Sharecropping law trapped Black farmers between debt servitude and accusations of shiftlessness.

Evidence

Holding out hope for redistributed land as long as they could, rural southern Blacks walked backward into sharecropping, meaning they handed the landowner a share of the crop as payment for the ability to farm there. Crooked landowners maneuvered sharecroppers into debt, and laws prevented sharecroppers from leaving landowners to whom they owed money. Blacks who were able to leave a bad situation took to the road, looking endlessly for ethical landowners. Landowners called this annual movement a sign of Black shiftlessness. Stuck between racist policies and ideas, sharecroppers could not win. Staying often meant servitude, but leaving meant shiftlessness. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 678

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closing line — ‘Staying often meant servitude, but leaving meant shiftlessness’ — is a complete double-bind structure: the policy creates the conditions, then the racist idea (shiftlessness) converts the policy’s victim into the justification for it. This IS the book’s thesis in microcosm.
• QUESTION: The debt-peonage laws are a concrete counterexample to test — here policy clearly precedes and manufactures the racist label, strongly supporting Kendi’s inversion.
• XREF: connects to: Export-oriented monocrop farming traps debt-burdened farmers in spirals ending in suicide — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 285