All of my citations were footnotes, which did not get transferred over in the blogger format. I promise all of my statements are backed up though. This essay gives a brief history of Black relationships to the land, and focuses on how two paradigms of relationship to the land have flourished and intertwined throughout American history. One is 'land as commodity' and the other is 'land as community'. The lens of land as commodity was a very European understanding of land value. Land as community can be seen heavily in West African Customary law (these are very loose assumptions, and should be seen as paradigms rather than historical facts). But the entanglement of these two paradigms is particularly interesting in American history. It is the commodification of land and labor propagated by the colonists protestant land ethic that was a driver of the Trans Atlantic Slave system. Agrarian virtues that were core to American citizenry and ethic were a key argument