How Department of Agriculture Is Reckoning With Racial Inequity
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.5 • 24.9K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Ximena Bustillo, and congressional correspondent Claudia Grisales.
This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Chase Caracostas in Austin, Texas, where I'm about to finish my first week working for KUT, the local NPR affiliate. |
| 0:09.6 | I am so excited to be here and to be back in Austin where I went to college and where I just fell in love with this city. |
| 0:16.1 | And I'm also so excited to be involved with NPR. This podcast was recorded at. |
| 0:21.6 | That is a great station and welcome to Public Radio World. It's one-ten Eastern on Tuesday, March 7th. |
| 0:28.1 | Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still be loving every minute of being here and every minute of being involved in Public Radio, |
| 0:36.2 | where just to record this, I unplugged my fridge because it was making too much noise. |
| 0:41.5 | Yeah, nice. Enjoy the show. |
| 0:43.5 | He knows what's up. |
| 0:47.5 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detro, I cover the White House. |
| 0:51.1 | I'm Kemena Bustillo and I cover politics. |
| 0:53.1 | And I'm Claudio Garizales, I cover Congress. |
| 0:55.1 | And a big-bodied administration goal going into office was to address historic inequities in federal agencies, |
| 1:01.1 | where two years in and at this point the results are kind of mixed. |
| 1:03.9 | Hemena, you spent a lot of time covering agriculture issues and you have recently taken a very close look at how the Department of Agriculture has tried to deal with decades of discrimination against black farmers. |
| 1:15.8 | Yeah, no exactly. And this all in part dates back over a century, right? |
| 1:22.6 | There has been proven discrimination whether that is farmers of color, particularly black farmers that went into their county committee offices, |
| 1:31.5 | where it is that they can access the department to ask about loans and programs. |
| 1:35.6 | And they were outright rejected, you know, often told to go away to leave, to never come back. |
| 1:40.6 | But even other instances like they filled out the application wrong and no one helped them out or no one told them what options were. |
| 1:47.6 | And I'm so glad that we're talking about this and that you did all of this reporting because I have followed this issue a little bit with how it is bubbled up in Congress over the last couple of years, |
| 1:58.6 | which is something we're going to talk about later in the podcast and that to put it kind of charitable, reduces it a little bit too much. |
| 2:05.1 | But we're getting into the details with and let's rewind one key moment to start this conversation with is the fact that the agency settled a lawsuit back in 1999 |
... |
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