What Is Owed?

C-Span broadcast [00:00:00] We have assembled here to discuss the case for black reparations. In doing so, we will try to remain faithful to the millions of blacks who remain economically and socially disabled.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:15] You're hearing a C-Span broadcast of a roundtable held by the TransAfrica forum in 2000. The conversation is called the case for reparations, and the arguments are what you would expect from a group of black intellectuals who've been talking about reparations for years. There are points about the racial wealth gap and the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres. But at the root of all their demands, there's an important part that keeps coming up. It seems almost more important than economic compensation, a national effort to heal the country.

John Conyers [00:00:54] Look, citizens, if you believe in the rhetoric that has moved us from where we were in the late 19th century to now, we've got to look at how we can become whole as a nation, as a people, and to those descendants who have contributed so much.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:18] That plea comes from then US Congressman John Conyers. You might remember he pushed for years for federal legislation to establish a national reparations plan. His words underscored this often forgotten element of the reparations conversation. The process for repair doesn't only involve the victims, it involves the entire nation. It shared past and its future. Conyers put the responsibility of leading that effort on the federal government.

John Conyers [00:01:50] This isn't just for the descendants of slaves. This is something that the nation has to undertake. This is a national responsibility.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:02] Conyers was urging the country to live up to its ideals. It was part of his plan for a national reparations conversation that he felt was necessary.

John Conyers [00:02:11] And so we gather here today to try to fashion a way to have hearings, not just among a commission that would be appointed because of their skill and ability, but also hearings around the country to keep people focused, not on on wild eyed schemes, but on what we need to do to make this country real and to make democracy a reality for all of our citizens within.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:47] Up until this point in the series, we've been tracking the progression of reparations through history as a black led effort. But the idea John Conyers is talking about begins to shift the responsibility. It asks the country to think about reparations as a government led project, one that facilitates one kind of repair for the people the government allowed to be exploited. And at the same time works toward a broader repair, one that confronts America's bitter racial history and tries to forge unity on reparations, even with people who've been resistant to the idea.

WSD [00:03:25] You know, this is not going to happen unless people who currently object to the idea of reparations or indifferent to it change their point of view.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:34] But how could the federal government develop a plan to accomplish this? And what lessons could the U.S. learn from other governments that have already made it past that point?

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:03:44] You know, the society woke up and said, listen, that there is something which is still we have to deal with it. We can't always live with this historical lie.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:54] I'm Saraya Winter Smith. This is what is owed.

Pre-Roll

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:00] If you are at a dinner party and someone says. What do you do? How do you describe your job to them?

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:00:06] When I started out, I would have answered I tried to save the world.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:11] That secretary, Hannah Lessing. She plays a leading role in Austrias national effort to reckon with its fraught history from World War Two. She's a civil servant, and her official title is kind of long. She's the secretary general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism, which means she oversees the government restitution program for citizens persecuted during the war.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:00:38] 28 years later. I would use probably a beautiful quote from Nip Geese and just a very small light in a very, very dark room. But this means also hope because even if you are only a small light, you can do things.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:07] In the nearly 30 years Lessing has been doing her job, she's connected with thousands of Austrians worldwide who were persecuted by the Nazi government during World War Two. She's been able to offer over €300 million in various forms like cash payments, memorials and educational projects. Lessing says it's just as much hard work as head work.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:01:32] Yes, it's about money. Yes, it's about budgets for stuff, etc., which is the dry part. But we have this chance to be allowed to work with people whose history and whose persecution, touches the hearts of probably most of the people.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:53] When Lessing started this work in 1996, the government of Austria was already in the process of paying out reparations. Most of it had been through restitution laws from the 1940s and 50s that called for the return of property to victims, as well as various international efforts to hold the country accountable for their atrocities committed against Jewish people. But by the mid 1990s, the government decided to take a more proactive approach and formally create a government account to support victims through a tax funded program. And this program was more expansive because it considered any victim of the National Socialists, including Romans, black people, queer folks. Lessing, who was previously an economist in the private sector, was hired to take on the task of stewarding Austria's ongoing effort with these groups. But before she could issue any checks, she said the first step was to find the people. So she told the government that she needed a few things. First, ...

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:02:54] I need total free access to all archives.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:59] Second, she needed a team.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:03:01] I need historians who will be able to understand the archives, who will be able to read it.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:08] And she needed a way to connect with survivors she found.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:03:11] And then I said, and I want to travel.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:15] Lessing said the head of Austria's parliament approved her demands, and she soon gathered a team of seven women to support the work. Together, they started to contact survivors. And they were everywhere.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:03:28] Shanghai, Hong Kong, UK. France. Everywhere I knew that there are Austrian survivors.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:03:35] Lessing says. They found 30,000 living survivors worldwide and issued checks to all the victims as a symbolic gesture. But as Lessing continued her work, she came to realize that many of the victims were quite old and had specific needs for a range of circumstances. She took it upon herself to find a way to meet their needs.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:03:57] Austria is paying, pension payments to the survivors and even, a nursing allowance. If, for example, you're bedridden or you need the help, we are paying for it, but still, very often it doesn't. It's not enough.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:13] Lessing and her team also talk to survivors about their experiences, hoping to capture their knowledge to inform the work of helping Austria reimagine its past.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:04:23] I think the success of it, for the country itself is that we have a program in Austria bringing survivors to, schools. And we really gave the survivors the promise that we will not let their name and their story be forgotten.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:04:49] This work has led Lessing to understand her job as bigger than building connections between Austria and the people who were persecuted during the war.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:04:58] I wanted to change the way that Austria would see its past.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:07] And that has meant helping Austria realize that it had not been a bystander, nor an innocent victim in the war. The nation needed to come to a recognition of shared responsibility for the victims who were persecuted by the Nazi government.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:27] For a time, Austria resisted confronting its history during World War two. It was almost a national identity. Here's Lessing again.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:05:36] Austria after the war, considered itself as being the first victim of National Socialism, of the Nazis. And this worked quite well for a certain time.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:05:49] Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938 and stayed in power until Austria declared independence with the help of Allied forces in 1945. Lessing says that after the war, Austria saw itself as a victim, and with that view came the idea that those who suffered under the Nazi regime could attribute their suffering to Adolf Hitler and German aggression, not to Austria. This theory, Lessing says, allowed the country to not acknowledge its own role in the suffering.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:06:23] So that's this victims paradigm, which helped a lot for Austria, you know, to stay out of those discussions of having to pay compensation.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:06:34] But that abruptly changed in 1986, and it had to do with a prominent Austrian figure.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:06:40] Former secretary general of the United Nations called Kurt Wildheim.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:06:46] Kurt Waldheim, as some Americans remember him, led the U.N. for a decade and was later elected as the president of Austria. The problem was that it was discovered that he had been a high ranking Nazi. In fact, nearly 10% of Austrians joined the Nazi Party after they were annexed.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:07:03] People started telling him you were a Nazi and you have to take responsibility. And so suddenly it became clear within the Austrian society that we have to deal with this fact. We can not hide behind the victims theory.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:21] About four years later, the Austrian government finally recognized their culpability. But the acknowledgment didn't come from ball time. Instead, it was a man he appointed Austrian government Chancellor Franz Vernadsky, who addressed the issue before Parliament.

Franz Vernadsky [00:07:38] (Speaking Germen)

Saraya Wintersmith [00:07:47] He said, quote, "we acknowledge all of our history and the deeds of all parts of our people, the good as well as the evil. As we lay claim to the good, so must we apologize to the survivors and the descendants of the dead for the evil", unquote. Then he went and made the same declaration in Israel before the Israeli government. Lessing says his actions ultimately led Austria to reconsider its history and reevaluate this idea of victimhood. Vernadsky's recognition and apology led the country to codify their voluntary restitution program into law.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:08:29] Many Austrians were at the forefront, and we have as Austrians of core responsibility in the Nazi crimes. And that made the whole thing, you know, really like a start. And in 1995, the Austrian parliament, decided about the National Fund law.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:08:47] That's the law that created the fund. And Lessing's job is that Austria is whole government restitution effort into motion. I want to pause for a second and recognize the path of repair that the Austrian government went on was unique to the experiences and circumstances of their history. In other words, their harms defined their repairs. Secretary Lessing agrees. When I asked her what she thought the U.S. could learn from the Austrian government about reparations, she wasn't sure if they were comparable.

Sec. Hannah Lessing [00:09:22] It's a very, very difficult question. My job has been about genocides. Yeah. And yes, definitely, the United States has an issue if we call it genocide under the time of slavery. I can't judge it, but I would say it's a, it's crimes against humanity. Definitely.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:09:46] But there are some challenges that do seem universal, like the idea of a country owning its role in the shameful chapters of its history. Lessing pointed out that Austria's atonement didn't start until it confronted its complicity in the persecution of its own people. This step opened the door for deeper grappling with the idea of national responsibility. It's an idea that black thinkers around reparations have felt is an important part of responding to the exploitation of the formerly enslaved in the US.

Kellie Carter Jackson [00:10:19] I absolutely think the federal government has a responsibility. No question. No question.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:10:25] That's Kellie Carter Jackson, who's been talking with us through our ongoing reparations conversation. She's a professor of africana studies at Wellesley.

Kellie Carter Jackson [00:10:34] I mean, slavery was a federally recognized institution. Now, how how they go about the work of administrating, justice or reparations. I don't feel so confident. That doesn't mean it's impossible. That doesn't mean it can't be done. That doesn't mean it can't involve outside, you know, outside actors. But, I don't know how that would work.

William Sandy Darity [00:11:07] You know, this is not going to happen unless people who currently object to the idea of reparations or indifferent to it change their point of view.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:11:17] That's William Sandy Darity. He's an economist and researcher at Duke University.

William Sandy Darity [00:11:23] Congressional action is required, and congressional action is driven by, substantial public sentiment and support for a policy.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:11:33] Darity is credited with developing one of the most comprehensive proposals for black reparations in the country. Believe it or not, 30 years ago he was a reparations skeptic. It changed when he was asked to write about the subject.

William Sandy Darity [00:11:49] A colleague named Richard America asked me if I would write the introduction to a volume that he was editing, which subsequently was called The Wealth of Races.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:12:02] It was a collection of essays by economists who were trying to estimate what the magnitude of a reparations bill might be.

William Sandy Darity [00:12:10] So I said to Richard, I think reparations is something that's completely justified on moral grounds, but it's something that's not going to happen. So why are we investing our energy? And, actually, putting together a book on on reparations.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:12:28] Not a great Prolog for a book on the subject. But Richard America was undaunted.

William Sandy Darity [00:12:34] And Richard said, if that's the way you feel after you read the essays, feel free to write that in the introduction. And in the process of reading these essays, I became so convinced that, reparations for black Americans. Whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, was so justified that it was essential to work on it as a project, even if the odds were extremely low that it would happen.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:13:06] And now he sees how it could happen. It's a plan he developed into a book with his coauthor and wife, Kirsten Mullen. The work is called From Here to Equality. In it, Darity and Mullen lay out the framework. They start by identifying the harm that the U.S. government would need to remedy the racial wealth gap. And it begins with a very big number.

William Sandy Darity [00:13:30] The appropriate bill for reparations is at least $16 trillion.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:13:36] $16 trillion. It's hard to fit that figure in my mind, but let me try and back up into how he gets there. To start, Darity advocates for reparations for black folks who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., which total about.

William Sandy Darity [00:13:55] 40 million black Americans.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:13:58] And when Darity thinks about how to make these 40 million people whole, he looks at the wealth gap between the average white household and the average black household. That gap is roughly $1.2 million, according to 2022 data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. And keep in mind one household could have more than one person eligible for reparations.

William Sandy Darity [00:14:25] So if it's a $1.15 million per household across approximately 40 million black Americans, it would mean that each individual, eligible recipient would be able to receive a direct payment from the United States government of $400,000, an aggregate bill in the vicinity of $16 trillion.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:15:01] Due to the magnitude of that cost. Darity says any reparations effort can only come from the federal government. Local and state reparations would never be able to cut it. The other part of his argument is that, like Carter Jackson, he believes the federal government is liable for the harms of slavery, too. He points out that the government sanctioned slavery, and then it denied the 40 acres that had been promised to the formerly enslaved as compensation after the Civil War. Instead, around that time, the government doled out 160 acre allotments to white families in the American West. Darity says this inequity set the groundwork for the racial wealth gap.

William Sandy Darity [00:15:43] Black Americans didn't even get the 40 acres, while white Americans were getting 160 acres, and that the magnitude of that land distribution, is the equivalent of the size of the states of California and Texas combined. So it was a staggering handout, if you will.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:16:06] The thing is, though, dirties plan only takes up one chapter of his book. He spends the majority of the book showing his proverbial math. He draws an arc through history, pointing out the moments where the country enacted policies to further the racial wealth gap, such as redlining and housing segregation. Like Lessing, Darity says the economic part of his plan won't come to pass until the country is ready to deal with the emotional part first, which is why Darity is focused on sharing his work with other people. He believes he might be able to answer their questions, maybe even change minds and help make reparations a national issue. But he also knows not everyone is interested in having that uncomfortable conversation. And some people resist it. Like the time he agreed to appear on the Doctor Phil show.

William Sandy Darity [00:17:04] Let's do it in 2023.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:17:07] There, he agreed to go on the show to talk about his scholarship and his plan.

William Sandy Darity [00:17:11] You know, I was given the impression that it was going to be an ancestor, a conversation, and this would require an expenditure of $14 trillion, which would be distributed evenly across the 40 million black American descendants of us. That would be approximately $350,000 per person. If you take $350,000 or $840,000, and you write a check to any group of people black. Why? The poor. Homeless. Whatever you give any group of people that much money and say, there you go. Best of luck and you come back in six months, they're going to be broke. So whatever reparations are done, that would be an absolute disaster as opposed to guidance and help in creating generational wealth as opposed to income. Right. That would be an absolute disaster. No one ever says that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:18:23] Darity says the show was uninterested in his reply.

William Sandy Darity [00:18:27] There was ultimately a response that I gave him, about a detail in our proposal that I think they never put on the show, which was, if you are truly concerned about how people will spend the money and there's, there's a highly paternalistic dimension to that.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:18:49] And then the angry letters began.

William Sandy Darity [00:18:52] The Doctor Phil show generated. Hordes of hate mail, something that's just reflective of, you know, a racist impulse in the United States that views black Americans as a sexually dysfunctional, but black American dysfunction as a consequence of the historical circumstances that have created this enormous economic disadvantage in a society in which money is critical for participation.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:19:26] What Darity is saying isn't new. We've heard similar logic come from black people throughout history who've been fighting for reparations, from the early petitions of the first freed African captives, such as Belinda Sutton, to the Black Power agenda championed by Massachusetts state Senator Bill Owens. It's this tension that sits quite central to the challenge the federal government will have to navigate if a reparations plan makes it through Congress. Darity adds that the government's ability to unite the country behind the idea of reparations will become more important after a plan is passed because as a national reparations policy comes closer to reality, things could get ugly.

William Sandy Darity [00:20:09] I think there's inevitably going to be about 30% of the population that remains hostile towards any kind of program that would increase, the equitable status of black Americans in the United States. And they may actually have a violent response.

Mid-Roll

Saraya Wintersmith [00:00:01] Can you say something about the prospect of violence? You brought up the idea that if we do get into a position where reparations comes to pass. You have some concern that, ...other than the court challenges, other than the political challenges, there would be something else.

Darity [00:00:22] You know, the United States has the most heavily armed private population in the world. And we have had not necessarily in the context of the reparations issue. But we have had mass shootings on a routine basis in this country. So we have a tradition of armed violence on the part of, disgruntled whites in the United States, directed at black Americans. And so I think, unfortunately, that is a potential chain of events that could take place in the aftermath of the adoption of a reparations plan.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:01:12] Darity words bring a sobering reality to this conversation of reparations. Even if the black led movement for reparations gained steam, and even if the government got on board and passed legislation, it wouldn't mean the end of the fight. It might actually be the beginning. In the last few years, we've seen landmark Supreme Court rulings overturn rights we once took for granted, and a tax on efforts to teach inclusive American history have led some states to ban books that educate students about the harms endured by black people. Darity says these flashpoints are moving the conversation around reparations from one focused on morality to one that's more political. And Darity says that's the path that has to be clear for reparations to move forward.

Darity [00:01:59] We would need adequate, support from the executive branch, because the executive branch would be responsible for administering a reparations plan, and there would have to be a very different Supreme Court. It really is, transformation of authority positions in the federal government. That's that's required. And that is something that has to be done through politics. I'm not an expert on how you build a social movement effectively. But I'm hopeful that there are other people out there who are much more knowledgeable about that than I am, who will invest the time and energy in doing so.

Saraya Wintersmith [00:02:41] There are people out there, and they've put in the work to move a US city to consider and implement reparations as a working form of repair.

Speaker 3 [00:02:50] It is possible reparations is not a political nonstarter. It's not too provocative. It is not unattainable. At least one city has shown that there is a path forward.

WSD [00:03:02] We'll explore that and more in our next episode. 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 millets, 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. We love hearing from our listeners. Leave us a voicemail at 617958 6061. GBH.