money off the top of workers’ paychecks, lying about the terms of their employment or housing workers in substandard buildings. The workers, often undocumented or economically desperate, rarely complain out of fear they’ll lose their job or be sent home without pay. And legal aid organizations are barred from representing undocumented workers, leaving them even more vulnerable to abuse.
Why many restaurant workers don’t want a higher minimum wage
Washington Post
Raising the minimum wage for restaurant workers may seem like a reasonable idea, but many people in the industry — including some restaurant workers themselves — oppose the idea. When Maine voted to raise the minimum wage for servers from $3.75 in 2016 to $12 by 2024, servers were some of the first to denounce the change. They worried their employers would make up for the wage hike by cutting hours or offering less-lucrative shifts. They also feared customers would tip less. At least one report, though, found that tipped employees have a poverty rate nearly twice that of non-tipped workers and are more likely to need public assistance. But a new study, by economists at the University of Washington — and not yet peer reviewed — found that Seattle’s higher minimum wage cost the average low-wage worker in the city $125 a month.
Seven million people are starving near Lake Chad. Here’s what they ate today.
The New Republic
“A single vegetable, a dried fish, a bowl of red maize — sometimes this is all a mother has to divide between her children each day. She may have to choose to feed her two youngest and send the teenagers to a village to beg for food,” writes The New Republic, describing the mass famine on the once fertile shores of Lake Chad in central Africa. Climate change has shrunk the lake by 90 percent, from 10,000 square miles to just under 1,000. Seven million people are now starving in the lake region, which spans parts of Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon. The rise of Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group in Nigeria, also has disrupted agriculture, forcing thousands of people to flee for their lives. The photos of a typical “meal” for people caught in the struggle capture the region’s desperation.
Photo by Richard Ellis
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