What Is Owed?

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:08] We start this episode on the continent of Africa. Off the coast of Ghana, at the place where many Africans last touched the sands of their homeland before they were sold into slavery. A place called Elmina Castle. The whitewashed fort was built in 1482. The Portuguese used it as a warehouse for traded goods from nearby African kingdoms, exchanging guns and horses for gold and ivory. But history shows that the Portuguese soon found more commercial value in the people they were trading with than the precious materials they obtained. I mean, a castle was transformed into an important outpost for the transatlantic slave trade. Ships came in carrying goods and left with their hull stacked with bodies of captains. This continued for over 300 years. Much of Elmina Castle still stands today, though it's not a slave outpost anymore. It's a museum. It's even got a special designation as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Tens of thousands of people visit it every year to learn of the atrocities that took place within the castle's walls. But its current caretakers referred to Elmina by another name, though a dungeon. And they say visiting this place has another purpose for those who seek to address the past.

Tour Guide Otto [00:01:43] Visiting the dungeons would not only serve as just visiting. It becomes a place where as a people, we connect to. Correct. And by that, securing the future for everyone.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:01] That's Otto, a tour guide who takes visitors on the journey through the dungeons. The tour covers the accounts of captured Africans who were beaten and broken down in the presence of their captors, as well as the rape of women and girls. He says revisiting the story of the site's past is only meaningful if it informs the future.

Tour Guide Otto [00:02:22] The practicality and everything on the floor when they were sleeping in it during the vomit menstrual blood. And you seriously cannot underestimate the heat and the stench and bees, among others, explains why they were dying and those that died were thrown into the sea. We can never be in a position to truly comprehend what they suffered. You just can't imagine that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:51] The place where Otto says all of this culminated was the castle sole exit for the enslaved. It was one of the only spots where they saw any light within the dungeon. It's called the Door of No Return, no more than a few feet tall and a few feet wide. You almost have to duck down or turn sideways to pass through it. It was through this door that countless captives were taken away from their families and communities, and sold into slavery in foreign lands. It was here the enslaved were forced into the African diaspora. And it was this departure point, Otto says, where the fate of the enslaved and their descendants changed forever.

Tour Guide Otto [00:03:35] Nobody came in here and went back from here to the boats and that's it. And what I try to let people know is that in the life of a captive, life never got better. It only got worse.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:47] Looking at the door of no Return in this context has given Ghana and people who can make the trip. One way to respond to the harm. In 2019, the country started a campaign inviting those in the diaspora to reconnect to the continent. But this ancestral reflection journey to an African nation, acknowledging the damage done on its shores, is just one example of repair. In the U.S., there's a different set of harms. Different calls for repair and different points in history that the harm is tied to. This conversation is becoming one of the most important parts of the resurging reparations movement. It's defining what the harms are, how to remedy them, and who should benefit. I'm Soraya Wintersmith. This is what is owed.

Pre-roll 

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:01] For this episode, we're thinking through a controversial part of reparations. In some cases, it's also a question that derails conversations about potential programs. We're talking about the different ways folks are trying to address who should get reparations. And surprise, it's pretty messy. The truth is, there are endless ways to think about who qualifies for reparations. It depends mostly on what harm you're trying to address and who you think suffers as a result of that harm. You might consider the harm endured by black veterans, who were largely excluded from the social welfare benefits offered through the 1944 Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly known as the GI Bill. Or you might consider black people living in low income communities who were some of the most overpoliced and disproportionately incarcerated during the decades of the so-called war on drugs. And then there are black elders who lived through the period known as Jim Crow, where racial segregation was widely practiced and in many places, legally sanctioned. Still, for many people, the modern reparations movement returns to the roots of the original proposal, giving the formerly enslaved and on ramp into economic self-sufficiency. Post-Civil War. In Boston. The city now has a reparations task force that likewise begins with a focus on slavery. The task force has been directed to address reparations for the descendants of formerly enslaved black people. That language is critically important. For Aziza Robinson Goodnight.

Aziza Robinson Goodnight [00:01:49] We did push the mayor and the city council to use that language.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:54] Robinson Good night is an activist in Boston who helped draft the legislation that made the Reparations Task Force. She says it's important to focus reparations on the descendants of freedmen, because it was these families who were first cheated and then excluded from the nation's wealth for generations. But focusing only on this group could also mean a large number of black people in Boston aren't considered nearly 40% of the Boston metro areas black population is foreign born, and they come from multiple countries. The Dominican Republic, Cape Verde, Haiti, Somalia, Jamaica, Nigeria. That makes the city of Boston and its surrounding suburbs home to one of the most diverse black populations in the entire country, and they may not be eligible for reparations if the task force ultimately focuses only on the descendants of black people formerly enslaved in the US. Robinson Goodnight says she had to push the city to understand why that language mattered.

Aziza Robinson Goodnight [00:02:54] It was hard. It was hard to work with city councilors. I don't feel like we were actually working together. I feel like it was a thing that people understood that needed to get passed. It was a thing that was popular after Evanston had passed in Amherst had passed. But to to really get full understanding of why a certain group of individuals that are asking for certain thing, I still don't think there's full understanding.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:21] Robinson good night is not alone. There's a growing movement of people who share her views. And if there's anyone you can call a champion for restricting reparations eligibility, Yvette Carnell, is it?

Yvette Carnell [00:03:36] Reparations is a sacred claim. It's not something that I'm willing to negotiate away, not 1%.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:41] Carnell is the president of the Ada's Advocacy Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to pushing for a federal program to pay reparations to the American descendants of slaves. That's where the acronym Ada's comes from. And that's who Carnell says should be uniquely eligible for reparations from the U.S. government.

Yvette Carnell [00:04:02] We're talking about people who can trace their lineage to slavery, the institution.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:06] Carnell won't say precisely how many members her foundation has. She only shares that she has a goal to have ten chapters in place by the end of 2024. Boston, by the way, is one of the first places to set up a local Ada chapter. But before the Ada Foundation, there was a digital Ada movement. Carnell takes credit for popularizing the acronym through that effort. She says it started around 2016 when she and a friend, attorney and media personality Antonio Moore were appearing together on split screen YouTube discussions about wealth among black Americans.

Antonio Moore [00:04:44] This is Antonio Moore coming to you from Tony Talks. I have Yvette Carnell from Breaking Brown. We're here to talk about black economics one on one. Do you want to say anything to the audience?

Yvette Carnell [00:04:52] But I just want to say, hey, I'm happy we're talking about how we're talking about this and solutions and then everything that people been asking for. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:01] They talk about things like the gaping wealth gap between black Americans and white Americans today. Data from the Federal Reserve's Survey on Consumer Finances show the median net worth of a black household sits at about $45,000 for white households. It's $285,000. Carnell says one day, as she keeps engaging with this wealth discussion, she picks up this book. It's called capital in the 21st century. It's written by this French economist, Thomas Piketty, and it talks about wealth concentration. It basically says short of any intervention, people should expect the inequality to grow between those who inherit wealth and those who work for a living, hoping to someday achieve wealth.

Yvette Carnell [00:05:48] And the one thing that he shared that kind of stood out is that wealth is baked in now, either have it or you don't have it and you're not making it from you're not making it from labor anymore.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:58] This starts off a fascination for Carnell. She keeps reading more reports from regional thinktanks and regional Federal Reserve banks, and she sees a pattern of different economic outcomes for some groups of black immigrants when compared to black Americans. A Pew Research Center snapshot at the time showed that 20%, or 1 in 5 black immigrants live below the poverty line, slightly less than the 28% of black people born in the US. The study also showed that black immigrants had slightly higher median income than U.S. born blacks.

Yvette Carnell [00:06:36] And so I'm doing a lot of research, and I'm realizing and I'm talking to Antonio and realizing that, oh, no, something else has happened to us.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:06:44] The stats she sees about black immigrants and the stats she sees about the wealth gap and the stats she sees about inherited wealth becoming less and less attainable. Trigger a new question about wealth.

Yvette Carnell [00:06:57] So the question becomes, if you don't have it, and if this country and its leaders and its policymakers and its citizens are responsible for you not having it, what do you do? What do you demand?

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:10] Carnell decides that that broken promise of 40 acres for the then newly freed black people in America in 1865 is the same necessary economic intervention that can now help black people catch up in the game of American wealth building. That's the demand. And she wants to persuade others that the black people descended from those enslaved folks face a particular accrued disadvantage, one that stems from having ancestors who were exploited to build wealth for other people, and who were then systematically limited from other major wealth building opportunities for another several generations. Not to mention the individual acts of racism, discrimination, and domestic terrorism. Those folks suffered over time as they lived on U.S. soil. If you were creating one of those visual word bubbles where there's a big idea and then a bunch of little words around it. Eight is in the center of this word bubble. What are some of the smaller words that go hand in hand with this term?

Yvette Carnell [00:08:21] Plunder, wealthlessness. I would even say shoes, because we were the shoes that white America used to run the race of capital. And so that's why we say, listen, this is not just about being black. It is not being about being brown in terms of melanin. It is about being able to trace your lineage to American chattel slavery.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:08:40] Cornell's hard stance on this issue has made her a bit of a lightning rod. Critics say she's peddling a divisive brand of identity politics, one that runs counter to the idea of black unity. But, she says, that's the thing people get wrong about.

Yvette Carnell [00:08:57] Why don't you like other black people? Why don't you like, other black immigrants? And it's not about like. And I tell people all the time. Listen, if France ever pays Haiti reparations, I will dance in the street. I will have a drink. I will do all of it. But I will understand that nobody owes me a check, right? Like like I'm not. I'm not deserving of that. Because that's not who I am. I'm not Haitian. That's not my lineage. So I think we have to get past this idea because we are trying to get something for a specific group of people in America that that means we are antagonistic towards black immigrants, but we don't have a heart for other people.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:09:30] But Carnell and others using the Ada's hashtag on social media, have sometimes made punchy comments that could be interpreted as anti-immigrant, with dismissive references to people of foreign heritage. Carnell maintains that anyone who looks at the Ada's foundation's black agenda would find other policy proposals that would benefit all black people, just not reparations. To undergird her argument further, she points to legal scholar and dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky, who testified on reparations before California's state reparations task force.

Erwin Chemerinsky [00:10:09] In the United States. The current constitutional law in California, under proposition 209, laws that give a preference on the basis of race are either inherently suspect or perhaps per se, illegal. My conclusion is that reparation is most likely to be upheld by the courts. If it's structured in a race neutral fashion that is most likely to be held by the courts. If reparations are for those who are descendants of slaves and for all who are black.

Yvette Carnell [00:10:42] So that's first and foremost. The second thing is it doesn't make any sense if you are. Let's just use the example of a Nigerian who comes from an elite family and you come to America. I can't make a case for why you're owed anything. America is never going to say that it owes you something because of that. Because it doesn't.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:11:02] But there are other broader ways of approaching reparations. They begin with focusing on more wide ranging harms.

Post-roll

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:00] The more inclusive approach to who gets reparations is often referred to as Pan-African. It's related to this whole bigger ideology, one that suggests that all people across the African diaspora, regardless of their nationality or where they grew up or where they find themselves at any point in time, share common interests.

Social Media Soundbite [00:00:23] It's time for an uncomfortable conversation about what it means to deal with the legacy of the untreated trauma from colonialism. But also the narrative that the language of whiteness teaches African immigrants about their distinctness, their separateness from their blackness in America.

Social Media Soundbite [00:00:41] Why are we worrying? They ask, why are we doing this.

Social Media Soundbite [00:00:44] When I shouldn't say, when have we not? But you do. It's a thing.

Social Media Soundbite [00:00:49] Happy Black History Month from a friendly neighborhood, black Americans. And to kick things off, this month, we're going to start with a little presentation. I want to call that to Diaspora Wars. All right. So here's a list of similarities that we all had that we can reflect on. So we can start acting like we got some Gotham City starting with black. We are all black.

Social Media Soundbite [00:01:05] I don't care if you Haitian if you Trinidadian or African.

Social Media Soundbite [00:01:09] Just like we black people. And that's the way the world views us. And if we don't view ourselves like that, we're just divided for no reason.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:17] That's a mash up of black social media influencers. Their content shows how much the idea of a united black diaspora is catching fire in pop culture. This Pan-African perspective is the beginning of a broader view of reparations and the more limited view ET also advocates. It also opens the door to a conversation that's bigger than just seeking a check to address the economic harms for the descendants of folks formerly enslaved in the U.S.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:01:49] Black people from the moment they were put on slave ships earlier than that, from the moment they were captured, kidnaped, they have been fighting back like they have been resisting. They have been refusing. They have been doing everything in their power to assert their humanity, to assert their basic human rights. That has not stopped.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:12] That's Kelly Carter Jackson, africana studies professor at Wellesley College and historian in residence for the Museum of African American History in Boston.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:02:22] There has never been a appeared in American history where black people have not been fighting for justice, where black people have not been fighting for liberation and freedom and equality and equity.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:35] Carter Jackson says black people in the U.S. have engaged in a long fight against an embedded legacy of racist ideas and systems based on those racist ideas, one main one being white supremacist ideology or a belief that people with less melanin are inherently superior to those with more of it. Money, Carter, Jackson says, doesn't heal that part of society.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:03:01] Because if you can cut a check and then go back to white supremacy as usual the next day, you're like, then that's that's not the point. The point is not to get a check. The point is, like reparations is one part of the solution. And I think that black people have sort of always understood that. But reparations seems to always be like the, the entry point.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:26] To get to the heart of what should come after that monetary entry point. We talk to someone who works with a national group pushing reparations with that broader Pan-African perspective.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:03:37] My name is Willock Lett, and I am the male co-chair for the New England chapter of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:48] Willard Lett has been working with the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America or in Cobra for about 20 years. The group was formed in the late 1980s. Lett says working within it has shaped his own views.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:04:03] When I was introduced to reparations, the idea was introduced as an economic idea. It was only years later that I actually reached the conclusion of the epiphany and realization that, you know, reparations means we care, and it had to be broader, than economics.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:31] Lett says most people come to the reparations conversation, as he did with a laser focus on the money related harms that slavery and subsequent oppressive systems advanced. But like Kelly Carter Jackson, Lett says, a lot is missed when we think about reparations with that narrow focus in order to heal the true scope of problems. Lett says any reparations plan needs to address white supremacy and the harms that ideology enabled.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:05:01] Rather than reparations being about a broken labor contract where, oh, we did this work and you didn't pay me. It's about a broken human covenant.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:11] That broken human covenant is the broader harm he thinks reparations should solve. It's this idea of the nation's collective responsibility for the dehumanizing of, and the stereotyping of, and the theft of opportunity from black people. Let says, when you think about reparations that way as a remedy for major human rights violations from slavery onward, it's clear the benefits or fixes need to extend beyond just black people descended from those enslaved in the US. In some ways, he says, the remedy needs to extend beyond black people. Period.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:05:52] The rationalizations and justifications that serve to allow, Europeans to suffer the moral injury of treating other human beings as property must be addressed.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:06:07] To undergird this argument, let and other members of in Cobra point to the United Nations Principles on Reparation. A five point outline of the necessary parts for a reparations program, according to its website. In Cobra takes the position that all black people of African descent in the United States should receive reparations in the form of changes in, or elimination of laws and practices that allow them to be treated differently and less well than white people. To be clear, Lett says that if the national government does enact reparations in the form of compensation, the payments rightfully belong to folks injured by the paying government. So in the hypothetical example, Yvette Carnell throws out where France suddenly decides to pay Haiti reparations. Shout out to the first black Republic. Let says he agrees. He, as a descendant of folks enslaved in the US, wouldn't qualify for any of that money.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:07:15] I didn't suffer an economic loss in Haiti, and if there was a Haitian here in the US and the federal government provided compensation, I don't feel like they would be eligible because they didn't suffer an economic loss.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:27] At the same time. Many black immigrants have undoubtedly been impacted by the legacies of systemic racism and oppression that come from living in a society with a long history of white supremacy. As a prevailing belief, let says, there are plenty of black immigrants who have been denied jobs, stopped by police or otherwise discriminated against here in the U.S because of their blackness.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:07:52] And for those injuries they are due remedy. So compensation is necessary but is insufficient to be considered reparations. It's an element of the repair, but it's not the whole thing.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:08:05] Lett says aside from addressing wealth and poverty, and Cobra has identified four other injury areas to shape broader reparations remedies. They are nationhood, and people should do things that were denied black people for generations education, health and criminal punishment. In Cobra is guided by this idea that to equitably address the many forms of injury caused by chattel slavery and its ongoing vestiges, reparations can come in as many forms as necessary. Kind of like helping a society that ate from a poisoned tree for a long time get rid of all its poison. When asked about some of the ways to address those injury areas, Lett says reparations is relational rather than transactional. To him, that means people in communities where the conversation is happening need to be creative and vigilant.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:09:09] That may not be satisfying because it's not a, clear directive about what needs to happen. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, we have to be able to accept the fact that any, solution that they have is contingent, and they must be prepared to respond to those reactionary responses that we have.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:09:33] Even though it might seem like Lett is dodging the question, advocates in the reparations space say over and over that reparations remedies have to be determined with the input of those in the community asking itself what is owed. So leaving a reparations program design up to someone else closer to the work isn't quite the dodge we might think it is. And what's more, black people across the world are making their own demands to address the legacies of slavery and colonization.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo [00:10:07] No amount of money can restore the damage caused by the transatlantic slave trade and its consequences, with a span many centuries. But surely this is a matter that the world must confront and can no longer ignore.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:10:23] At the 2023 Accra Reparations Conference, heads of state from nations across the black diaspora gathered in Ghana as President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo called for reparations.

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo [00:10:37] My hope is that this conference will chart a roadmap which will define the nature and incidence of reparations that collectively, we seek. May God bless Mother Africa, black people everywhere and our soul. And thank you for your attention.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:10:56] Delegates there agreed to set up a global reparations fund, but there's no money yet. It's an effort to begin compensation for the 12 million or so Africans sold into slavery worldwide between the 16th and 19th centuries. Back in Boston, Aziza Robinson Good Night contemplates what would it mean for the U.S. and the world's colonizing nations to pay reparations to each place where they subjugated and enslaved black people?

Aziza Robinson Good Night [00:11:26] I think that it would actually help to heal our divides. I think that our divides, our strategic divides. Now, I think I know that all of our divides, strategic divides, because we're so powerful as a people.

Kelly Carter Jackson [00:11:42] We meaning the black world.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:11:47] The black world on the African continent and throughout the diaspora. But the questions we're tracking are all about the steps in building one reparations program. So what does it take to push a national government to address a moral and economic debt? And when a government does, how does it do the math? That's next time on what is owed. What is owed is a production of GBH news. This episode was produced and written by our senior producer Jerome Campbell, along with me, Soraya Wynter Smith. Our editorial assistant is Mara mellett, editing by Paul Singer. Production oversight by Lee Hill. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. Theme song and original music by Maleek Williams. And an extra special thanks again to Lee Hill, who traveled to Elmina Castle in Ghana for the reporting in this story. We love hearing from our listeners. Leave us a voicemail at 617-958-6061.