![warnock legacy racial tyranny warnock legacy racial tyranny](https://southerlymag.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/50632821578_2ceda5a396_k.jpg)
4 See generally Lee Anne Fennell, The Problem of Resource Access, 126 Harv. At its core, property is society’s system for distributing valuable resources. Property law bears a lot of responsibility. Wood, Jess Gilbert & Marilyn Sinkewicz, Black Agrarianism: The Significance of African American Landownership in the Rural South, 83 Rural Socio. “Land represents both a set of values and a store of wealth.” 3 Katrina Quisumbing King, Spencer D. “Most importantly, we might forget that the land beneath our feet holds endless stories of struggle to claim it.” 2 Natasha Bowens, The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming 7, 9 (2015). Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry 152 (1976). “If you remember nothing else in your whole life, Cassie girl, remember this: We ain’t never gonna lose this land. This Article deconstructs our most fundamental land-tenure choice-the fee simple itself-and calls on our collective legal imagination to develop more adaptive, inclusive, and dynamic land-tenure designs rooted in these otherwise overlooked rural places. This Article brings property theory to the table for the first time, arguing that property law itself is not only responsible for the original racialized distributions of agricultural land but also actively perpetuates both ongoing racialized disparities and the currently industrialized and depopulated rural landscape. Existing policy efforts to support beginning farmers have focused primarily on supporting a few private land transactions within existing systems. This Article builds on work of rural sociologists and farm advocates who demonstrate, again and again, that despite a pervasive narrative of rural places dying for want of population and agricultural systems too far gone for reform, the reality is a crowd of emerging farmers-and farmers of color in particular-clamoring for access. This is a critical racial justice issue that converges directly with our impending environmental crisis and the decline of rural communities more generally. Agricultural landownership remains almost entirely-98 percent-white. Today, rather than undoing this racialized legacy, modern property rules only further concentrate and homogenize rural landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of colonialism, slavery, and explicit race-based exclusion in property law. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline.
![warnock legacy racial tyranny warnock legacy racial tyranny](https://i2-prod.walesonline.co.uk/incoming/article13857984.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/Bristol-City-v-Cardiff-City-Sky-Bet-Championship-Ashton-Gate.jpg)
America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it.