Friday, October 18 VI A Deeper Excavation
1. The catfish didn't miss the current. They'd never known it. They lapped the pond all day like pace cars.
2. At feeding time, they thrashed for their share of pellets. The farmers bred them for size and taste and texture and profit.
3. They swam around in that little man-made lake and waited for the chopping block and the flash-frozen package. Their bodies were bullion.
4. There were others of them, wild ones, who lived in the open waters of the river to the west. They sometimes got caught on the trotlines of grizzled river rats.
5. Mostly they grew big as they pleased and swam deep into the crevices of the underwater earth. Fisherman told stories.
6. "Whiskers big as bullwhips." They saw fleeting visions of this barnacled ghost ship. If you caught and ate it, they said, you'd gain all the wisdom of a century.
7. It was part whale. Too big for the line. You could tell by the waves it made breaching the surface.
Wednesday, October 23: new unit
In class: "Deeper Excavation" class handout / copy below)
IMPORTANT INFORMATION:
By Monday at the close of class, you should have all 6 chapters of "This Land Was Our Land" completed.
I will accept any notebook work up at the start of class on Tuesday. You will have not class time on Tuesday to write in your notebooks. On Tuesday, we are writing a response from a quote by James Baldwin.
Take out your notebooks. Write a correct MLA heading
The title is "Deeper Excavation"
Please respond to the following questions in complete sentences, as needed.
1. Paragragh one is redolent with powerful visual imagery. Read the paragraph carefully and then sketch the image, labelling the objects found in the paragraph.
2. Using your chromebook, define the following words from paragraph 2; then use them in a complete sentence that clearly demonstrates the meaning of the word.
a. Alzheimers
b. meticulous
c. to compensate
d. ineffable
3. Why are Leflore, Sunflower and Washington Coutnies among the "worst in the country in terms of a child's prospects for upward mobility?" (weave in evidence; make sure your sentence can stand independently).
4. (Thinking; in your response your are sythesizing the information you have read) What would be the difference in the "our national politics if the center of gravity of black electoral strength had remained in the South after the Voting Rights Act.
5. Explain the following quote taken from the final paragraph: The history of the Delta suggests that any conversation about reparations might need to be more qualitative and intangible than it is. (You will need more than one sentence.)
VI. A
Deeper Excavation
as we drove through the patchwork remnants of the Scotts’
land, Willena Scott-White took me to the site of Scott’s Fresh Catfish.
Gleaming steel silos had turned into rusting hulks. The ponds were thick with
weeds and debris. The exterior walls of the plant itself had collapsed. Rusted
beams lay atop ruined machinery. Fire ants and kudzu had begun nature’s
reclamation.
Late
in Ed Scott Jr.’s life, as he slipped into Alzheimer’s, Willena and his lawyer,
Phil Fraas, fought to keep his original hopes alive. In the Pigford v.
Glickman lawsuit of 1997, thousands of black farmers and their
families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred
between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2
billion. The Scotts were one of those families, and after a long battle to
prove their case—with the assistance of Scott-White’s meticulous notes and
family history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic
damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness. The court
also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed by the department. In a 1999
ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of
Columbia acknowledged that forcing the federal government to compensate black
farmers would “not undo all that has been done” in centuries of
government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.
“The
telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at the time of World
War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in 1992 there were 18,000,” Fraas
told me. The settlements stemming from Pigford cover only
specific recent claims of discrimination, and none stretching back to the
period of the civil-rights era, when the great bulk of black-owned farms
disappeared. Most people have not pushed for any kind of deeper excavation.
Any
such excavation would quickly make plain the consequences of what occurred.
During my drive with Scott-White, we traveled through parts of Leflore,
Sunflower, and Washington Counties, three of the counties singled out by
Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research group, as among the worst
in the country in terms of a child’s prospects for upward mobility. Ten
counties in the Delta are among the poorest 50 in America. According to new
data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on all 74,000 U.S.
census tracts, four tracts in the Delta are among the lowest 100 when it comes
to average life expectancy. More than 30 tracts in the Delta have an average
life expectancy below 70. (The national average is 79.) In some Delta counties,
the infant mortality rate is more than double the nationwide rate. As if to add
gratuitous insult to injury, a new analysis from ProPublica finds that, as a
result of the Internal Revenue Service’s intense scrutiny of low-income
taxpayers, the Delta is audited by the
IRS more heavily than any other place in the country. In sum, the areas of
deepest poverty and under the darkest shadow of death are the ones where
dispossession was the most far-reaching.
The
consequences of dispossession had long been predicted. Fannie Lou Hamer, a
Sunflower County activist whose 1964 speech to a Democratic
National Convention committee galvanized support for the Voting
Rights Act, spoke often of the need for land reform as a precondition for true
freedom. Hamer’s utopian Freedom Farm experiment stressed cooperative
landownership, and she said the concentration of land in the hands of a few
landowners was “at the base of our struggle for survival.” In her analysis,
mass dispossession should be seen as mass extraction. Even as the U.S.
government invested billions in white farmers, it continued to extract wealth
from black farmers in the Delta. Each black farmer who left the region, from
Reconstruction onward, represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic
balance sheet and a deposit on the other side. This dynamic would only
continue, in other ways and other places, as the Great Migration brought black
families to northern cities.
This
cosmic balance sheet underpins the national conversation—ever more robust—about
reparations for black Americans. In that conversation, given momentum in part
by the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The
Case for Reparations” in
this magazine in 2014, I hear echoes of Mississippi. I hear echoes of Hamer,
the Scotts, Henry Woodard Sr., and others who petitioned the federal government
to hold itself accountable for a history of extraction that has extended well
beyond enslavement. But that conversation too easily becomes technical. How do
we quantify discrimination? How do we define who was discriminated against? How
do we repay those people according to what has been defined and quantified? The
idea of reparations sometimes seems like a problem of economic
rightsizing—something for the quants and wonks to work out.
Economics
is, of course, a major consideration. According to the researchers Francis and
Hamilton, “The dispossession of black agricultural land resulted in the loss of
hundreds of billions of dollars of black wealth. We must emphasize this
estimate is conservative … Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns,
and other factors, it could reach into the trillions.” The large wealth gap
between white and black families today exists in part because of this historic
loss.
But
money does not define every dimension of land theft. Were it not for
dispossession, Mississippi today might well be a majority-black state, with a
radically different political destiny. Imagine the difference in our national
politics if the center of gravity of black electoral strength had remained in
the South after the Voting Rights Act was passed.
Politics
aside, how can reparations truly address the lives ruined, the family histories
lost, the connection to the land severed? In America, land has always had a
significance that exceeds its economic value. For a people who were once
chattel themselves, real property has carried an almost mystical import.
There’s a reason the fabled promise that spread among freedmen after the Civil
War was not a check, a job, or a refundable tax credit, but 40 acres of
farmland to call home. The history of the Delta suggests that any conversation
about reparations might need to be more qualitative and
intangible than it is. And it must consider the land.
Land
hunger is ineffable, an indescribable yearning, and yet it is something that
Americans, perhaps uniquely, feel and understand. That yearning tugged at me
hardest as Willena Scott-White rounded out her tour of the fields, the
afternoon slipping away. Out among the Scotts’ fields is a clearing with a
lone, tall tree. In the clearing is a small cemetery. A handful of crooked,
weathered tombstones stand sentinel. This is where Ed Scott Jr. is buried, and
where some of Willena’s older siblings now rest. Willena posed for a picture
beside her parents’ grave. She told me that this is where her own bones will
rest after her work on Earth is done.
“This
is our land,” she said.
“This Land Was Our Land” vocabulary 2 quiz on Tuesday, October 22
1. de facto (adjective)- actual, real
2. anonymity (noun)-lack of outstanding, individual, or unusual features; impersonality.
3. attrition (noun)- the action or process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.
4. sprawling (adjective)- spreading out over a large area in an untidy or irregular way.
5. to audit (verb)- an official inspection of an individual's or organization's accounts, typically by an independent body.
6. to default -.
7. retaliation- (noun)- the action of returning a military attack; counterattack.
8. demarcation (noun) - the action of fixing the boundary or limits of something.
9. to plummet- (verb)- fall or drop straight down at high speed.
10.to consolidate- (verb)- make (something) physically stronger or more solid or combine (a number of things) into a single more effective or coherent whole.
