Small efforts, huge cause

People ask fairly often, "What are you doing for the Black farmer?" or "What is going on these days with the Team?" or "Is the work doing any good?" or "What is the current state of things with legislation for the Black farmer?" or "Will the congress add anything meaninful to the 2007 Farm Bill that will address economic and social inequities?" Those are complicated questions because the cause is huge and the efforts seem so minimal.

The Social Justice Movement is like a mighty raging river, the movement to address the plight of the Black farmer is itself larger than we can imagine, and all of our collective efforts seem so small. The analogy I offered recently was that we simply get into our small canoes, and begin to paddle with the current. Small efforts, huge cause.

Efforts of various sorts have been going on for years. Zippert and Watson (2001) chronicle the cause of the Black farmer and efforts to keep the land. I'd recommend giving that chapter in a book entitled "Advocacy for Social Justice: A Global Action and Reflection Guide" a serious read. One of the members of Team III will be writing a more in depth piece about that later. The Southern Federation of Cooperatives, BFAA, NBFA, BFAA-Inc., and a host of others, including the Rural Coalition, National Family Farm Coalition, NAACP, labor unions, and farmers and friends, just to name a few, have been active in the advocacy effort.

Zippert and Watson evaluate things this way: "So, in a democratic system, advocacy for legislative, administrative, and regulatory change is an incremental, not a revolutionary, process. The changes the Federation has achieved for Black farmers and rural communities are modest and require a continuing vigilance and fight to retain. The opposition is at work to reverse and contain these changes at every chance it can get (p. 157)."

Change is slow. The process is grindingly slow. People are ground down by the slow grind of it all.