Latest news with #Blacks
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Most South African farmers are black: why Trump got it so wrong
When world leaders engage, the assumption is always that they engage on issues based on verified facts, which their administrative staff are supposed to prepare. Under this assumption, we thought the meeting at the White House on 21 May between South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and US president Donald Trump would follow this pattern. Disappointingly, the televised meeting was horrifying to watch as it was based on misrepresenting the reality of life in South Africa. Issues of agriculture, farming and land (and rural crime) were central to the discussions. What is clear to us as agricultural economists is that the skewed views expressed by Trump about these issues originate in South Africa. This includes Trump's statement: 'But Blacks are not farmers.' In our work as agricultural economists, we have, in many pieces and books (our latest titled The Uncomfortable Truth about South Africa's Agriculture), tried to present South Africans with the real facts about the political economy policy reforms and structural dimensions of South African agriculture. Writing on these matters was necessary given that official data – agricultural census 2017, as well as the official land audit of 2017 – all provide an incomplete picture of the real state and structure of South African agriculture. The reason is that the agricultural census, which is supposed to provide a comprehensive and inclusive assessment of the size and structure of the primary agricultural sector, and the land audit, which was supposed to record the ownership of all land in South Africa, are incomplete in their coverage. The incomplete and inaccurate official data provides fertile ground for radical statements by the left and the right – and novices on social media. This is why South Africa has to deal with falsehoods coming from the US. These include Trump's statement that black people are not farmers in South Africa. South Africa is to blame for providing inaccurate data to feed these false narratives. The facts presented here should allow a more nuanced interpretation of South Africa's farm structure. Firstly, there are more black farmers in South Africa than white farmers. And not all white commercial farm operations are 'large-scale', and not all black farmers are 'small-scale', 'subsistence' or 'emerging'. Most farm operations can be classified as micro, or small in scale. This is important so that one doesn't view South Africa's agriculture as mainly white farmers. Indeed, we are a country of two agricultures with black farmers mainly at small scale and accounting for roughly 10% of the commercial agricultural output. Still, this doesn't mean they are not active in the sector. They mainly still require support to expand and increase output, but they are active. In the wake of the circus in the Oval Office, we were amazed by the total silence of the many farmers' organisations in South Africa. We have not seen one coming out to reject all of Trump's claims. The only thing we can deduce from this is that these falsehoods suit the political position of some farmer organisations. But at what cost? Will many of their members be harmed by trade sanctions or tariffs against South Africa? The US is an important market for South Africa's agriculture, accounting for 4% of the US$13.7 billion exports in 2024. When Ramaphosa highlighted the fact that crime, and rural crime in particular, has an impact on all South Africans and that more black people than white people are being killed, Trump's response was disturbing, to say the least: 'But Blacks are not farmers'. This requires an immediate fact check. We returned to the text from our chapter in the Handbook on the South African Economy we jointly prepared in 2021. In the extract below, we discuss the real numbers of farmers in South Africa and try to provide a sensible racial classification of farmers to denounce Trump's silly statement. As highlighted earlier, the two latest agricultural censuses (2007 and 2017) are incomplete as they restricted the sample frame to farm businesses registered to pay value added tax. Only firms with a turnover of one million rands (US$55,500) qualify for VAT registration. We were able to expand the findings from the censuses with numbers from the 2011 population census and the 2016 community survey to better understand the total number of commercial farming units in South Africa. The Community Survey 2016 is a large-scale survey that happened between Censuses 2011 and 2021. The main objective was to provide population and household statistics at municipal level to government and the private sector, to support planning and decision-making. Data from the 2011 population census (extracted from three agricultural questions included in the census) shows that 2,879,638 households out of South Africa's total population, or 19.9% of all households, were active in agriculture for subsistence or commercial purposes. Only 2% of these active households reported an annual income derived from agriculture above R307,000 (US$17,000). This translates into 57,592 households that can be considered commercial farmers, with agriculture as the main or only source of household income. This corresponds in some way with the 40,122 farming businesses that are registered for VAT as noted in the 2017 agricultural census report. If we use the numbers from the agricultural census it is evident almost 90% of all VAT-registered commercial farming businesses could be classified as micro or small-scale enterprises. If the farm businesses excluded from the census are accounted for under the assumption that they are too small for VAT registration, then the fact still stands that the vast majority of all farm enterprises in South Africa are small family farms. There are, however, 2,610 large farms (with turnover exceeding R22.5 million (US$1.2 million per annum) which are responsible for 67% of farm income and employed more than half the agricultural labour force of 757,000 farm workers in 2017. Another way to get to farm numbers is to use the 2016 Community Survey. Using the shares as shown in Table 2, we estimate there are 242,221 commercial farming households in South Africa, of which only 43,891 (18%) are white commercial farmers. (This is very much in line with the VAT registered farmers but also acknowledging the fact that many white farm businesses are not necessarily registered for VAT.) Let's consider only the agricultural households with agriculture as their main source of income, surveyed in the 2016 community survey. We end up with a total of 132,700 households, of whom 93,000 (70%) are black farmers. This reality is something that policy makers and farm organisations find very difficult to deal with and it seems that Trump also found this too good to be true. We have tried here in a long winded way to deal with farm numbers and how to get to a race classification of farmers in South Africa. In the end we trust that we have managed to show that there are more black farmers in South Africa than white farmers. Their share in total output is smaller than that of their white counterparts. The National Agricultural Marketing Council puts black farmers' share of agricultural production as roughly 10%. But these numbers are also incomplete and largely an undercount. It will always be challenging to get to the real number of black farmers' share of agricultural output as nobody would ever know whether the potato or the cabbage on the shelf came from a farm owned by a black farmer or a white person but operated by a black farmer, for example. As South Africans know, the labour on farms, in pack houses, distribution systems and retail are all black. So, the sweat and hard work of black South African workers are integral to the food supply chain in South Africa. Let's get these facts straight and promote them honestly. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Johann Kirsten, Stellenbosch University and Wandile Sihlobo, Stellenbosch University Read more: Initiation season in South Africa: why state regulation clashes with customary laws Trump wants to cut funding to sanctuary cities and towns – but they don't actually violate federal law Trump surrounds himself with sycophants. It's a terrible way to run a business – and a country Wandile Sihlobo is the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa (Agbiz) and a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC). Johann Kirsten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Opinion - When will the Supreme Court hold police responsible for lethal use of force?
Last year, 1,173 Americans were shot to death by police. That is an average of more than three every day. Police use of lethal force was greater last year than at any point in the last decade. So far this year, more than 425 people have been killed by law enforcement officers. On May 15, the Supreme Court made a decision that goes part way toward helping reduce those numbers, and holds police accountable when they take someone's life. But it stopped short of doing what needs to be done. Growth in the police use of lethal force in the U.S. has been steady for many years, despite judicial efforts to clarify when it is legal and to restrict it. Ten years ago, 950 were shot and killed; five years ago, that number had risen to just over a thousand. And it has increased every year since. Moreover, the largest number of police shootings have involved an unarmed suspect. Yet in 98.2 percent of killings by police from 2013-2024, no one was 'charged with a crime.' There is also a clear racial dimension to the police use of lethal force. Blacks and Hispanics are shot at a disproportionate rate. Scholars suggest that these figures result from a combination of implicit bias and a pervasive 'warrior culture' among police officers that leads them to overreact to anything that seems to challenge their authority. And most victims of police shootings are young and male. One of them was a 15-year-old Black teenager named Edward Garner, who was shot and killed by a Memphis police officer in October 1974. Garner had broken into a house but was 'unarmed and fleeing on foot when a police officer shot him in the back of the head.' The policeman who shot Garner did not think that the fleeing suspect was armed. But at the time, that made no difference. Tennessee law allowed police to 'use all the necessary means to effect the arrest' of suspects who flee, whether they were armed or not. In 1985, in the first of its efforts to restrict police use of lethal force, the Supreme Court struck down that law. Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, said, 'Notwithstanding probable cause to seize a suspect, an officer may not always do so by killing him.' He explained that lethal force should only be used when 'the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others.' But as we have already noted, the court's effort to clamp down on police use of deadly force did not stem the tide of such killings. Four years after its Garner ruling, the court revisited it, holding that claims the police used excessive force would be judged 'based on how a reasonable police officer would have handled the same situation.' In the case decided earlier this month, a Houston policeman shot and killed a 24-year-old Black man, Ashtian Barnes, at 2:45 in the afternoon. The officer stopped him because he was driving a car whose license plate number matched one with outstanding toll violations. Things got out of hand when Barnes opened the car door but refused to get out. A few minutes later, he started to drive away with the driver's door still open. Instead of letting him go and calling for assistance, the officer jumped onto the doorsill of the moving car and fired two shots that killed the driver. The court ruled that when the police use lethal force in a traffic stop, judges should examine the totality of circumstances, including 'the reasons for the stop, or earlier conduct of, and interactions between, the suspect and the officer,' not just what happened 'at the moment of threat that resulted in [his] use of deadly force.' That is an important step forward. But the court did not go far enough. It did not speak on what happens when police do things that escalate the situation, like what the officer did in the Barnes case. In ordinary cases, the accused cannot claim homicide is justifiable if they behave recklessly or create the danger to which they then respond. That same rule should apply when the police use lethal force. The Supreme Court refused to apply it in the Barnes case. That was a serious mistake. The court's failure means that people will continue to die needlessly at the hands of the police — at least until the court makes clear that, as Justice White put it, it is not 'better that … felony suspects die than that they escape.' Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Hill
When will the Supreme Court hold police responsible for lethal use of force?
Last year, 1,173 Americans were shot to death by police. That is an average of more than three every day. Police use of lethal force was greater last year than at any point in the last decade. So far this year, more than 425 people have been killed by law enforcement officers. On May 15, the Supreme Court made a decision that goes part way toward helping reduce those numbers, and holds police accountable when they take someone's life. But it stopped short of doing what needs to be done. Growth in the police use of lethal force in the U.S. has been steady for many years, despite judicial efforts to clarify when it is legal and to restrict it. Ten years ago, 950 were shot and killed; five years ago, that number had risen to just over a thousand. And it has increased every year since. Moreover, the largest number of police shootings have involved an unarmed suspect. Yet in 98.2 percent of killings by police from 2013-2024, no one was 'charged with a crime.' There is also a clear racial dimension to the police use of lethal force. Blacks and Hispanics are shot at a disproportionate rate. Scholars suggest that these figures result from a combination of implicit bias and a pervasive 'warrior culture' among police officers that leads them to overreact to anything that seems to challenge their authority. And most victims of police shootings are young and male. One of them was a 15-year-old Black teenager named Edward Garner, who was shot and killed by a Memphis police officer in October 1974. Garner had broken into a house but was 'unarmed and fleeing on foot when a police officer shot him in the back of the head.' The policeman who shot Garner did not think that the fleeing suspect was armed. But at the time, that made no difference. Tennessee law allowed police to 'use all the necessary means to effect the arrest' of suspects who flee, whether they were armed or not. In 1985, in the first of its efforts to restrict police use of lethal force, the Supreme Court struck down that law. Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, said, 'Notwithstanding probable cause to seize a suspect, an officer may not always do so by killing him.' He explained that lethal force should only be used when 'the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others.' But as we have already noted, the court's effort to clamp down on police use of deadly force did not stem the tide of such killings. Four years after its Garner ruling, the court revisited it, holding that claims the police used excessive force would be judged 'based on how a reasonable police officer would have handled the same situation.' In the case decided earlier this month, a Houston policeman shot and killed a 24-year-old Black man, Ashtian Barnes, at 2:45 in the afternoon. The officer stopped him because he was driving a car whose license plate number matched one with outstanding toll violations. Things got out of hand when Barnes opened the car door but refused to get out. A few minutes later, he started to drive away with the driver's door still open. Instead of letting him go and calling for assistance, the officer jumped onto the doorsill of the moving car and fired two shots that killed the driver. The court ruled that when the police use lethal force in a traffic stop, judges should examine the totality of circumstances, including 'the reasons for the stop, or earlier conduct of, and interactions between, the suspect and the officer,' not just what happened 'at the moment of threat that resulted in [his] use of deadly force.' That is an important step forward. But the court did not go far enough. It did not speak on what happens when police do things that escalate the situation, like what the officer did in the Barnes case. In ordinary cases, the accused cannot claim homicide is justifiable if they behave recklessly or create the danger to which they then respond. That same rule should apply when the police use lethal force. The Supreme Court refused to apply it in the Barnes case. That was a serious mistake. The court's failure means that people will continue to die needlessly at the hands of the police — at least until the court makes clear that, as Justice White put it, it is not 'better that … felony suspects die than that they escape.' Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
USA Today
4 days ago
- Politics
- USA Today
Rebels, gangsters and presidents animate biography of radical lawyer Paul O'Dwyer
Rebels, gangsters and presidents animate biography of radical lawyer Paul O'Dwyer 'An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O'Dwyer,' takes readers through the civil rights era, Northern Ireland, and post-war New York's machine politics. Show Caption Hide Caption Harvard Law School's Magna Carta revealed as an original Harvard Law School's Magna Carta revealed as an original, the school bought a 1327 copy of the Magna Carta from legal book dealer for $27.50 in 1946. Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy's biography of Paul O'Dwyer examines the clash between purity and pragmatism in public llife. The book includes cameos from presidents including JFK, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, and Franklin Roosevelt. O'Dwyer spent decades fighting for civil rights and desegregation. His elder brother, New York Mayor William O'Dwyer, was dogged by unproven allegations of gangland ties. In the endless dogfight between purity and pragmatism it's never clear who to bet on. It's even harder to know who to love. Radical Irish-American lawyer Paul O'Dwyer was a passionate purist who spent most of the 20th Century fighting – and often winning – for society's losers. O'Dwyer stood up for Irish Republicans, the early Zionists, Blacks in the segregated South, Blacks in the segregated North, gays and lesbians during the AIDS crisis, Kentucky coal miners and, briefly, the entire population of Iran. His elder brother, William O'Dwyer, was the silver-tongued, machine-backed mayor of post-war New York who traveled by chauffeured car and got things done – until creeping scandal pushed him from office, all the way to Mexico City. The intensely loyal but often difficult relationship between these immigrant siblings is only the most attractive of several threads crackling through Robert Polner and Michael Tubridy's excellent biography, 'An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O'Dwyer' (available now from Three Hills Books). The clash of zealotry and conciliation, the question of how best to do the right thing, animates the O'Dwyer story in ways eerie and often striking. Sometimes tilting at windmills and at others slaying dragons, Paul O'Dwyer keeps popping up where the action is, wavy-haired, brogue-talking, and brave. It's 1967: O'Dwyer is in segregated Alligator, Mississippi, watching the local polls to help out civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. It's 1968 and he's manhandled by Chicago cops while trying to save an anti-Vietnam war delegate from a beating at the riotous Democratic National Convention. There he is, sunburned in San Antonio, springing suspected Irish Republican Army sympathizers from federal lock-up. And here he is in 1993, whispering to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries that the time might be right for the U.S. to get off the sidelines and broker an end to decades of violence and repression in Northern Ireland. O'Dwyer, the youngest of 10, grew up in an impoverished hamlet in Ireland's County Mayo. After graduating from a Dickensian church-run school and completing a year of college – supported by the meager salaries of his schoolteacher sisters – he was summoned at age 17 to New York by his four brothers, who'd already escaped across the Atlantic. There he met Bill, who'd never laid eyes on the baby of the family. Bill was something: A seminary dropout, he'd worked as a barman, riverboat furnace-tender, and laborer before joining the NYPD and becoming a lawyer. He flashed a gold tooth. Unlike his younger brothers, he didn't send money home. He steered Paul into law school, and encouraged him to rise through the patronage and compromises of Tammany Hall – the city's ruling Democratic machine – though Paul chose more difficult means of ascent. Eldest and youngest formed a bond that would survive decades of friction over principles and tactics. Bill was elected district attorney of Brooklyn, where he prosecuted the button-men of Murder Inc., but he was stalked by allegations – never proven – of gangland ties that would later undo his mayoralty. Where Bill sent men to the electric chair, Paul defended accused killers bound for the death house. The contrast is even more striking when the book describes how their brother Frank O'Dwyer was himself shot dead in a hold-up, and his killer executed. Paul O'Dwyer didn't let zealotry fence off the road to common ground. Fiercely anti-British, he refused to condemn IRA violence, and also refused to condemn attacks on Catholics by Northern Ireland's Protestant paramilitaries, reasoning – despite his Catholic allegiance – that he couldn't pit one group of Irishmen against another. In the 1970s he caught hell for reaching out to the violent anti-Catholic bigot Andrew Tyrie, a man with plenty of blood on his hands, in search of a way to unite the poor of Belfast, Protestant and Catholic, against their shared poverty and unemployment in the British north. O'Dwyer influence and compromise While Bill O'Dwyer became mayor in 1945, the highest office Paul achieved was that of city council president, in 1973. He lost primary or general election races for mayor, Congress and the U.S. Senate. Friends and foes "painted Paul as more influential than he actually was" in his brother's administration, the authors write. In retirement, Bill said his younger brother "had little patience for me because of compromises that I may have made." "That's perhaps the difference between a successful politician and one who had to learn some things yet," he added. In a now-familiar swing of the pendulum, the man who defeated O'Dwyer in the 1968 Democratic primary for senator from liberal New York, in a year of riots and tumult, ultimately lost – not to a Republican, but to the Conservative party candidate. Fifty-six years later, at another moment of upheaval, a majority of New Yorkers pulled the lever for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election – but Donald Trump still won 30% of the city, the best GOP showing in three decades. As Polner and Tubridy write, O'Dwyer's life is 'relevant to understanding America's and the world's polarization in the twenty-first century.' Sense and sensibility Back to the brothers: Who to love? Bill O'Dwyer took the world as it was, made his deals, and built airports, housing, transit and sewers in America's biggest city. Paul O'Dwyer tried to make the world a better place, catching where he could those who walked life's high-wire without much of a net. He died in 1998, shortly after the Good Friday Agreement ended decades of open conflict in Northern Ireland. As Polner and Tubridy show, to make a go of things – in a story, a city, a republic – you ultimately need both characters, the pragmatist and the purist.
Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- General
- Chicago Tribune
Indiana Landmarks, Decay Devils partner to clean Roosevelt school
Tyrell Anderson, president of Decay Devils, believes there's a lot of community excitement for a project to clean up Theodore Roosevelt High School. 'It's not necessarily excitement for, 'Hey I used to go to school here',' Anderson said, 'but more so, 'I wonder what this space could be.'' Decay Devils, a Gary-based nonprofit, has partnered with Indiana Landmarks to help clean inside the former high school. The two organizations are also seeking volunteers to help with the cleanup, from June 2-6. Those interested in helping cleanup can register at . In May 2024, Roosevelt was named one of the most endangered historic places in the U.S. by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Repair costs are estimated to be about $20 million. The school had a failing heat system in February 2019, which when combined with low temperatures, caused pipes to burst and water sent through the school. Students had to be moved off-site, according to Indiana Landmarks. When the school was built in 1930, Roosevelt was one of three Indiana high schools built exclusively for Black students. In the 1920s, the school district sent 18 Black students to all-white Emerson High School and white students staged a series of protests and walk-outs. City, school and NAACP leaders decided to build a school for Blacks. Roosevelt at one point housed more than 3,000 students. 'It's a big site,' said Blake Swihart, director of Indiana Landmarks' northwest field office. 'It's a very historic site with a lot of emotion, and a lot of meaningful residents and alumni in the city.' It's important for Indiana Landmarks to support communities throughout the state, Swihart said, adding that they want to make sure historic sites are valued and recognized. On April 17, Indiana Landmarks hosted a community meeting where they learned what residents wanted to see from the site. People mentioned a museum and a boutique hotel, among other uses, Swihart said. Swihart believes that it's very important to find a use for the site, especially because of the history it holds. Even before Indiana Landmarks became involved, Swihart said the community has been vocal for years about reusing the Roosevelt site. 'There's been a lot of good collaboration, a lot of good ideas and a lot of interest that we hope will continue as we move along this process,' Swihart said. Anderson sits on the board for Indiana Landmarks, which has helped build a relationship between the two organizations. He also works with Indiana Landmarks' Black Heritage Program about historic structures in Gary. Decay Devils has gone to Roosevelt to archive the site, Anderson said, including identifying books, furniture and memorabilia that needs to be moved. It's important to move everything out so Indiana Landmarks has a blank slate to show interested investors, Anderson said. 'Let's get this building empty, and let's bring in those people who have the funds to push this project forward,' he added. 'So that's pretty much what we'll be asking of the volunteers.' Because Roosevelt was the first high school in Gary for Black students, Anderson believes it's important for the community to protect, especially because Gary has a majority of Black residents. 'Even though I didn't go to Roosevelt personally, and I never set foot in the school until I went with Indiana Landmarks, it's just beautiful to see,' Anderson said. Other developments in the city, including the newly awarded Lake County Convention Center, will help improvements to abandoned structures, Anderson said. 'A lot of investors don't want to feel as though they're investing on their own,' he added. 'They would love to see a collective push moving forward, so we definitely see this as a positive.'
