When journalism functions as propaganda without editors.

I have been noodling on this since I saw it at the end of last week. From Black families once lived off their southern farmland. Their descendants are struggling to hold onto it. by Korsha Wilson.

Originally it made news for the fact that the corrections to the article were beginning to approach the length of the original article. That's an exaggeration but not much of one. Fifteen specific corrections at most recent account.

There were fair questions about why this socioeconomic piece was in the Food section. There were questions about how a piece as badly flawed as this managed to get by any editors. There were questions about why social justice editorializing was being passed off as reporting.

All fair questions. But mostly there was a lot of mocking about how it was so factually flawed that they had to write a whole new preface with the numerous corrections.

I did not see many people actually engage with the core argument, to the extent that you can extract one from the creative writing 101 reporting.

Wilson has taken family folklore and recast it through the racism of social justice.

It’s a story that Hyman and Palmer keep in their minds as evidence of the challenges black farmers have long faced in their fight for land retention. “I feel like it’s my fight now to stand my ground and keep this land,” says Hyman, administrator of the Freeman estate, even though it is no longer actively used for farming. They and other descendants of Freeman and Barksdale have been fighting a decades-long legal battle to preserve their ownership, a fight that is all too familiar to many black farming families.

Land ownership in America, a precarious notion for both the colonists and the enslaved, took on new meaning during Reconstruction. With hope and the promise of 40 acres of Confederate land, abandoned rice fields stretching across islands from Charleston to Florida in an order written by Gen. William T. Sherman, black families settled in the South. But the promise never came to fruition, and former slave owners were given back their lands, forcing black families into sharecropping. Some were able to save enough money to purchase their own land but others ended up owing money to their former owners. By 1910, black farmers operated 212,972 farms in America, but, like Freeman, they found land ownership didn’t negate being black in the Jim Crow South.

“There was a severe backlash to that land acquisition,” says Leah Penniman, author of “Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land” and founder of Soul Fire Farm in Upstate New York. “There was burning of homes, lynchings . . . People were literally driven off of the land.

Many of those farmers’ descendants are now scrambling to prove and retain ownership, a complicated task thanks to a legal loophole that allows distant relatives and developers to obtain rights to lands that have been in families for generations.

The problem is that Wilson appears to have an extremely tenuous grasp on history and class. So shaky that she is unable to recognize that virtually all of her article could as easily have been written using white sharecroppers as well. And not just white sharecroppers, any landowner.

I know because there is plenty of family lore across multiple branches regarding the loss of land post-civil war. Especially resented was the land appropriated in the 1920s and 1930s during electrification and the building of hydroelectric dams and their attendant reservoirs. Much of the land taken was prime alluvial land, painstakingly acquired over generations.

Had the families been paid fairly and in full, it would have still been emotionally wrenching. But, according to family lore, they most often were not paid fairly or in full. Prime land was acquired which was not then flooded but also not returned. Land was acquired for amounts which were to be paid later, and never paid. Sometimes land was just flooded without compensation being discussed at all.

And these were all white farmers. It wasn't about race, as Wilson is trying to make it, it was about coercive government action taken in bad faith.

But my knowledge of the issue goes beyond simple citizen-State issues.

For a number of years, I always spent a weekend in January on Sapelo Island on the south coast of Georgia, home of one the last remaining Gullah communities. When I first visited, there were perhaps 150 residents. I think they are down to about 50 at this point, there being little economic activity on the island beyond working for the State which owns about 97% of the island at this point. Young people, uninterested in subsistence living, braiding baskets, etc. head out to the mainland, Atlanta, Chicago even.

I first began visiting through a friend who worked in the State Department of Natural Resources. He was also a noted genealogist. By the early 1990s, mainland vacationers began seeking to purchase land from members of the community which quickly generated all sorts of issues. Land records were patchy. Marriages were not infrequently common law. Out migration was extensive. As generations drifted apart, people began selling land they thought belonged to them only find a distant cousin in Chicago suddenly insisting on sharing part of the proceeds while someone on the island insisted the land was not for sale at all based on a verbal inheritance of the land.

Internecine fights between different families on the island were long and drawn out. And all the families were inter-related, making the arguments that much more bitter. Residents who stayed on the island were seeking money and a means to sustain their way of life. Those who left often saw the half acre left to them by their grandmother as a fast and easy means of improving their financial health without regard to others or those left behind. Then the state started tax land at demand prices rather than the near zero valuations of history.

It was a mess.

My friend was called in to hopefully resolve most of the disputes by documenting the actual kin-lines, thus clarifying who might be a legitimate inheritor of what. But the disputes were less about the law and more about a conflict of visions, and steadily worsened as the remainers aged and declined in number. Distrust of those within the community was a bigger barrier than distrust of the state.

Everything Wilson has in her article echoes what was going on in Hog Hammock. Out-migration, common-law marriages, undocumented land titles, poor county records survival, distrust of state, distrust of community members - all were issues for the people Wilson reported on as well as for the Sapelo Islanders.

My final experience relevant to this article is indirect through my father.

In the 1990s, he acquired a number of oil producing lots in California to form a small producing company. One of his best acquisitions was also one of the most difficult. 1920-30s grandad had purchased the original lands and developed in the early production. Dad had taken over from the 60 through the eighties. By this time, family had grown and scattered. Siblings and cousins were estranged.

They all wanted to dispose of the oil producing fields as an asset. None of them wanted to work out of Bakersfield, California. But none of them were willing to designate a family representative for negotiations. They all wanted to be involve and they all had different objectives and acceptable price-points.

To my rationalist, engineering father it was a prime example of people letting their emotions subvert their own best interests. He was a patient man and finally created a deal which everyone found acceptable. But it was long, drawn-out, and could have fallen apart many times save for his enduring patience.

And these were well-off, white Californians.

Wilson's article brings nothing new to the table except for her own historical ignorance. Nothing she reports was unique to blacks versus whites. All experienced similar issues though perhaps at different times, under different circumstances. I am not denying that poor blacks might have suffered disproportionately. I am observing that the the State and Vested Interests are equally willing to exploit the poor. The issue was less to do with being black than it was about being poor and exploitable.

The fundamental reality is that in 1865, about 55% of the population lived on farms and today 1% do so. That decline has had huge, and beneficial, implications for everyone and for the economy. It has not occurred easily or seamlessly.

Whether there is a uniquely black experience of such decline and consolidation or not is debatable. Probably more by degree than by kind. Wilson, in trying to make everything about race, instead of history of all people, betrays once again the identitarian paradox of the social justice jacobins. The only active racists any more are those trying to make everything about race.