- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by (upbeat music) - [Chris Norris] Slavery is a stain on America's fabric that cannot be removed.
However, can the harm caused by slavery be repaired?
Is reparations enough?
How much would that cost and what should be on Black America's atonement agenda?
(upbeat music continues) - Hello, I'm Chris Norris and welcome to "The Atonement Agenda" Over the next three episodes we will define and contextualize reparations, explore how it could close the racial wealth gap and create equity in the areas of home ownership, education and business.
- So the root word of reparations is repair and since the harm was not just economic, that means the repair has to be dynamic as well.
If every Black person in America was to get a check, nothing would change.
The system is still there.
Everything that's causing the harm would still remain intact.
So the money really wouldn't help.
It could help in some aspects, but as far the system still being ingrained with white supremacy, that will remain.
So we would need a fundamental change of the whole system.
- I'd like to welcome my guests here.
First Jordan Harris, State Representative, he's also the House Democratic Whip.
Lisa Sharon-Harper, author of "Fortune; How Race Broke My Family and the World and How to Repair It All" Khaleef Alexander, co-founder of Millennial Juneteenth and Reverend Naomi Washington Leaphart, Director of Faith Based and Interfaith Affairs for the city of Philadelphia.
Thank you guys all for joining me.
So I wanted to start with, many people think reparations is simply the federal government cutting every Black American a check.
I think we can all agree that's an oversimplification.
So let's start with you Rep Harris, how would you define reparations?
- Well, reparations is, when you look at the root of the word is about making repairs, but I think what you have to understand is the totality of what we're actually talking about.
I think a lot of people get turned off because they feel as though they're being responsible for the sins of their father.
That's not actually what we're saying, what we're saying is, the government needs to understand and address the fact that there are disparities that have been generational, right.
For example, and this just may seem small, but there's a lot of African Americans who don't know how to swim, right.
And you ask yourself, well, why is that?
Well that's because there were segregation, during segregation times, there were pools for white Americans and there were pools for Black Americans.
Those Black Americans' pools were unsafe and you couldn't go swimming in those pools.
The white American pools were nice, right.
So now you have generations of Black Americans who grew up not knowing how to swim.
It seems simple, right.
But when you think about what we're talking about with reparations, that's what we're talking about.
We're talking about generations of being disenfranchised.
And because of that disenfranchisement, if you wanna fix it, you actually gotta address all of those things.
So, no, it's not about just cutting, you know, all Black Americans a big check, it's about talking about.
- But that is a part of it.
- What?
Money is a part of it, but it's also talking about all of those things that happen and how do we actually right those wrongs to level the playing field.
- Okay, we'll dive more into that.
- I think that I would say it exactly the same, in terms of repair.
It is about repairing what race, this construct that we have broke in our world, the hierarchies of human belonging.
They were established in 1662 and 1664 in the very first colonies and not abolished when we became the United States of America, instead further entrenched.
And so we have not only generational wealth gap that starts, that we can trace back to post-Reconstruction, but we also, we go all the way back.
So we ask the question, what is it gonna take to repair what these hierarchies of human belonging have created in the world?
And ultimately it's not just a check, but it has to include the check.
- Khaleef.
- So I would say that reparations is reparative justice.
And when we look at reparative justice, we have to also look at labor and wages.
So reparations, it has to be a monetary thing, but it also has to be a benefits thing also because when we just started to look at the time in which Black Americans were working for free for over 200 years, we have to really start to dissect that amount of money, time, energy that we spent building this great country.
This country is, I mean, according to other people, is the greatest country in modern history.
So when we look at the economic wealth and then we look at the wealth gap between Black folk and white folk in this country is anywhere between 14 to 20 trillion dollars, according to Dr. William Sandy Darity from Duke University.
So we have to, we really had to be mindful in that component, but the reparative justice is the key part of reparations.
And I think we're moving forward to it.
- Reverend.
- Well, you know, I think two things, one is, repair can't happen, which I think is key to reparations without confession, without acknowledgement that there has been a breach of relationship, that promises were broken to Black folks in this country.
And so, you know, as a faith leader, I'm also concerned about the ways in which this country refuses to admit its own wrongdoing.
And that as Rep Harris has said, is not about individuals feeling shamed about what happened in the past, but it's about this country saying we are sorry that we disadvantaged so many people.
And then I think it's about money, but it's also about power, right.
Because you can have money in your pocket and have no power.
- That's right.
- Or institutional power or systemic power, right.
So I think an aspect of reparations is also about redefining power in ways that include Black folk.
It's about giving access to power.
It's about distributing power and ultimately, sustaining power because we don't want this to be, you know, dependent on who's in office or dependent on, you know, the economy.
We need to be able to sustain real power in real ways.
And so I think reparations needs to address that too.
- So we've all agreed reparations is about repair, right?
But can you actually repair the cause, the harm caused by slavery?
I mean, I know, we talk about the $12 trillion, $12 or $13 trillion, we talk about changing laws, but does that actually repair the harm?
Like the emotional scars or is it just as much as we can do?
Go ahead.
- I think, you know, in.
"Fortune" The last part of the book, which traces 10 generations of my family's story, asking how did race break the world and break my family and how do we repair it.
In the last section of the book, we talk about truth telling, reparation, and forgiveness.
And so, and the forgiveness part is not popular.
It's not the part that anybody really wants to talk about.
But Archbishop Desmond Tutu said something that was really profound in his book "No Future Without Forgiveness" He said, there's no way that we, people who have been tied to our oppressor, needing to get stuff from them because they are the majority and they are the ones with power, for the things that cannot be repaired.
We remain tied to them if we keep demanding.
For example, my great-grandfather Hiram Lawrence, owned a whole block of homes in the old community called Elmwood here in Philadelphia, back in the 1940s and 50s, a block.
But that neighborhood, his whole community was seized by eminent domain.
That neighborhood is not coming back.
He died that year, we believe of a broken heart.
That's not coming back.
I could demand that we bring that back until the day I die and what do, what happens?
I die with a deficit.
So healing requires release of the expectation that they would fill our need for the things that cannot be repaired.
But that's when, and I am also a faith leader.
That's when we turn to God and we say, okay, God, you have cattle on a thousand hills, you ante up.
And I think it's God's good pleasure to give us what we need.
And sometimes what that looks like is by changing laws and you can't bring back the community, but you can bring back the legacy.
- Khaleef, you had it quickly.
You had a reaction to the word forgiveness.
I take it that you don't agree.
- Well, I would just say more so, you know, it's not necessarily, we won't forgive because I think that some of our ancestors have already done that.
I think something that we really need to address as a community, which is dealing with, I don't really like to use the term white supremacy, I like to use the term, the dominant society of our dominant society.
So with dealing with the dominant society, we have had ancestors who have forgiven, but we haven't had ancestors who have become politically mature enough to really understand as Malcolm X says, to really understand what is actually going on in the system that we're in.
So since we're not paying attention, how can we forgive if we're still fighting?
- Yeah, I wanted you to, take on that, but I also wanted you to talk about whether we talk about reparations in a lot of laws and bills, but is reparations solely a political construct or is there also a moral argument to be made around that?
- Yeah.
I think that, that there is, and, and I agree that that reparations then is a kind of aspirational destination.
We, we won't fully arrive to the point of total repair.
And I think that speaks to the depth of the breach, right?
As you say, there's some stuff that we can't get back.
So this is aspirational.
We're not talking about, you know, a life for a life or an eye for an eye as a way to make us whole, but I think there is something morally available in reparations for all of us.
And what do I mean by that?
For people in dominant society who participate in reparations work with a posture of humility and a posture of wanting to be accountable to the folks that they have harmed, there is moral transformation available for them, right?
And so that's why this is a moral issue.
There's a spiritual bankruptcy that exists among white folk, among people in the dominant society.
And so in order to be repaired spiritually, I think it's important for white folks and other folks who support this kind of hierarchical way of living to, to participate in reparations.
- Your reaction to everything you've heard, state rep, particularly that reparations is aspirational.
We may not fully reach that, that pinnacle repair.
- No, I, I agree.
I think there are just some things like we can't bring back your, you know, great grandfather and, and, and that, that's just that that can't happen.
Right?
But there are things that we can do.
And, you know, as a lawmaker, there are things that I think need to be put in place that what I call it level the playing field.
For example, when we talk about finance, there are two men, two women, whoever are sitting at the table who are cutting a deal together while they're at that table, because they grew up together.
They're at that table because their parents grew up together.
They're at that table.
Cause their grandparents grew up together.
There's no way that we can fix that.
You know what I mean?
When, when, when somebody needs a financing for a deal and they can pick up the phone and call a banker that they've known because you know, they grew up in that person's house and they grew up with those kids.
And like when people talk about reparation, I don't think we talk about that.
We don't talk about the fact that there have been generations of relationships, of information, of, of activity.
- Networks.
- [Lisa] That's true.
- [Rep. Harris] of networks of things.
That Black folks just haven't had the access to, right?
The access to think about it this way, how many brothers and sisters, you know, who are amazing cooks and chefs, but they still cooking in their kitchen because they don't have access to the capital to get from the kitchen, to the restaurant, all of the brothers and sisters, you know, that can put together a garment for me, you and everybody else.
But they're still sewing, in their house because they can't have access to the capital.
That's a part of, of, of what we've had to deal with as Black folk of not having access.
So for me as a lawmaker, it's like, how do we now change that narrative, right?
And level the playing field so that you do have access, you do build those relationships.
You do get to, to a position where, you know, you don't just have to be the creative mind cause you know, everybody loves to use Black folks' creativity, but they don't like paying for it.
Or they don't like taking that Black person and putting them in the position where they can now be the executive producer and not just the actor.
- Mm.
- So, so, so for me, reparations has to be that, that is a part of what we're actually, for me, what we're actually talking about.
I'm with I'm with the Reverend on, on the moral piece, I go to church on Sunday.
I'm with you, but on Monday through Saturday, I'm also talking about the finances that has to happen because a part of the power piece is the money too.
- [Lisa] Oh, absolutely.
- That that has to happen.
It has to happen in tandem.
- Absolutely.
Let's take a pause here.
We'll go right back to you, Lisa.
- I'm a member of Green Street Meeting in Germantown and inspired by many conversations over many years around racism since 2014 and an examination of the wealth that we held and did, did our distribution of this wealth match our values and our commitment to anti-racism.
We created a reparations committee and that reparations committee worked for two years thinking of projects, what project would we fund?
And then came to the conclusion that what we needed to do was commit to reparations.
We needed to commit to that.
And we looked at at what that, what reparations is, we looked at the UN definition of reparations.
We looked at a video by Miss Kimberly, who is an activist in Minneapolis who has this powerful analogy for the generational theft of Black wealth over time.
She talks about how, how it's like you're playing Monopoly and you're giving money to the side, the, the, your opposing side.
And so we, we sort of educated the meeting about that.
We talked about how do you budget for reparations and, and really a, a really good rule of thumb is that if you, if you have different generational privilege, you should be budgeting about half of your disposable income to, to reparations.
- Lisa, you were gonna say something right before we took that break.
- Yeah, I was.
I was thinking how we, we can't repair what we don't understand when we don't understand how it broke.
So we have to understand how did it break.
And when we think about, and, and when, when we think about when and how it broke, you have to trace it all the way back to like Plato.
Plato created race literally was the first person in Western civilization to pontificate on this thing called race.
And he thought of race as being something that ordered society, the gold people, he literally said, there's a gold race, a silver race.
And all the rest, they will serve society in different ways.
His acolyte Aristotle is the one who really took it up a notch.
And he, he made hierarchy out of it.
He said that if you've been conquered, then you have proven that you are created to be enslaved.
- Mm.
- And then, huh.
And then bring that a thousand years forward.
And you have Pope Nicholas the Fifth.
And this is where the whole world changes.
Pope Nicholas the Fifth has a, a family friend come to him and say, Pope, I'm gonna go exploring and I need a blessing.
And so the Pope says, Hey, I'll give you a blessing and I'll do you one better.
If you come across land, that's not civilized or Christian.
You get to claim that land for the throne and enslave its people.
And so from that, we get North America, South America, Central America, all of colonized Africa, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Australia, and all the rest, the world, as we know it today.
So when we ask the question of how, how do we repair?
What, what, what our people have gone through.
We have to ask the question, when did it break?
Now we see an example actually in scripture of a really profound, act of reparation.
The Gibeonites come to King David and say, hello, Mr. David Mr. Saul, the king before you, tried to commit genocide against our people.
And he had just, David had just been asking God, why is there a famine in the land?
Why is there a famine?
And, and then they said, we have a bone to pick with you.
And he said, oh, that's why there's a famine in the land.
So he said to them, something that was profound, he said, what do you say that we need to do for you in order for things to be made well for you, he did not say, oh, I'm so sorry Saul did that.
That's not my bad.
Right?
He did not say, I'll take my counsel back and figure out how to help you.
What he said, what he did was he evened the power in the, in the relationship because that's how it broke.
- Mm - That's how it broke for us too.
The power dynamic was broken the first minute that that explorer came to the coast of Africa and said, I have the power to enslave you.
- I appreciate that context, Reverend, what, what Lisa described was that atonement or was that reparations and are those words synonymous?
- Well, you know, it's interesting.
I think this is a good segue to talk about the role of religion in perpetuating the evils that we're talking about, trying to address today.
I think the fact that oppression was sanctified and I'm, I'm using that word very intentionally.
Yes.
By the religious powers that be, means that we should start perhaps involving religious systems in the work of repair, this word atonement, right, has a spiritual and religious connotation, Christian communities talk about atonement to kind of explain the meaning of the death of Jesus.
What did Jesus's death accomplish?
Right.
And so it's, it's fitting that we're using that word to get at the kind of spiritual origins of reparations.
I think atonement is about ridding oneself of the moral bankruptcy, right?
That, that facilitates this kind of oppression and this kind of harm in the first place.
And then reparations is the practical manifestation of that spiritual commitment.
So it first requires a kind of spiritual humility to say, we, we even did this in God's name.
Right.
So we are, we are responsible to you, but we also have to answer to God, right.
For using God's name to oppress others.
And then once we do that, we look at, alright.
How can this practically manifest among us?
It's not okay just to pray or just to say, I'm sorry, but to, to put some money on that, on that too.
- Well that's a good transition.
Khaleef I'll come to you in a second.
Rep., let's, let's talk about the actual manifestation.
So the state of California established on the state law first in the nation task force to study reparations, that task force recently voted to base compensation based on lineage rather than race, based on your view of the political structures in, in the state and how things are working, how close is Pennsylvania to something like that?
- Mm, wow.
Pennsylvania is definitely not California.
And, and, and sometimes when trying to get things done, I wish we were a little bit more, but, you know, I, you know, there have been a piece of legislation introduced in the general assembly around reparations, but I don't, I don't think in its current construct, the general assembly is ready to deal with with reparations.
Quite honestly, I don't necessarily know if the community at large is ready to deal with reparations or have a serious and significant conversation about what reparation means, what atonement means and what all those things.
I mean, I agree with the Reverend about, you know, reparations being the manifestation, right.
Of, of, of atonement.
But when you actually look at what I talked about, reparations being repaired, but you know, atonement kind of takes as a step further, right?
When you look at atonement, you talk about reconciliation.
When you talk about reconciliation, you talk about restoration.
So we have to, in my mind, as a government, get to a place where one, the first thing is admitting that we were wrong.
Right?
You can't atone, you can't restore, you can't repair.
You can't have reparations without first admitting we were wrong for what we did.
Right.
So once we've made that declaration, and I think the declaration is important.
I mean, we, we need those declarations in our own personal relationships.
Right.
We can't act like you just going wrong me, and then I'm gonna be okay tomorrow.
I mean, we might be able to work together.
We might, but I'm still thinking in the back of my mind, you wrong me and you never apologize for it.
So that apology is important because it puts on the record that the government is saying, there was something that we did that we should not have done Once that happens, right.
Then we need to get to the process of, to your point asking the, the, the aggrieved group, not us talk, but asking the aggrieved group, what is it that we can do to reconcile and repair, but after reconcile and repair, how do we get to a real restore?
Because for me, that is the, the, the capstone to the conversation around reparations and atonement is that there has to be a full restoration for the people who have been aggrieved.
- Khaleef, what do you think about that?
And why is it so hard for why do you think it's so difficult for the federal government to apologize for what everyone objectively agrees was a brutal stain on the fabric?
- Right.
Well, first thing I, I don't really think that the government wants to apologize.
It's kind of like when we start to look at amendments, for example, we like to see that amendments are kind of like the apology for wrongdoing.
So the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment, they said, well, you can't vote, you can't do this, you can't do that.
So now let's give you the opportunity to do such.
But when you really look at it, that's them admitting that they were wrong.
So that's kind of like an apology, but it's not an apology, if that makes sense.
I don't think that the government is ready because the government does not want to give reparations.
They have H.R.
40, but H.R.
40 is only there as a joke.
It's not.
- And for our audience, H.R.
40 is a, the study law, the study.
- [Khaleef] The study to, for reparations introduced by John Conyers in I believe 1989.
Now Sheila Jackson Lee, she has, the legislation has been introduced.
- [Chris] And this is just to create a task force to study reparations.
- [Lisa] It's more than that now, actually.
- Okay.
(group laughs) - It is more than that now.
Dr. Daniels is the, - Ron?
- the head.
Yeah.
Dr. Ron Daniels is the head of the, the reparations task force commission.
And what he's, what they have actually just recently determined is that they have added to the legislation, not only a study, but also recommendations for how then to move forward with reparations.
- Can I, I just want to rebut that, not really rebut, but I, I would like to just throw some insight for the, for the viewer.
So because Ron Daniels, we just gotta give a backtrack of who this guy is.
Ron Daniels.
He is the founder of NAARC, but he's also the founder of N'COBRA.
N'COBRA is the organization who's been dealing with reparations for - N'COBRA is the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.
- Absolutely.
They've been dealing with reparations for 30 years.
And to everyone's point, where has reparations been in 30 years?
We, we don't know.
We've we're just now talking about it in 2022, after a timeframe where as though it, it is just been a joke.
It's just been something that people thought could happen.
But back to Ron Daniels, now his organization, they received $3 million from the MacArthur Foundation for non-lobbying work.
In fact, N'COBRA received $1.5 million in IBEW, another organization that they're all in cahoots with, they received $1.5 million for non-lobbying work of reparations.
So when we start looking at reparations, y'all heard me say as a political fight, people are receiving money for non-political work on reparations, which does not make sense, but to take it a step further, the commission that they're, that they've created or this task force that they wanna create out of H.R.
40, those people that will be on that task force, they'll be getting paid to be on the task force.
And it comes from the N'COBRA and the NAARC axis.
So I'm saying all that to say, when we look at H.R.
40, it's still just a study.
And even with the study, the study is supposed to create proposals after the fact, which that proposal will still be, will still have to be a legislation that is produced after the fact that still has to get voted on by the House and the Senate.
So H.R.
40 - [Chris] You're not a fan.
- HR 40 is a nothing burger.
- Can I just respond to that?
- Yeah, we got 30 seconds.
- Okay.
Well, within 30 seconds he, H.R.
40 has movement behind it now and we have to operate within the system we have, which requires legislation.
And there's also TRHT, the H.Con.Res.19 Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Act, which would move in cohort in, in concert with it, moving all of it forward.
- Moving forward, indeed.
And we'll be moving forward next week in this conversation, Lisa Sharon-Harper, State Representative Jordan Harris, Khaleef Alexander, Reverend Naomi Washington Leaphart.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We're just getting started.
Join us next week.
when my guests will unpack how reparations can narrow the wealth and opportunity gap in home ownership and education, as always, we want to hear from you.
Email your comments and thoughts to talkback@whyy.org or tweet me @floodthedrummer For WHYY, I'm Chris Norris.
Goodnight.
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