THE OTHER
AMERICANS
upon in 2008 to cover the large
number of farmers and their
families who missed the original
cut-off for filing claims.
The deadline for filing new claims
passed on May 11 of this year.
Conservative critics have
slammed some of these efforts.
In particular, the USDA suit—
among the largest civil-rights
settlements in history—was
labeled a “shakedown” and a
“fraud” by right-wing pundit
Andrew Breitbart, among others,
in large part because the number
of claimants exceeded federal
data on black-owned farms for
the period in question.
Extensive under-counting of
black farmers, as well as shared
land development among minorities, have been offered as explanations for the disparity.
But even if every one of the nearly 100,000 claimants in the Pigford case were fraudulent, and they
somehow managed to game the
system to secure what amounts, in
most cases, to a one-time $50,000
payout, the total $2.2 billion price
tag for the case would still only
amount to a tiny fraction—far less
than 1 percent—of the estimated
wealth that has been extracted from
the African-American community
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
over time, if Feagin’s upper-end estimate is accurate.
IF ONE PERSON IS POOR,
WE ARE ALL POOR
Eileen Briggs, a member of the
Cheyenne River Sioux reservation
in central South Dakota, joins me
for a 50-mile drive along Route
212 from Eagle Butte to the reservation’s eastern edge. A herd of
buffalo, property of the tribe, grazes on the crest of a low hill off to
the right, beyond which an empty,
yellow-green prairie spills southward to the horizon.
Briggs, an articulate and passionate host, has been educating
me about her tribe’s role in an otherwise familiar narrative arc for all
Native Americans, one of displacement, disenfranchisement and unabashed double-dealing. This has
been particularly true for tribes of
the desert and prairie West, where,
over the last century or so, tribal
culture has been deliberately undermined, land has been given and
taken away, and geographic isolation has made gaining a meaningful
foothold in the American economy
particularly difficult.
By at least one recent census
measure, Ziebach County, one
of two South Dakota counties
that comprise most of the Cheyenne River reservation, is cur-