The “social justice” movement that’s taken the nation by storm since last summer has descended as leftists employ absurd lies to impose glaring injustices. Perhaps the biggest of these lies being spread by leftist lawmakers is that Vermonters killed off all the Native Americans and must now pay economic penance.
A vile bill, introduced by 18 misinformed legislators, incorporates fraudulent claims to statutorily inflict hateful vengeance in the name of “social justice.”
H.273, “An act relating to promoting racial and social equity in land access,” proposes to contribute $10 million to a BIPOC-operated bank which will administer the funds for BIPOC applicants to purchase land or housing in “every town in Vermont.” To justify this, the bill incorporates the following fallacious drivel:
“The foundation of our current economic system was built on land that was taken from Abenaki and other Indigenous persons, and the structures of our economic system were constructed with the labor of enslaved persons … The laws and policies of our State and nation severed Indigenous persons from their land while denying them, Black persons, and other Persons of Color from having the opportunity to access and to own land.”
That all sounds horrid, of course, but here’s the thing… It never happened. Not in Vermont, at least. This statute re-writes Vermont’s history, replacing its past with fiction. It attributes violence against Abenakis to all Vermonters, when the reality is that the vast majority of white migrants settled lands nearly empty of Abenaki, back in the 1800s. The Abenaki were nomadic and did not “own land” to be “taken” in the western sense, and the “economic system” alleged in the statute was white subsistence farming, which built Vermont’s economy for some two hundred years—after most Abenaki were gone. The bill alleges that “Centuries of genocide, eugenics, broken treaties, displacement, and land dispossession placed persons of the Abenaki Nations and other Indigenous persons living in Vermont at a great social disadvantage.” While it is true that Abenaki were targeted for forced sterilization, that was a progressive policy of which most white Vermonters were simply not complicit—indeed, poor white farmers were themselves targeted.
The statute also conflates the Abenaki and slaves, yet slavery was prohibited in Vermont by its “laws and policies”—the first Constitution in the nation, in fact, banning slavery. Vermont is so extremely white today because slavery was almost nonexistent in the state’s history. There is no record of Vermont “denying… [people of color]… from having access to land.” It just did not occur, not “systemically,” not ever.
In truth, the historic basis for this kind of legislation is entirely imagined.
Photo of a plaque on the wall of the Vermont State House. The Vermont historical archives are filled with Vermont legislative denunciations of slavery.
TRUE BIPOC VERMONT
Black people have never lived in Vermont in significant numbers: the 1960 Census (Table 15) reflects 572 Black residents in 1920, 568 in 1930, 584 in 1940, 443 in 1950, and 519 in 1960. The 1910 U.S. Census identified 34 Native Americans residing in Vermont in 1890, 5 in 1900, and 26 in 1910. But the evidence that this demographic makeup is a result of discrimination—or “barriers to the equal enjoyment and economic benefit of land access and homeownership opportunities based on race and ethnicity,” as H. 273 alleges—is scant.
At one point, the bill even calls out Jim Crow laws… (Vermont, of course, was not a Jim Crow state).
Instead, the bill makes a huge show of condemning historic grievances that “BIPOC” Americans may have with the federal government: the General Allotment Act of 1887 (the Dawes Act); policies started 1934 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation that were criticized for “denying Black and brown residents equal access to home mortgages, often offering subprime loans that came with unusually severe terms”; or the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act which created the G.I. Bill of Rights (“Funds from the bill were only made available to White soldiers returning from war and not BIPOC veterans.”). None of these policies were enacted in Vermont or by Vermonters. At one point, the bill even calls out Jim Crow laws: “The rate of ‘Black land-loss’ can be attributed to Jim Crow, racist practices conducted by the USDA and decades of farm busts.” (Vermont, of course, was not a Jim Crow state).
Still, H. 273 seeks to fund land acquisition for those “who have not had equal access to public or private economic benefits due to race, ethnicity, sex, geography, language preference, immigrant or citizen status, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic status, or disability status.” Hundreds of thousands of white Vermonters, meanwhile, have endured a long history of crushing poverty—a history that “native” Vermonters well know, but a history which those who condemn them recast as “white privilege.”
Most “native” Vermonters (now a pejorative term) understand and are humbled by this history. Poor houses existed in numerous Vermont towns. Sheep farming was once relatively profitable, but the wool market peaked in 1851. Then, Vermont shifted its agriculture to dairy—first butter and cheese lugged to Boston; later, fresh milk. But the opening of the railroads undermined dairy prices, and Vermont dairy farming has been in decline ever since. Over the decades, from 1930 to the present, Vermont dairy suffered an “economic freefall.” Vermont’s dairy farms—its primary industry—shrank from 27,000 in 1927 to barely 600 today. Milk prices dropped by more than half during the Great Depression and never fully rebounded.
Social Justice Warriors proclaim that today’s black Vermonters are owed money and land by their white neighbors…
There were a few black farmers through this period, but blacks were mostly spared the abject misery, alcoholism, and despair that strangled white farm families who often lacked food, clothing, and dental or health care. This is what H.273 now fantastically alleges was a period of white privilege enabled by the exploitation of black and Abenaki labor.
Now Social Justice Warriors proclaim that today’s black Vermonters are owed money and land by their white neighbors, for nebulous crimes such as those routinely alleged (and far from proven) against Abenaki natives. “Native peoples” are routinely invoked by just-off-the-bus agitators who claim that only Native Americans (and them) have the right to declare who owns the land. As former legislator Kiah Morris proclaimed, “Unless you are First Nations, you have no right to claim who are real Vermonters. Nativist political platforms are the basest level of discourse.” SJWs use allegations of historic Native suffering to stake their claim—Kiah herself moved to Vermont from Chicago (where presumably, only native people have a right to claim who are really Chicagoans).
Xusana Davis, Vermont’s Executive Director of Racial Equity, echoes this same manipulation. Having moved to Vermont from New York City six months before COVID-19 struck, Xusana stated in a recent podcast:
“What’s most interesting to me is that when we think about a typical Vermonter, it is often the case that people envision somebody who may be white. Oftentimes, people who are white who maybe are born and raised in Vermont, they’ll say, ‘I’m a native Vermonter.’ And I always think, oh, you’re Abenaki? Because if you’re really a native Vermonter, then you’re probably indigenous to the land.”
But there are no Abenaki “indigenous to the land” in that there are no Abenaki with intact culture, language, or genetics. The Cro Magnon have no indigenous sites remaining either, so perhaps exploitation of them can be similarly understood. Why do newly arrived BIPOC ideologues possess the authority to exact retribution from white Vermonters who have lived on family land for 200 uninterrupted years?
John Klar is an Attorney, farmer, and author. Mostly farmer… And Regular Contributor to GraniteGrok and VermontGrok.
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