Because, on average, black people are more economically disadvantaged than white people.

Choosing to explicitly buy from black farmers will, on average, tend to support those with the least financial means out of the general population of farmers, whereas choosing to explicitly buy from white farmers will, on average, tend to support those who are already more financially advantaged.

One side is directly choosing to help those most likely to be economically disadvantaged, the other would be explicitly ignoring those with the least means in order to help those who already have the most, thus the situations are not quite comparable.

I personally would prefer an index that directly assessed farmers based on overall wealth to determine who you should buy from, but because that's extraordinarily difficult to constantly update & maintain, verify, etc, it can just be easier to divide among racial lines since that still tends to produce a grouping that is relatively similar.

Well why do you think it is? Genuinely curious

This is a remedial question, but that doesn't make it a bad question. It is a hard problem to solve, and calling an advantage based on race somehow not racist does sound paradoxical at first glance. It's important to be able to entertain the explanation without outright assuming you're being attacked by a bunch of obtuse racists.

Hopefully we agree that:

• black americans are at a statistically significant socioeconomic disadvantage compared to white americans, both historically and to this day, and
• this is a direct result of a history of systematic disadvantages specifically targeting them based on their race

Let's pretend the second bullet point has been solved, that systemic racism is over and done, and we've established a perfectly equal union. Even if that's the case, we are left with the first bullet point as an ongoing problem. The challenge is now, how do you undo the very apparent damage that our history of racism caused, without specifically giving advantages to that group based on their race? And the short answer to a very complex question is: you can't.

So the US government instituted "Affirmative Action" the goal of which was to deliberately give a targeted advantage to people who have had a history of targeted disadvantages in this country. This catches you up to roughly the 1960s.

But in the last 40 years or so, we continue to see lower class areas of the US disproportionately filled with black americans, and we also see widening wealth inequality affecting virtually everyone. So naturally we also see an increase of non-black people asking the same question as you: "I'm having a hard time too, why are they getting an advantage based on their race? That's racism!"

The solution was to tax the rich, reduce wealth inequality, and continue to normalize disproportionate demographics. Instead, the wealthy used populism to hijack the republican party, and convince white americans that the minorities recieving these benefits were their enemy. And after 40ish years of pushing this narrative, they succeeded.

With the republican takeover of the federal govt, we can be virtually assured that any ongoing attempts to normalize these unfair demographics will be abandoned, at least at the federal level.

But it's still a problem, just now one for the people and the states to solve. If you want to support black-owned farmers in an attempt to help pull historically disadvantaged groups out of poverty, you can. If not, that's fine, just at least please vote for legislation that intends to reduce wealth inequality. (Note that history has exactly two ways of reducing wealth inequality: high taxes on the rich, or war. The question isn't whether wealth will get redistributed, it's how).

Tl; dr Yeah, it's an advantage based on race to solve a problem caused by a history of disadvantages based on race.

Lol. Lmao.