Forwarded spam and other racism

Let's say you get an e-mail that has been forwarded so many times to so many large groups of recipients that you must scroll for several pages to get past the names to the meat.

Let's say the correspondence contains a subject line filled with an alarming heading that is punctuated by an exclamation point.

Let's say the sender insists that you simply must read this and pass it on because people need to know.

Here's a handy rule of thumb: What you probably have there is some right-wing conspiratorial nonsense.

I got plugged in on one of those electronic atrocities last week. My inclusion was a careless mistake, I am sure.

What had happened was that some right-wing blogger made an accusation and Fox News ended up reporting on the accusation, though not on television, but on its website, as if that didn't count.

So then somebody linked all this and sent it to countless others and then these countless others sent it to countless more.

Somewhere along the way some forwarder declared that, if you doubted any of the information, you should just search on Google. Indeed, a search on Google would take you directly to the nonsense that got linked in the first place.

In this particular e-mail, scores of people were spreading the allegation that President Obama was taking their money and giving it to his fellow black people. They charged that he was doing this on the fraudulent notion that these fellow black people were farmers assigned to a class in a triumphant lawsuit alleging that the federal Agriculture Department discriminated against black farmers from the early 1980s.

The e-mail called this back-door reparations and said Obama's blatant communism had been revealed.

It's all racist, of course. That goes without saying. And it's also complete bull.

In the '90s a few black farmers brought this lawsuit, alleging a pattern in the USDA dating to 1983 by which black farmers were denied the loans, price allowances and disaster relief regularly extended to white farmers.

The Agriculture Department admitted its guilt and settled the case in 1999.

Aggrieved black farmers were paid $50,000 apiece or advised to seek to substantiate larger actual damages. This was done when Obama was not even yet a state legislator in Illinois.

But then it turned out that nearly 70,000 claims came in after the deadline from people asserting they were aggrieved black farmers who had not been properly notified of this claims-filing period. So, in 2008, a young African-American U.S. senator from Illinois, that would be Obama, handled a USDA funding bill to authorize late payments to farmers filing late but found to be otherwise qualified.

This e-mail makes much of the fact that we now confront more than 70,000 claims from supposedly aggrieved black farmers when, in fact, the census of 2007 showed that there were only 36,000 black farmers in the country.

But the affected class encompasses blacks who farmed, or who tried farming, over a period of several years beginning in 1983. That has nothing to do with the number of people calling themselves black farmers in a census shap shot.

Anyway, claims would have to processed and verified before payment.

Then there's this: Though the USDA admits guilt, it hasn't yet paid. It doesn't have the money and Republicans are filibustering any appropriation.

Yet the Obama administration, the very administration said to be conspiring to redistribute wealth to black people, just managed to find an extra $650 million or so outside the appropriation process to distribute mostly to white Southern farmers to help them deal with rainfall during the harvest of 2009.

No doubt right-wingers are saying the left does this same kind of distortion. But sometimes there is one difference. This black farmer conspiracy is not true.

Most of what the left says about Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell -- why, that came right out of their mouths.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.