February 2, 2021 • 45 mins
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson talks to Alec about her best-selling book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Wilkerson says America’s caste system began in 1619, when enslaved people first arrived in the Jamestown colony. Drawing comparisons between India’s millennia-long caste system and the Nazis’ subjugation of Jews in WWII, Wilkerson says white Americans developed a caste system to justify centuries of violence and discrimination against African-Americans. Wilkerson says we must understand our full history and the caste system today to become a more equitable nation. Alec then follows up on the question of reparations with William Darity, a Duke University professor of economics and co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. Darity says the U.S. government owes $10 - $12 trillion in reparations to the approximately 40 million descendants of enslaved people. Darity says reparations are essential to close the persistent wealth gap between white and Black households.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. She's the author of Cast,
The Origins of Our Discontent. It's a profound book and
an instant bestseller. Wilkerson digs deep into American history, as
(00:24):
well as the history of Nazi Germany and the cast
system of India to understand the ways systemic inequality is
enforced in the United States. Throughout the book, Wilkerson explicitly
does not use the word racism. You know, one of
the reasons I use the word cast and this invisible, unrecognized,
(00:47):
unspoken hierarchy and infrastructure is that it is so profoundly
embedded into you know, our history, our psyches, the way
that things work, that it doesn't have to be a
single institution or actor. It's an autonomic response to changes
(01:12):
or threats to the hierarchy as we've known it. I
spent a lot of time thinking about how the word
cast is used in our language, with or without the E.
And so if you think about cast in a play
in which everyone has there's a script and everyone has
a place on the stage stage left, stage right, foreground background,
(01:33):
and everyone knows their lines, and if you're really invested
in it, you know everyone's lines because you know the
entire script. And so one when you have a situation
in which we have all inherited this script that's been
passed down through the generations, it doesn't take a single person.
It's not about a single person or entity. It's about
the recognition that this is the way things have been,
(01:56):
and those who are deeply invested in maintaining it will
do whatever it takes to keep it going. So it
could be any number of different entities, subsets, individuals anywhere
along the hierarchy who have a vested interest in maintaining it.
But would you say that in decades prior, would you
say that organizations that clearly espoused public policy and argue
(02:20):
for public policy that had a racially subjugating tinge to it,
an ultimate result was a cast maintenance. Oh? Absolutely. But
what I'm saying is, were those organizations more fringe years ago,
like the John Bird's Society, things that were ultra conservative,
ultra reactionary. We're much more marginalized fifty years ago, and
(02:44):
now it's mainstream now you have a whole news organization
where Tucker Carlson is saying the things he's saying. You know,
he's got advertisers, he's got a nightly show. Has it
become more mainstream that maintenance people who espouse a maintenance
of the cast system that you write of. Well, the
reason that I mentioned of the plateau is that as
long as you're in a plateau, there's not necessarily a
(03:07):
need for anyone to get activated. While the play is
going on and everything is going you know, it's had
a very long run, and everybody knows where they're supposed
to be, then there's no need for anyone to necessarily
to act to take action. It's only when there is
a threat, a perceived threat to what all has happened before,
(03:27):
to the infrastructure as we've known it, that is when
more and more people can be drawn into responding to
whatever is perceived as a threat. And that is how
I would look at it from a cast perspective. So
when the African American community, my question for a long
time has always been, you know what, ultimately as a
(03:48):
group separate from Hispanics, latinos Asians, the black community, the
African American community what do you think African American people
wanted fifty two years ago and how that's changed? Is
integration itself? Acquaint idea? Have black Americans? Have African Americans
arrived at a place and have they been there for
(04:10):
a while where they're like, we don't need to be
friends with you, we don't need to live with you
and hang out with you, as long as you just
let us have what we need and get off our
back and give us equal opportunity. Is the idea of
a pure racially blind integration Is that dead in this country?
I think that we don't even have necessarily a single
(04:31):
African American community. There are communities, There are people who
have been in this country for longer than most Americans
who might meet, meaning you know, slavery went on for
two hundred and forty six years, more than a hundred
years before there was the United States of America. So
that means that that's one group of people who are
descended from enslavement in a huge percentage, you know, probably
(04:52):
the majority of people who would be identified as black
in this country. Then we have people who have who
have immigrated here from a Caribbean and have been here
for many many decades as well, and now we have
a new introduction of people who are immigrating very large
numbers of people integrating from Sub Saharan Africa, so there's
not even just one community. There's also an issue of
class within the group known as African Americans. So there
(05:15):
are many, many different perspectives that are paid within forty
million people who would be identified as black or African
American in this country. So it's not one perspective, I
would say in that case, although of course everyone would
agree that people in our current day wish to be
treated as anyone else would in this country, wish to
not be over surveiled and over policed, would wish to
(05:37):
be able to go about their lives every day the
way other people do, without having someone intrude into their
day and call the police on them for you know,
sitting at a Starbucks waiting for a friend, trying to
get into one's own condo building. Those are the kind
of things that have happened to people who are of
African descent in this country in in just the last
couple of years. I mean just many, many, many, many
(05:57):
many examples of this going on. So I mean, I
think it's a have to say that all people of
African descent would love to just be able to go
about their lives as everyone else, as Americans, to be
able to pursue their dreams as anyone else would, or
just to be able to get through the day. I
would say that going back to the nineteen you know,
to the era of the Civil rights movement, which actually,
(06:17):
it could be argued, began with the arrival of the
first slave ship, meaning that there has always been resistance
to enslavement, always been resistance to being kept in Chaine,
and there's always been some kind of resistance, and what
we think of as a civil rights movement, it's just
part of the continuum of resistance that goes back for many,
many generations. You know, when you think about during slavery,
(06:39):
there were people the underground railroad of people trying to escape.
So I also think looking at the long arc of
history where we talk about progress and backlash and plateau,
those are the things that have continued for as long
as there's been a country. But the Civil Rights movement,
as you were speaking about what do people want, I
mean people wanted, well, what was life like for them
(07:00):
at that time? During the Civil rights era, nineteen fifties
and sixties, A good portion the majority of African Americans,
many of them were in the South, were not permitted
to vote, not permitted to be able to just use
public facilities, were segregated in every way that you can imagine.
There were actually separate bibles in court to swear to
(07:21):
tell the truth on. There is a Black Bible and
altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on.
In court. It was against the law for a black
person and a white person to merely play checkers together
in Birmingham, for example. So the world that people lived in,
and what I call the cast system of the American South,
was one of such extreme inequality and injustice and this
(07:42):
artificial graded ranking of human value, that the goal would
have been to be able to be seen and accepted
and have all the rights and privileges of any other
citizen of the United States, which they had earned through
generations and generations of course of working for free to
build this country for two and forty six years. So
that is what they were seeking ultimately, and they were
(08:04):
seeking human rights as well as civil rights, to be
seen and recognized as the humans that they had always
been and the citizens that they had always been. I
want to just get to another idea, and these are
all my opinions. In the last several years, there are
three primary groups that have organized politically to varying degrees
of success and using various methodologies to try to advance
(08:28):
their cause of their human rights. The l g B
t Q community, women and African Americans and people of color. Now,
one would argue that although none of them have come
far enough, the gay community made great strides with marriage equality,
and there was a lot of things that really really
you know, they had a nice, tight campaign and they
(08:50):
pushed and they won, and they prevaire women. I think
things have gotten better for women in this country, not enough.
I mean, I think the fact that we don't have
an equal rights in them and in this cord yous
appalling to me. Do you think that the cause of
African Americans in terms of their human rights has been
in third place in terms of those accomplishments gaining what
they wanted to and why? Well, I can only second
(09:13):
only go back to the work that I've done, which
is to say that we have inherited a cast system,
which is, you know, the arbitrary artificial ranking of human value.
And it was founded on the essential belief that the
colonists established themselves on top. They imported, they brought in
people from Africa to form the bottom wrong of that hierarchy.
(09:37):
So we're going back to the founding of our country.
Before there was the United States, there was this hierarchy
and it established this bipolar infrastructure. And X of course,
in the founding of the country, the indigenous people were
their numbers were decimated, and they were driven from their lands.
So this is this is our inheritance as Americans, and
(10:00):
this is so built into the infrastructure of our country
that this is an enduring question that has yet to
be fully resolved. Even though we had in a civil
rights movement and civil rights legislation of nineteen sixty four,
sixty five, and sixty eight. What we are seeing now
is an indication that you can have the laws in
place which are absolutely necessary and a show of progress.
(10:23):
Um yet you can still have what we have seen
in just the last year when it comes to video
after video of you know, dehumanizing effects of people who
are still enforcing these assumptions and and this this ranking
of human value. We can we have seen people killed
before our very eyes, inside of all that has gone before.
(10:46):
For you who have achieved, I mean, it doesn't get
any better for someone in your field than what you've accomplished.
You have a poet, surprise. You live in a pretty
rarefied world, in a pretty elite world. You'll be You're
an enormous successful, enormously well respected writer. You've been given
one of the highest honors in your field. Do you
(11:06):
still encounter microaggressions from people in the world you live in? Oh? Absolutely.
The one that I feel most comfortable talking about is
where I was actually accused of impersonating myself. For people
who haven't heard that, how did this guy pulled? How
did he do this? Yeah? So I had made appointments
with several people for this one story that was a
(11:28):
fairly harmless, you know, not controversial story at all, and
everybody that I called was really excited about it, about participating.
And he was one of the people that I called.
And I've done all these interviews during the course of
the day and he was the last interview of the
day and when I got there, he was not there.
I got into his h It's a retail establishment, a
(11:49):
small boutique and there was no one there in the
boutique at the time. Was a quiet hour of the day.
And the sales clerk said, you know, he's not here.
This is the man nager of the boutique. And I
waited for him, and then this, you know, the door
opening in. He's clearly recognized that he's late for something.
(12:09):
He's taking off his code, he's trying to get situated.
The clerk tells me to go over to him, because
that's the guy that I'm supposed to be interviewing. And uh.
I go up to him and I introduced myself and
he said, oh, I can't talk with you now, I
cannot talk with you. I'm getting ready for a very
very important meeting, very very important interview. I don't have
the time to talk with you. And I said, I'm
I'm Isabel Wilkerson. Um, I think I'm the appointment that
(12:32):
you're here, because we have this interview set up for
four thirty. Uh. And he said, well, how do I
know that? How do I know that? I mean, I
was stunned by that, because, I mean, here we were,
he was late, there was no one else there, and
he was saying to me, how do I know that
you're who you say you are? And I said, I
(12:53):
made this appointment with you. It's well past the time
I made this appointment with you. And he said, well,
let me you know you have a business card. And
it's so happened. It's one of those things where there's
when you're in a particular you know, uh past, I
might say, there's no room for error, and it just
so happened. I didn't have any business cards. I've been
(13:13):
out talking to people all day. I said, I don't
have a business card with me. I but we have
this appointment. I have my notebook. I was here waiting
for you. There's no one else here. We should be
having his interview. And he said, well, I'll need to
see some I D. So I said to him, I said,
I shouldn't have to show you I D. We're already
well into the time that we should be interviewing. But
(13:34):
here's my idea. I showed it to him, and he said,
showed him the driver's life. And he said, you don't
have anything with the New York Times on it. And
I said, we are well into the time we should
be doing the interview. I mean like we're just wasting time.
We could have been done with the interview by now.
And he said, I'm going to have to ask you
to leave because she'll be here any minute. She'll be here, Yes,
(13:56):
she'll be here any minute. Here she is. Let me
Let me leave and read what I thought of that? Wait?
Wait here, I am. It's me and my boss is
on the phone. They want you to call at the times.
But what's interesting to me? Among a myriad of things?
Were there ever any consequences for him? Was he an
employee of a company. Did anybody contact his employer and
(14:18):
say nothing ever happened to him? Now this charade? Now, Now,
I wrote the piece, I finished the piece, and I
would have liked to have included him, and he very
much wanted to be in it, obviously, But I wrote
the piece and got it done, and you know, and
that was it. I mean, he I I've sent him
a copy of the article with the business card he'd
asked for. Author Isabel Wilkerson. Another person who was challenging
(14:43):
the narratives of our nation's history is Brian Stephenson, the
founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. From the Here's the
Thing Archives, Stevenson talked about the way civil rights history
gets condensed. All we want to do when we talk
about the nineties, forties and fifties and exties is celebrate
the civil rights movement, to celebrate the progress that we made,
(15:05):
and freeze it. Everybody gets to celebrate. There's no qualifying
questions that you have to add answer before you get
to participate. And we've reduced it almost to this kind
of three day event where Rosa Parks gives up her
seat on the first day. Dr King leads the march
on Washington on the second day, and then we pass
all these laws on the third day. And it provokes
(15:26):
me because we're ignoring the decades of damage that we
did to everybody by humiliating people of color every day
of their lives. You can find the rest of my
conversation with Brian Stevenson that here's the thing dot Org.
We talk about the need for a curriculum for all
Americans to understand the history of the cast system. After
(15:47):
the break, I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing.
We're speaking today with author Isabel Wilkerson about her best
selling book Cast The Origins of Our Discontent. It feels
like racial inequality in our country is by design. Well,
(16:11):
it was designed as a hierarchy that we don't often
recognize because we can't see it. And that's why it's
in some ways so powerful. We've accepted it for so
long that we don't we don't see it because it
is just the way things are. You know, I described that,
you know, the country is like an old house, and
that old house, you know you don't want to go
into the basement to see, but the reins have wrought
(16:34):
after a rain. But if you don't go in and
look at it, then you're not You're not going to
avoid the consequences just because you don't know what they are.
You don't avoid having to deal with whatever is down
there just because you have not to have look. It
could be that if there's a human impulse to create hierarchy,
and you know, again getting back to that play that
I'm talking about, that script that has been passed down
(16:54):
through the generations, it doesn't take a single individual to
make pro ones for a society because if everyone has
received the script, then they're acting upon that script. I
am saying that each one of us has received the script,
and we we may act upon it in our own ways,
but the script is still there. And I think that
(17:15):
this is a matter of, you know, of adjusting and
changing and dealing with the programming that we have been heard.
It's like we've all been programmed to see things in
a certain way, to treat people in a certain way,
to elevate those who are in who are in the
dominant group, and to sublimate those who are in the
subordinated group. And it's so it's so much a part
of the social order of things, and it's been in
place for so long that we may not even be
(17:37):
able to see how it's acting upon ourselves. We may
not be able to say I was acting upon our
society until things reach that breaking point as they have
in more recent times, you know, in our current era.
I want to get to one last thing while I
have you, because I can't believe I've forgotten this. That is,
are you a proponent of reparations? Yes, I think that
The Warmth of the Sons your other book, Yeah, the
(17:58):
first book describes what African Americans endured, not doing slavery,
not doing slavery, but in the lifespan of people, actually
the oldest Americans and our current era, what they endured,
you know, the idea of redlining and restrictive covenants. That
meant that African Americans were excluded from the American dream
(18:19):
ununtil the nineteen sixties, excluded from the ability to just
kind fortgage like any other like white Americans were able to.
That means that white Americans whose parents bought homes or
grandparents and great grandparents bought homes before the nineteen sixties
were you know, unintended or may not be aware of it,
but we're beneficiaries of the discrimination that occurred against African Americans,
(18:42):
the exclusion of African Americans because they African Americans were
not permitted to participate in this wealth building, you know,
part of the American dream. And so there is a way,
without even having to go back to slavery, to say
that African Americans have been harmed economically and that current
day Americans, you know, my my own parents, for example,
(19:05):
who were not able to to get a mortgage in
the regular way that other people were because they fell
under that category of people who were excluded. They were
African Americans who were excluded by the virtue of their race.
And so I think that the record is very clear
that this is a group that has has endured completely
different experience as they went about trying to build lives
(19:28):
for themselves, excluded from the American dream. And so therefore,
of course, as other groups have have experienced abuses and
and atrocities and have been harmed for that, and that
is what countries do, reparations having to do with repairing harm.
So I'm in favor of clearly that is for the groups,
(19:48):
but I would also add that I believe what's most
important is education to go along with that, so that
all Americans can know why it is appropriate. No, we
need to have instruction in this country. Human rights is
something that should be taught in the core curriculum. You
should be have. Kids should come into school and they
should learn all about human rights with it two women
(20:11):
related to sexuality, related to race. We should have a
core course that kids are talking from a very young
age about why it's just the right thing to do
and why it's in your interest to allow people their
their rights. The only thing I would finish with is
beyond where the money would come from and how much
money would be in a reparations program, who do you
(20:32):
think is the best arbiters and who would be the
best managers of that system, do you think, see I
appreciate you asking me that question, but I'm not equipped
to answer that question. Who's a good person you think
they can speak about, who has a view about reparation
that you admire? Well, there are many people who do
who are researching this. One of them is a professor
of economics at Duke University named William Darety. He's one
(20:54):
of the people who's been working on this for a
very long time. Obviously, Ton Halsey Coates is you know,
wrote the piece the Case Reparations, which he very kindly
referred to the warmth of other sons as being an
inspiration for that. So there are many, many, many people
working on this, and I think that they're the ones
that I would defer to on this topic. I would
only say, and I really want to emphasize that in
(21:16):
other countries. I'm thinking about Germany, where I spent a
lot of time trying to understand how they deal with
their history. You know, in the middle of Berlin is
this massive memorial to the Jews who were killed in
the Holocaust, and it should be there. It is massive,
and of course is anyone to give deep thought reflect
upon what was lost uh in that. But it takes
(21:39):
up a massive amount of that city center. And in
spite of how large it is, it's notable that there's
no sign there's no signage, there's no exhibit explanation as
to why it's there or what happened. And the reason
is because everyone knows what is there. It happened to have
(21:59):
have been cre aided by a Jewish American architect, and
it's there as a memorial, and it makes a statement
by its existence by saying everyone there recognizes the horror
that happened. Everyone recognizes the history, as they should because
everyone receives an education about how and why this is
(22:20):
necessary to honor and how and why the country got
to where it was in World War Two, And we
do not have that. We're not on the same page
here in our country about basic facts as to the
causes of the Civil War and what happened after reconstruction,
and what was Jim Crow and how did that? How
(22:40):
did that work? How did we end up with the
cast system when I'm describing as a cast system of
this artificial grade and ranking of human value. We're not
on the same page about what happened in our country.
And that is what I'm saying. Why it's so important
as we try to understand how we got to where
we are now, is to understand what happened. You know,
you can't fix what you can't see, and you can't
(23:02):
repair what you don't know. And and that's why I
think it's important for us to get on the same
page about what happened. You can't make progress unless you
know what's happened to get us where we are. I
think there's hope. I think there's hope. I actually do
think there's hope. I've written these books so that people
can have an idea of where and how we got
(23:24):
to where we are. But that first book, when it
came out, moren't other sons. People would come up to
me of all different backgrounds and would say to me
over and over and over again, I had no idea.
I had no idea that this happened in our country.
I had no idea. And so the goal of this
is to get us on the same page about what
happened in this country. Things don't make sense until you
know how we got here. It's as if our country
(23:48):
like we're in an audience that walked into a theater
in the middle of a movie and we didn't catch
the first half. So we see one car chasing another car,
and a man chasing and and someone else's stopping the
man is chasing, and we don't understand why this one
man is chasing the other man. We don't understand what's happened.
And we watched the rest of the movie and we
(24:09):
still missed out on what was the essential questions about
how and why this happened. And so that's what we're like.
And if you've walked into the middle of a movie
and you didn't catch the first half, in some ways
nothing else really truly makes sense. And this is an
effort to try to get us on the same page
so that things will make sense, so that we will
have a better understanding of why we're where we are
(24:33):
and how we got to where we are, so that
we can have a better sense of what to do
going forward. That's the whole goal here. Well, let me
just say once again, thank you so much for taking
the time to do with this. Thank you so much.
That's best selling author Isabel Wilkerson. I wanted to follow
up on this question of reparations and as Isabel Wilkerson
(24:54):
recommended talking to William Daretti. He happens to be my
next guest. He teach is public Policy, African American Studies,
and Economics at Duke University. He and his wife Kirsten
Mullen are the authors of From Here to Equality, Reparations
for Black Americans in the twenty one century. It's a
(25:15):
detailed case for reparations, particularly as a way to close
the generational wealth gap between white and Black Americans. Dareity says,
the reparations invoice the federal government owes descendants of enslaved
people is between ten and twelve trillion dollars. It's a
daunting price tag. However, Darety says, if the federal government
(25:38):
commits to the plan, it can find the money. Well,
first of all, I don't think the increasing the deficit
necessarily means you increase the debt, uh, And it's it's
really a rise in the death that creates a financial
burden that's carried over time. But you can finance projects
without increasing taxes or increasing tax revenu new or making
(26:01):
a commitment to obtain an additional debt. In the process
of engaging in the expenditure. But let's say, even just
as a hypothetical, that they gave a trillion dollars over
ten years or twenty years, you've got a trillion dollars
a hundred billion dollars a year that was distributed for whatever,
for as you said, institutions, scholarships, direct cash payments to
(26:23):
people who I mean, this is going to be a
process to identify who really is entitled to this money
by your own metric. And even if you do that,
you don't think we need to raise taxes in order
to distribute a trillion dollars over ten years, not necessarily.
I mean, the limit to additional federal spending is the
inflation risk, and so any new expenditure program would have
(26:46):
to be designed in such a way that it minimized
the risk of high rates of inflation, UH, including this one.
But we propose some ways in Chapter thirteen that the
program could be administered UH in such a way that
you contain the prospects of high inflation, including what you
(27:07):
just mentioned, which is the idea of distributing the payments
over a period of years rather than making the payments
take place all at once. But we're also concerned about
creating a new wealth position for Black Americans that's comparable
to the wealth position that's held by white Americans. Or
(27:27):
the average white household has eight hundred thousand dollars more
in net worth than the average black household, and we
argue in the book that that's a consequence of the
cumulative intergenerational effects of policies that have promoted white wealth
accumulation at the expense of black wealth accumulation. And so,
(27:50):
you know, we could distribute that that set of funds
over the course of a decade. We could also distribute
the funds in such a way that we create trust
to counts or endowments where the full amounts are not
spent overnight or instantly by the individual recipients. So there
are ways to contain the inflation risk. Now the question becomes,
(28:13):
you know as well as I do, that the knee
jerk response you always get from people is almost kind
of a statute of limitations. Bail out. They kind of
sit there and they go, hey, man, I didn't known
any slaves, and yet you and I I mean, you
maintain I think, and I'll let you speak to this
this idea that the whole country there is the nation
itself is where it is today, and as the directors
(28:36):
of the bears responsibility as a country to pay this
amount of money. Correct, Yes, that's precisely right. Our position
is that the United States government is the culpopal party
because it maintained the legal and authority framework that permitted
these atrocities take place, and in many instances actually supported
(28:57):
the execution of these these are cities. And so yes,
it is the United States government that bears the responsibility
on behalf of the nation as a whole for meeting
the reparations bill. Uh. This comes into full focus when
we start thinking about the origins of the racial wealth
disparity that exists in the United States today, and and
(29:20):
that kind of disparity actually begins UH in the aftermath
of the Civil War when they formally enslaved persons were
promised forty acre land grants in the form of restitution,
and that promise was not met when at the same time,
the United States government, through the Homestead Acts, was providing
(29:42):
one point five million white families with access to a
hundred sixty acre land grants in the western part of
the United States and land that was appropriated from the
native population. This was a settler colonialist projects straight up.
But the effects of that were to create a situation
(30:02):
in which Black Americans start with no steak, no grub
steak in American society. They have to build wealth entirely
independently after being subjected to many, many years of bondage,
and white Americans get what is essentially a governmental handout
in the form of land that provides them with a
(30:24):
foundation for intergenerational wealth from the Homestead Act. Now, in
chapter thirteen a program of Black Reparations, you enumerate a
handful of different methods by which where the money would
be accessed. You talk about the wealth of the country
and the percentage of the population on the most simple terms,
(30:44):
that's African American. If it's thirteen percent, so they're entitled
to of that. Uh, you know, wealth of the country.
Which metric that you reference in the book? Are you
the most in favorable what do you think is the
calculation and what do you think is the best way
to get the money out of the Congress. So the
thing that we settle on as the metric for dictating
(31:07):
the actual amount of the reparations payment is elimination of
the racial wealth differential in the United States by increasing
the black asset position until there is no longer any
significant difference between average black and white household wealth. Uh,
And that would require an expenditure we estimate in the
(31:30):
vicinity of ten to twelve trillion dollars, So that would
be the basic amount that would be required to actually
accomplish the goals of a reparations project. Right now, the
African American population in the United States is what we
should say about forty million. I would say that the
African American population that is descended from persons who are
(31:52):
enslaved in the United States is about forty million people.
So do you have much knowledge as to how much
money the German government had to transfer even to the
state of Israel, because you mentioned not only just direct
payments to people, but to institutions as well. What what
what was the bill that was handled by the German government?
Do you know? As far as I understand, the German
government as well as interestingly enough, the United States government,
(32:14):
which is not a culpable party in that situation, are
still making payments and they are running into the vicinity
of billions and billions of US dollars. I think at
the outset When the German government first started this process,
it was running into the low billions in the nineteen forties,
(32:37):
the late nineteen forties. So the US government is still
paying into a program. The U s government is paying
into a program to provide restitution for US citizens who
were victims of the Holocaust and their descendants. How long
has that been going on. I think that was enacted
(32:59):
within the past ten years. And how much money is
that program spending US dollars. I'm not certain about the
exact amount of money and that program. I will say
this that you know, progressively, over time with respect to
the Holocaust payments, there's been an increase in the number
(33:19):
of individuals who are identified as being eligible for payments.
So it has expanded, particularly to the descendants of the
folks who were the direct victims, in such a way
that it actually includes I believe, not only sons and daughters,
but nieces and nephews. So it really has become a
(33:40):
more expansive program in terms of treating the ramifications of
the harm. The United States to me seems like a
country that they do the right thing, not all the time,
but very often they do the right thing only when
it's absolutely necessary. As my friend who was a professor
at n y U Law School, he had a great quote.
(34:03):
He said, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown
versus Board of Education decision, they didn't wake up that
morning and have any new information. They woke up that
morning and they knew the timing was right, that they
had to do this, that the country absolutely demanded and
was ready for this change. Now, what do you think
is the foundation, if you will, of selling this to
(34:24):
the American people? How would you expect that to work
in the COVID ravaged and financially limping United States of today. So,
I mean, I think it's critical again that that I
emphasize that I don't believe that the United States is
crippled in terms of its capacity to finance anything new,
(34:47):
but it has to structure those financing programs in a
sensible way so that it mitigates the risk of inflation.
I think that we should not be mystified or paralyzed
the consequence of the United States having accumulated a significant
amount of debt already, because we don't have to continue
(35:09):
to fund new programs by accumulating additional debt. So I
think we should just proceed to do the right thing. Now,
what would it take to persuade the American public at
large that this is the right thing to do. There
is evidence of a substantial sea change in American attitudes
about the legitimacy and the desirability of a reparation's plan
(35:34):
for Black Americans, which would have the effect of finally
giving Black Americans the material conditions for full citizenship, their
grounds for optimism because in a survey that was done
by Michael Dawson and Ravana pop Off, two researchers at
the University of Chicago the beginning of this century year
two thousand, they found that four percent of white Americans
(35:57):
were in favor of reparations for Black Americans. That's fou
r four. But about fifteen or sixteen months ago, a
survey indicated that about fifteen percent of white Americans were
now in favor of reparations. And the most recent survey
that I'm aware of, one that was conducted by the
organization Civics in June, indicated, and I'm not sure you
(36:21):
know how much confidence I have in this number, but
it indicated the thirty nine percent of white Americans are
now in favor of reparations for Black Americans. So even
if that's off by nine percentage points, it still would
represent a doubling of the figure that we had fifteen
or sixteen months ago. So I'm not sure if this
(36:42):
is a permanent change. I'm not sure if we can
make it a permanent change, but it sounds like the
momentum is moving in the right direction. This is here's
the thing. I'm Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking to Duke
University professor William Darty about reparations. If you like, here's
a thing, don't keep it to yourself, tell a friend.
(37:03):
You can subscribe to hear the thing on the I
Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After the break, we'll talk about how, according to Darty's proposal,
the federal government could determine who is eligible to receive reparations.
(37:25):
William Darety teaches economics at Duke University and has become
a leading advocate for reparations. He mentioned other cases where
reparations have been paid here in the US and in Germany.
I asked if he has any concern about other historically
marginalized groups like women, also coming forward to make a
case for reparations to actually no. Uh. We encourage whichever
(37:50):
group thinks they have a claim for a grievous injustice
to come forward and work on and present their claim. Uh,
just as we have in our book. We encourage other
folks who think that they have a legitimate claim to
craft their own narrative about why such a claim should
be met. I think it's really interesting that in the
(38:11):
process of the provision of reparations for Japanese Americans, uh,
in the process of the provision of reparations to the
families that lost loved ones in the nine one attacks,
they received significant federal compensation and the U. S Government
was not the culpable party in that instance either. But
(38:32):
in in those cases, I think there was some concern
about future claims being made by other groups, but this
was not something that proved to be an obstacle to
actually executing the project. So uh, yeah, it may well
be the case that there's I mean, the Native American
population has a strong case that I think is predicated
(38:55):
on sovereignty as opposed to the Black American case, which
is for used on citizenship. But certainly there's a case
to be made there and as far as we're concerned,
we welcome others to pursue their own case. We're just
tired of black, the Black American case being consistently pushed
to the back of the bus. Now. In October, the
(39:17):
governor of California signed a bill that will develop proposals
on paying out reparations to the descendants of the enslaved
who lived there. Now. Similar plans are underway in Rhode Island,
North Carolina, and elsewhere. Some would suggest that's a good
first step, you believe otherwise, correct, Yeah. I I certainly
believe that states and municipalities should establish what might be
(39:40):
called racial equity task forces, and I certainly believe that
they should address the scope of ongoing or sustained discriminatory
practices in their in their communities. But I don't think
that they should call the actions that they take reparation.
(40:00):
I think that in the context of the arguments we
make and from here to equality, we are concerned that
the concept of reparations has a certain proprietariness that's appropriate
to the type of project that we describe. In particular,
if you were to take all of the funds that
the state and local governments spend in their budgets from
(40:26):
a year ago, it would amount to three point one
trillion dollars. That's the total for all purposes. If we
have a reparations bill of ten to twelve trillion dollars,
there's no way that individually or collectively, our state and
local governments can actually meet the bill. And so uh
(40:48):
in addition to the fact that the federal government is
the culpable party, it is also the federal government that
has the practical capacity to actually fulfill the requirements of
a reparations plan. And so as a consequence, I think
that as admirable as any local efforts are for atonement
or for change with respect to discriminatory practices within their states,
(41:11):
these things should not be called reparations. When you look
at the world and you look at history, is there
a model for what you want to do that you
can point to? Well? From our perspective, the model is
that's relevant to the United States experience. The model that's
most relevant is is the Japanese American Reparations Project. Is
(41:31):
it possible to say that it was effective? That's much
harder to do because the individual recipients were not followed.
Nobody was concerned about making some type of judgment about
how they might use the money. Now you make mention
you said, we advanced two criteria to determine eligibility for
(41:52):
a black reparations program. First, U S citizens, we need
to establish that they had at least one ancestor who
was enslaved in the United States after the formation of
the Republic. Second, they would have to prove that they
self identified as black, Negro, Afro American, or African American
at least twelve years before the enactment of the reparations
(42:13):
program or the establishment of a congressional or presidential commission
quote to study and develop reparations for African Americans unquote,
whichever comes first. Does such a thing exists now? No,
not to my knowledge. Uh. Yeah. So the idea is
that we wouldn't want people to have to bear a
significant financial burden to establish their eligibility. And since one
(42:37):
of the criteria for eligibility is demonstrating that you have
at least one ancestor that was enslaved in the United States,
we could have the federal government provide that investigation as
a service to individuals to me the genealogical component in
order for it to be really really helpful and be effective.
(42:57):
Is another thing you've got to build out in this operation.
This is that this is a big operation to identify
who gets the money. Well, well, I mean this is
something that is as a debt that is overdue for
a hundred fifty five years, and it's a debt that
now is owed to forty million people. So yes, it's
a substantial operation. I mean, if if if the debt
(43:19):
had been met in eighteen sixty five, it would have
involved the allocation of approximately on the low end estimate
of about forty million acres of land to the four
million newly emancipated Americans. And that that was not something
that was done. Today we're now talking about forty million people.
(43:40):
It doesn't mean that you would have solved every problem.
I think there's a quotation that we provide in the
text from Malcolm X that kind of captures the scope
of the issue, where Malcolm X talks about having a
knife plunged into his back nine inches and he makes
a distinction between pulling the knife fount and healing the wound.
(44:02):
From our perspective, reparations is a matter of healing the wound.
But there's a host of steps that need to be
taken to make sure that the knife is pulled out
and that it stays out. And those are steps that
do not involve necessarily the types of payments that we're
talking about, but the types of payments we're talking about
are essential, and they would have to take place for
(44:24):
the purposes of really altering the framework, the substance, and
the morality of this society in such a way that
we really truly have an inclusive democracy, something we've never
actually had. Thank you very much for taking time to
do this with us. Best of luck with your next book.
Thanks very much. William Darety teaches at Duke University and
(44:48):
is the co author with his wife Kirsten Mullen, of
From Here to Equality, Reparations for Black Americans in the
twenty one century. I'm at like Baldwin. Here's the Thing
is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo and Carrie donohue. Our editor is Zack
mcneie and our engineers Frank Imperial. Special thanks to Sarah
(45:09):
every and Justin Wright. Our theme song is by Miles Davis.
If you like Here's the Thing, don't keep it to yourself.
Tell a friend you can subscribe to here's the thing
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. My guest today is Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. She's the author of Cast,
The Origins of Our Discontent. It's a profound book and
an instant bestseller. Wilkerson digs deep into American history, as
(00:24):
well as the history of Nazi Germany and the cast
system of India to understand the ways systemic inequality is
enforced in the United States. Throughout the book, Wilkerson explicitly
does not use the word racism. You know, one of
the reasons I use the word cast and this invisible, unrecognized,
(00:47):
unspoken hierarchy and infrastructure is that it is so profoundly
embedded into you know, our history, our psyches, the way
that things work, that it doesn't have to be a
single institution or actor. It's an autonomic response to changes
(01:12):
or threats to the hierarchy as we've known it. I
spent a lot of time thinking about how the word
cast is used in our language, with or without the E.
And so if you think about cast in a play
in which everyone has there's a script and everyone has
a place on the stage stage left, stage right, foreground background,
(01:33):
and everyone knows their lines, and if you're really invested
in it, you know everyone's lines because you know the
entire script. And so one when you have a situation
in which we have all inherited this script that's been
passed down through the generations, it doesn't take a single person.
It's not about a single person or entity. It's about
the recognition that this is the way things have been,
(01:56):
and those who are deeply invested in maintaining it will
do whatever it takes to keep it going. So it
could be any number of different entities, subsets, individuals anywhere
along the hierarchy who have a vested interest in maintaining it.
But would you say that in decades prior, would you
say that organizations that clearly espoused public policy and argue
(02:20):
for public policy that had a racially subjugating tinge to it,
an ultimate result was a cast maintenance. Oh? Absolutely. But
what I'm saying is, were those organizations more fringe years ago,
like the John Bird's Society, things that were ultra conservative,
ultra reactionary. We're much more marginalized fifty years ago, and
(02:44):
now it's mainstream now you have a whole news organization
where Tucker Carlson is saying the things he's saying. You know,
he's got advertisers, he's got a nightly show. Has it
become more mainstream that maintenance people who espouse a maintenance
of the cast system that you write of. Well, the
reason that I mentioned of the plateau is that as
long as you're in a plateau, there's not necessarily a
(03:07):
need for anyone to get activated. While the play is
going on and everything is going you know, it's had
a very long run, and everybody knows where they're supposed
to be, then there's no need for anyone to necessarily
to act to take action. It's only when there is
a threat, a perceived threat to what all has happened before,
(03:27):
to the infrastructure as we've known it, that is when
more and more people can be drawn into responding to
whatever is perceived as a threat. And that is how
I would look at it from a cast perspective. So
when the African American community, my question for a long
time has always been, you know what, ultimately as a
(03:48):
group separate from Hispanics, latinos Asians, the black community, the
African American community what do you think African American people
wanted fifty two years ago and how that's changed? Is
integration itself? Acquaint idea? Have black Americans? Have African Americans
arrived at a place and have they been there for
(04:10):
a while where they're like, we don't need to be
friends with you, we don't need to live with you
and hang out with you, as long as you just
let us have what we need and get off our
back and give us equal opportunity. Is the idea of
a pure racially blind integration Is that dead in this country?
I think that we don't even have necessarily a single
(04:31):
African American community. There are communities, There are people who
have been in this country for longer than most Americans
who might meet, meaning you know, slavery went on for
two hundred and forty six years, more than a hundred
years before there was the United States of America. So
that means that that's one group of people who are
descended from enslavement in a huge percentage, you know, probably
(04:52):
the majority of people who would be identified as black
in this country. Then we have people who have who
have immigrated here from a Caribbean and have been here
for many many decades as well, and now we have
a new introduction of people who are immigrating very large
numbers of people integrating from Sub Saharan Africa, so there's
not even just one community. There's also an issue of
class within the group known as African Americans. So there
(05:15):
are many, many different perspectives that are paid within forty
million people who would be identified as black or African
American in this country. So it's not one perspective, I
would say in that case, although of course everyone would
agree that people in our current day wish to be
treated as anyone else would in this country, wish to
not be over surveiled and over policed, would wish to
(05:37):
be able to go about their lives every day the
way other people do, without having someone intrude into their
day and call the police on them for you know,
sitting at a Starbucks waiting for a friend, trying to
get into one's own condo building. Those are the kind
of things that have happened to people who are of
African descent in this country in in just the last
couple of years. I mean just many, many, many, many
(05:57):
many examples of this going on. So I mean, I
think it's a have to say that all people of
African descent would love to just be able to go
about their lives as everyone else, as Americans, to be
able to pursue their dreams as anyone else would, or
just to be able to get through the day. I
would say that going back to the nineteen you know,
to the era of the Civil rights movement, which actually,
(06:17):
it could be argued, began with the arrival of the
first slave ship, meaning that there has always been resistance
to enslavement, always been resistance to being kept in Chaine,
and there's always been some kind of resistance, and what
we think of as a civil rights movement, it's just
part of the continuum of resistance that goes back for many,
many generations. You know, when you think about during slavery,
(06:39):
there were people the underground railroad of people trying to escape.
So I also think looking at the long arc of
history where we talk about progress and backlash and plateau,
those are the things that have continued for as long
as there's been a country. But the Civil Rights movement,
as you were speaking about what do people want, I
mean people wanted, well, what was life like for them
(07:00):
at that time? During the Civil rights era, nineteen fifties
and sixties, A good portion the majority of African Americans,
many of them were in the South, were not permitted
to vote, not permitted to be able to just use
public facilities, were segregated in every way that you can imagine.
There were actually separate bibles in court to swear to
(07:21):
tell the truth on. There is a Black Bible and
altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on.
In court. It was against the law for a black
person and a white person to merely play checkers together
in Birmingham, for example. So the world that people lived in,
and what I call the cast system of the American South,
was one of such extreme inequality and injustice and this
(07:42):
artificial graded ranking of human value, that the goal would
have been to be able to be seen and accepted
and have all the rights and privileges of any other
citizen of the United States, which they had earned through
generations and generations of course of working for free to
build this country for two and forty six years. So
that is what they were seeking ultimately, and they were
(08:04):
seeking human rights as well as civil rights, to be
seen and recognized as the humans that they had always
been and the citizens that they had always been. I
want to just get to another idea, and these are
all my opinions. In the last several years, there are
three primary groups that have organized politically to varying degrees
of success and using various methodologies to try to advance
(08:28):
their cause of their human rights. The l g B
t Q community, women and African Americans and people of color. Now,
one would argue that although none of them have come
far enough, the gay community made great strides with marriage equality,
and there was a lot of things that really really
you know, they had a nice, tight campaign and they
(08:50):
pushed and they won, and they prevaire women. I think
things have gotten better for women in this country, not enough.
I mean, I think the fact that we don't have
an equal rights in them and in this cord yous
appalling to me. Do you think that the cause of
African Americans in terms of their human rights has been
in third place in terms of those accomplishments gaining what
they wanted to and why? Well, I can only second
(09:13):
only go back to the work that I've done, which
is to say that we have inherited a cast system,
which is, you know, the arbitrary artificial ranking of human value.
And it was founded on the essential belief that the
colonists established themselves on top. They imported, they brought in
people from Africa to form the bottom wrong of that hierarchy.
(09:37):
So we're going back to the founding of our country.
Before there was the United States, there was this hierarchy
and it established this bipolar infrastructure. And X of course,
in the founding of the country, the indigenous people were
their numbers were decimated, and they were driven from their lands.
So this is this is our inheritance as Americans, and
(10:00):
this is so built into the infrastructure of our country
that this is an enduring question that has yet to
be fully resolved. Even though we had in a civil
rights movement and civil rights legislation of nineteen sixty four,
sixty five, and sixty eight. What we are seeing now
is an indication that you can have the laws in
place which are absolutely necessary and a show of progress.
(10:23):
Um yet you can still have what we have seen
in just the last year when it comes to video
after video of you know, dehumanizing effects of people who
are still enforcing these assumptions and and this this ranking
of human value. We can we have seen people killed
before our very eyes, inside of all that has gone before.
(10:46):
For you who have achieved, I mean, it doesn't get
any better for someone in your field than what you've accomplished.
You have a poet, surprise. You live in a pretty
rarefied world, in a pretty elite world. You'll be You're
an enormous successful, enormously well respected writer. You've been given
one of the highest honors in your field. Do you
(11:06):
still encounter microaggressions from people in the world you live in? Oh? Absolutely.
The one that I feel most comfortable talking about is
where I was actually accused of impersonating myself. For people
who haven't heard that, how did this guy pulled? How
did he do this? Yeah? So I had made appointments
with several people for this one story that was a
(11:28):
fairly harmless, you know, not controversial story at all, and
everybody that I called was really excited about it, about participating.
And he was one of the people that I called.
And I've done all these interviews during the course of
the day and he was the last interview of the
day and when I got there, he was not there.
I got into his h It's a retail establishment, a
(11:49):
small boutique and there was no one there in the
boutique at the time. Was a quiet hour of the day.
And the sales clerk said, you know, he's not here.
This is the man nager of the boutique. And I
waited for him, and then this, you know, the door
opening in. He's clearly recognized that he's late for something.
(12:09):
He's taking off his code, he's trying to get situated.
The clerk tells me to go over to him, because
that's the guy that I'm supposed to be interviewing. And uh.
I go up to him and I introduced myself and
he said, oh, I can't talk with you now, I
cannot talk with you. I'm getting ready for a very
very important meeting, very very important interview. I don't have
the time to talk with you. And I said, I'm
I'm Isabel Wilkerson. Um, I think I'm the appointment that
(12:32):
you're here, because we have this interview set up for
four thirty. Uh. And he said, well, how do I
know that? How do I know that? I mean, I
was stunned by that, because, I mean, here we were,
he was late, there was no one else there, and
he was saying to me, how do I know that
you're who you say you are? And I said, I
(12:53):
made this appointment with you. It's well past the time
I made this appointment with you. And he said, well,
let me you know you have a business card. And
it's so happened. It's one of those things where there's
when you're in a particular you know, uh past, I
might say, there's no room for error, and it just
so happened. I didn't have any business cards. I've been
(13:13):
out talking to people all day. I said, I don't
have a business card with me. I but we have
this appointment. I have my notebook. I was here waiting
for you. There's no one else here. We should be
having his interview. And he said, well, I'll need to
see some I D. So I said to him, I said,
I shouldn't have to show you I D. We're already
well into the time that we should be interviewing. But
(13:34):
here's my idea. I showed it to him, and he said,
showed him the driver's life. And he said, you don't
have anything with the New York Times on it. And
I said, we are well into the time we should
be doing the interview. I mean like we're just wasting time.
We could have been done with the interview by now.
And he said, I'm going to have to ask you
to leave because she'll be here any minute. She'll be here, Yes,
(13:56):
she'll be here any minute. Here she is. Let me
Let me leave and read what I thought of that? Wait?
Wait here, I am. It's me and my boss is
on the phone. They want you to call at the times.
But what's interesting to me? Among a myriad of things?
Were there ever any consequences for him? Was he an
employee of a company. Did anybody contact his employer and
(14:18):
say nothing ever happened to him? Now this charade? Now, Now,
I wrote the piece, I finished the piece, and I
would have liked to have included him, and he very
much wanted to be in it, obviously, But I wrote
the piece and got it done, and you know, and
that was it. I mean, he I I've sent him
a copy of the article with the business card he'd
asked for. Author Isabel Wilkerson. Another person who was challenging
(14:43):
the narratives of our nation's history is Brian Stephenson, the
founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. From the Here's the
Thing Archives, Stevenson talked about the way civil rights history
gets condensed. All we want to do when we talk
about the nineties, forties and fifties and exties is celebrate
the civil rights movement, to celebrate the progress that we made,
(15:05):
and freeze it. Everybody gets to celebrate. There's no qualifying
questions that you have to add answer before you get
to participate. And we've reduced it almost to this kind
of three day event where Rosa Parks gives up her
seat on the first day. Dr King leads the march
on Washington on the second day, and then we pass
all these laws on the third day. And it provokes
(15:26):
me because we're ignoring the decades of damage that we
did to everybody by humiliating people of color every day
of their lives. You can find the rest of my
conversation with Brian Stevenson that here's the thing dot Org.
We talk about the need for a curriculum for all
Americans to understand the history of the cast system. After
(15:47):
the break, I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing.
We're speaking today with author Isabel Wilkerson about her best
selling book Cast The Origins of Our Discontent. It feels
like racial inequality in our country is by design. Well,
(16:11):
it was designed as a hierarchy that we don't often
recognize because we can't see it. And that's why it's
in some ways so powerful. We've accepted it for so
long that we don't we don't see it because it
is just the way things are. You know, I described that,
you know, the country is like an old house, and
that old house, you know you don't want to go
into the basement to see, but the reins have wrought
(16:34):
after a rain. But if you don't go in and
look at it, then you're not You're not going to
avoid the consequences just because you don't know what they are.
You don't avoid having to deal with whatever is down
there just because you have not to have look. It
could be that if there's a human impulse to create hierarchy,
and you know, again getting back to that play that
I'm talking about, that script that has been passed down
(16:54):
through the generations, it doesn't take a single individual to
make pro ones for a society because if everyone has
received the script, then they're acting upon that script. I
am saying that each one of us has received the script,
and we we may act upon it in our own ways,
but the script is still there. And I think that
(17:15):
this is a matter of, you know, of adjusting and
changing and dealing with the programming that we have been heard.
It's like we've all been programmed to see things in
a certain way, to treat people in a certain way,
to elevate those who are in who are in the
dominant group, and to sublimate those who are in the
subordinated group. And it's so it's so much a part
of the social order of things, and it's been in
place for so long that we may not even be
(17:37):
able to see how it's acting upon ourselves. We may
not be able to say I was acting upon our
society until things reach that breaking point as they have
in more recent times, you know, in our current era.
I want to get to one last thing while I
have you, because I can't believe I've forgotten this. That is,
are you a proponent of reparations? Yes, I think that
The Warmth of the Sons your other book, Yeah, the
(17:58):
first book describes what African Americans endured, not doing slavery,
not doing slavery, but in the lifespan of people, actually
the oldest Americans and our current era, what they endured,
you know, the idea of redlining and restrictive covenants. That
meant that African Americans were excluded from the American dream
(18:19):
ununtil the nineteen sixties, excluded from the ability to just
kind fortgage like any other like white Americans were able to.
That means that white Americans whose parents bought homes or
grandparents and great grandparents bought homes before the nineteen sixties
were you know, unintended or may not be aware of it,
but we're beneficiaries of the discrimination that occurred against African Americans,
(18:42):
the exclusion of African Americans because they African Americans were
not permitted to participate in this wealth building, you know,
part of the American dream. And so there is a way,
without even having to go back to slavery, to say
that African Americans have been harmed economically and that current
day Americans, you know, my my own parents, for example,
(19:05):
who were not able to to get a mortgage in
the regular way that other people were because they fell
under that category of people who were excluded. They were
African Americans who were excluded by the virtue of their race.
And so I think that the record is very clear
that this is a group that has has endured completely
different experience as they went about trying to build lives
(19:28):
for themselves, excluded from the American dream. And so therefore,
of course, as other groups have have experienced abuses and
and atrocities and have been harmed for that, and that
is what countries do, reparations having to do with repairing harm.
So I'm in favor of clearly that is for the groups,
(19:48):
but I would also add that I believe what's most
important is education to go along with that, so that
all Americans can know why it is appropriate. No, we
need to have instruction in this country. Human rights is
something that should be taught in the core curriculum. You
should be have. Kids should come into school and they
should learn all about human rights with it two women
(20:11):
related to sexuality, related to race. We should have a
core course that kids are talking from a very young
age about why it's just the right thing to do
and why it's in your interest to allow people their
their rights. The only thing I would finish with is
beyond where the money would come from and how much
money would be in a reparations program, who do you
(20:32):
think is the best arbiters and who would be the
best managers of that system, do you think, see I
appreciate you asking me that question, but I'm not equipped
to answer that question. Who's a good person you think
they can speak about, who has a view about reparation
that you admire? Well, there are many people who do
who are researching this. One of them is a professor
of economics at Duke University named William Darety. He's one
(20:54):
of the people who's been working on this for a
very long time. Obviously, Ton Halsey Coates is you know,
wrote the piece the Case Reparations, which he very kindly
referred to the warmth of other sons as being an
inspiration for that. So there are many, many, many people
working on this, and I think that they're the ones
that I would defer to on this topic. I would
only say, and I really want to emphasize that in
(21:16):
other countries. I'm thinking about Germany, where I spent a
lot of time trying to understand how they deal with
their history. You know, in the middle of Berlin is
this massive memorial to the Jews who were killed in
the Holocaust, and it should be there. It is massive,
and of course is anyone to give deep thought reflect
upon what was lost uh in that. But it takes
(21:39):
up a massive amount of that city center. And in
spite of how large it is, it's notable that there's
no sign there's no signage, there's no exhibit explanation as
to why it's there or what happened. And the reason
is because everyone knows what is there. It happened to have
(21:59):
have been cre aided by a Jewish American architect, and
it's there as a memorial, and it makes a statement
by its existence by saying everyone there recognizes the horror
that happened. Everyone recognizes the history, as they should because
everyone receives an education about how and why this is
(22:20):
necessary to honor and how and why the country got
to where it was in World War Two, And we
do not have that. We're not on the same page
here in our country about basic facts as to the
causes of the Civil War and what happened after reconstruction,
and what was Jim Crow and how did that? How
(22:40):
did that work? How did we end up with the
cast system when I'm describing as a cast system of
this artificial grade and ranking of human value. We're not
on the same page about what happened in our country.
And that is what I'm saying. Why it's so important
as we try to understand how we got to where
we are now, is to understand what happened. You know,
you can't fix what you can't see, and you can't
(23:02):
repair what you don't know. And and that's why I
think it's important for us to get on the same
page about what happened. You can't make progress unless you
know what's happened to get us where we are. I
think there's hope. I think there's hope. I actually do
think there's hope. I've written these books so that people
can have an idea of where and how we got
(23:24):
to where we are. But that first book, when it
came out, moren't other sons. People would come up to
me of all different backgrounds and would say to me
over and over and over again, I had no idea.
I had no idea that this happened in our country.
I had no idea. And so the goal of this
is to get us on the same page about what
happened in this country. Things don't make sense until you
know how we got here. It's as if our country
(23:48):
like we're in an audience that walked into a theater
in the middle of a movie and we didn't catch
the first half. So we see one car chasing another car,
and a man chasing and and someone else's stopping the
man is chasing, and we don't understand why this one
man is chasing the other man. We don't understand what's happened.
And we watched the rest of the movie and we
(24:09):
still missed out on what was the essential questions about
how and why this happened. And so that's what we're like.
And if you've walked into the middle of a movie
and you didn't catch the first half, in some ways
nothing else really truly makes sense. And this is an
effort to try to get us on the same page
so that things will make sense, so that we will
have a better understanding of why we're where we are
(24:33):
and how we got to where we are, so that
we can have a better sense of what to do
going forward. That's the whole goal here. Well, let me
just say once again, thank you so much for taking
the time to do with this. Thank you so much.
That's best selling author Isabel Wilkerson. I wanted to follow
up on this question of reparations and as Isabel Wilkerson
(24:54):
recommended talking to William Daretti. He happens to be my
next guest. He teach is public Policy, African American Studies,
and Economics at Duke University. He and his wife Kirsten
Mullen are the authors of From Here to Equality, Reparations
for Black Americans in the twenty one century. It's a
(25:15):
detailed case for reparations, particularly as a way to close
the generational wealth gap between white and Black Americans. Dareity says,
the reparations invoice the federal government owes descendants of enslaved
people is between ten and twelve trillion dollars. It's a
daunting price tag. However, Darety says, if the federal government
(25:38):
commits to the plan, it can find the money. Well,
first of all, I don't think the increasing the deficit
necessarily means you increase the debt, uh, And it's it's
really a rise in the death that creates a financial
burden that's carried over time. But you can finance projects
without increasing taxes or increasing tax revenu new or making
(26:01):
a commitment to obtain an additional debt. In the process
of engaging in the expenditure. But let's say, even just
as a hypothetical, that they gave a trillion dollars over
ten years or twenty years, you've got a trillion dollars
a hundred billion dollars a year that was distributed for whatever,
for as you said, institutions, scholarships, direct cash payments to
(26:23):
people who I mean, this is going to be a
process to identify who really is entitled to this money
by your own metric. And even if you do that,
you don't think we need to raise taxes in order
to distribute a trillion dollars over ten years, not necessarily.
I mean, the limit to additional federal spending is the
inflation risk, and so any new expenditure program would have
(26:46):
to be designed in such a way that it minimized
the risk of high rates of inflation, UH, including this one.
But we propose some ways in Chapter thirteen that the
program could be administered UH in such a way that
you contain the prospects of high inflation, including what you
(27:07):
just mentioned, which is the idea of distributing the payments
over a period of years rather than making the payments
take place all at once. But we're also concerned about
creating a new wealth position for Black Americans that's comparable
to the wealth position that's held by white Americans. Or
(27:27):
the average white household has eight hundred thousand dollars more
in net worth than the average black household, and we
argue in the book that that's a consequence of the
cumulative intergenerational effects of policies that have promoted white wealth
accumulation at the expense of black wealth accumulation. And so,
(27:50):
you know, we could distribute that that set of funds
over the course of a decade. We could also distribute
the funds in such a way that we create trust
to counts or endowments where the full amounts are not
spent overnight or instantly by the individual recipients. So there
are ways to contain the inflation risk. Now the question becomes,
(28:13):
you know as well as I do, that the knee
jerk response you always get from people is almost kind
of a statute of limitations. Bail out. They kind of
sit there and they go, hey, man, I didn't known
any slaves, and yet you and I I mean, you
maintain I think, and I'll let you speak to this
this idea that the whole country there is the nation
itself is where it is today, and as the directors
(28:36):
of the bears responsibility as a country to pay this
amount of money. Correct, Yes, that's precisely right. Our position
is that the United States government is the culpopal party
because it maintained the legal and authority framework that permitted
these atrocities take place, and in many instances actually supported
(28:57):
the execution of these these are cities. And so yes,
it is the United States government that bears the responsibility
on behalf of the nation as a whole for meeting
the reparations bill. Uh. This comes into full focus when
we start thinking about the origins of the racial wealth
disparity that exists in the United States today, and and
(29:20):
that kind of disparity actually begins UH in the aftermath
of the Civil War when they formally enslaved persons were
promised forty acre land grants in the form of restitution,
and that promise was not met when at the same time,
the United States government, through the Homestead Acts, was providing
(29:42):
one point five million white families with access to a
hundred sixty acre land grants in the western part of
the United States and land that was appropriated from the
native population. This was a settler colonialist projects straight up.
But the effects of that were to create a situation
(30:02):
in which Black Americans start with no steak, no grub
steak in American society. They have to build wealth entirely
independently after being subjected to many, many years of bondage,
and white Americans get what is essentially a governmental handout
in the form of land that provides them with a
(30:24):
foundation for intergenerational wealth from the Homestead Act. Now, in
chapter thirteen a program of Black Reparations, you enumerate a
handful of different methods by which where the money would
be accessed. You talk about the wealth of the country
and the percentage of the population on the most simple terms,
(30:44):
that's African American. If it's thirteen percent, so they're entitled
to of that. Uh, you know, wealth of the country.
Which metric that you reference in the book? Are you
the most in favorable what do you think is the
calculation and what do you think is the best way
to get the money out of the Congress. So the
thing that we settle on as the metric for dictating
(31:07):
the actual amount of the reparations payment is elimination of
the racial wealth differential in the United States by increasing
the black asset position until there is no longer any
significant difference between average black and white household wealth. Uh,
And that would require an expenditure we estimate in the
(31:30):
vicinity of ten to twelve trillion dollars, So that would
be the basic amount that would be required to actually
accomplish the goals of a reparations project. Right now, the
African American population in the United States is what we
should say about forty million. I would say that the
African American population that is descended from persons who are
(31:52):
enslaved in the United States is about forty million people.
So do you have much knowledge as to how much
money the German government had to transfer even to the
state of Israel, because you mentioned not only just direct
payments to people, but to institutions as well. What what
what was the bill that was handled by the German government?
Do you know? As far as I understand, the German
government as well as interestingly enough, the United States government,
(32:14):
which is not a culpable party in that situation, are
still making payments and they are running into the vicinity
of billions and billions of US dollars. I think at
the outset When the German government first started this process,
it was running into the low billions in the nineteen forties,
(32:37):
the late nineteen forties. So the US government is still
paying into a program. The U s government is paying
into a program to provide restitution for US citizens who
were victims of the Holocaust and their descendants. How long
has that been going on. I think that was enacted
(32:59):
within the past ten years. And how much money is
that program spending US dollars. I'm not certain about the
exact amount of money and that program. I will say
this that you know, progressively, over time with respect to
the Holocaust payments, there's been an increase in the number
(33:19):
of individuals who are identified as being eligible for payments.
So it has expanded, particularly to the descendants of the
folks who were the direct victims, in such a way
that it actually includes I believe, not only sons and daughters,
but nieces and nephews. So it really has become a
(33:40):
more expansive program in terms of treating the ramifications of
the harm. The United States to me seems like a
country that they do the right thing, not all the time,
but very often they do the right thing only when
it's absolutely necessary. As my friend who was a professor
at n y U Law School, he had a great quote.
(34:03):
He said, when the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown
versus Board of Education decision, they didn't wake up that
morning and have any new information. They woke up that
morning and they knew the timing was right, that they
had to do this, that the country absolutely demanded and
was ready for this change. Now, what do you think
is the foundation, if you will, of selling this to
(34:24):
the American people? How would you expect that to work
in the COVID ravaged and financially limping United States of today. So,
I mean, I think it's critical again that that I
emphasize that I don't believe that the United States is
crippled in terms of its capacity to finance anything new,
(34:47):
but it has to structure those financing programs in a
sensible way so that it mitigates the risk of inflation.
I think that we should not be mystified or paralyzed
the consequence of the United States having accumulated a significant
amount of debt already, because we don't have to continue
(35:09):
to fund new programs by accumulating additional debt. So I
think we should just proceed to do the right thing. Now,
what would it take to persuade the American public at
large that this is the right thing to do. There
is evidence of a substantial sea change in American attitudes
about the legitimacy and the desirability of a reparation's plan
(35:34):
for Black Americans, which would have the effect of finally
giving Black Americans the material conditions for full citizenship, their
grounds for optimism because in a survey that was done
by Michael Dawson and Ravana pop Off, two researchers at
the University of Chicago the beginning of this century year
two thousand, they found that four percent of white Americans
(35:57):
were in favor of reparations for Black Americans. That's fou
r four. But about fifteen or sixteen months ago, a
survey indicated that about fifteen percent of white Americans were
now in favor of reparations. And the most recent survey
that I'm aware of, one that was conducted by the
organization Civics in June, indicated, and I'm not sure you
(36:21):
know how much confidence I have in this number, but
it indicated the thirty nine percent of white Americans are
now in favor of reparations for Black Americans. So even
if that's off by nine percentage points, it still would
represent a doubling of the figure that we had fifteen
or sixteen months ago. So I'm not sure if this
(36:42):
is a permanent change. I'm not sure if we can
make it a permanent change, but it sounds like the
momentum is moving in the right direction. This is here's
the thing. I'm Alec Baldwin, and I'm talking to Duke
University professor William Darty about reparations. If you like, here's
a thing, don't keep it to yourself, tell a friend.
(37:03):
You can subscribe to hear the thing on the I
Heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
After the break, we'll talk about how, according to Darty's proposal,
the federal government could determine who is eligible to receive reparations.
(37:25):
William Darety teaches economics at Duke University and has become
a leading advocate for reparations. He mentioned other cases where
reparations have been paid here in the US and in Germany.
I asked if he has any concern about other historically
marginalized groups like women, also coming forward to make a
case for reparations to actually no. Uh. We encourage whichever
(37:50):
group thinks they have a claim for a grievous injustice
to come forward and work on and present their claim. Uh,
just as we have in our book. We encourage other
folks who think that they have a legitimate claim to
craft their own narrative about why such a claim should
be met. I think it's really interesting that in the
(38:11):
process of the provision of reparations for Japanese Americans, uh,
in the process of the provision of reparations to the
families that lost loved ones in the nine one attacks,
they received significant federal compensation and the U. S Government
was not the culpable party in that instance either. But
(38:32):
in in those cases, I think there was some concern
about future claims being made by other groups, but this
was not something that proved to be an obstacle to
actually executing the project. So uh, yeah, it may well
be the case that there's I mean, the Native American
population has a strong case that I think is predicated
(38:55):
on sovereignty as opposed to the Black American case, which
is for used on citizenship. But certainly there's a case
to be made there and as far as we're concerned,
we welcome others to pursue their own case. We're just
tired of black, the Black American case being consistently pushed
to the back of the bus. Now. In October, the
(39:17):
governor of California signed a bill that will develop proposals
on paying out reparations to the descendants of the enslaved
who lived there. Now. Similar plans are underway in Rhode Island,
North Carolina, and elsewhere. Some would suggest that's a good
first step, you believe otherwise, correct, Yeah. I I certainly
believe that states and municipalities should establish what might be
(39:40):
called racial equity task forces, and I certainly believe that
they should address the scope of ongoing or sustained discriminatory
practices in their in their communities. But I don't think
that they should call the actions that they take reparation.
(40:00):
I think that in the context of the arguments we
make and from here to equality, we are concerned that
the concept of reparations has a certain proprietariness that's appropriate
to the type of project that we describe. In particular,
if you were to take all of the funds that
the state and local governments spend in their budgets from
(40:26):
a year ago, it would amount to three point one
trillion dollars. That's the total for all purposes. If we
have a reparations bill of ten to twelve trillion dollars,
there's no way that individually or collectively, our state and
local governments can actually meet the bill. And so uh
(40:48):
in addition to the fact that the federal government is
the culpable party, it is also the federal government that
has the practical capacity to actually fulfill the requirements of
a reparations plan. And so as a consequence, I think
that as admirable as any local efforts are for atonement
or for change with respect to discriminatory practices within their states,
(41:11):
these things should not be called reparations. When you look
at the world and you look at history, is there
a model for what you want to do that you
can point to? Well? From our perspective, the model is
that's relevant to the United States experience. The model that's
most relevant is is the Japanese American Reparations Project. Is
(41:31):
it possible to say that it was effective? That's much
harder to do because the individual recipients were not followed.
Nobody was concerned about making some type of judgment about
how they might use the money. Now you make mention
you said, we advanced two criteria to determine eligibility for
(41:52):
a black reparations program. First, U S citizens, we need
to establish that they had at least one ancestor who
was enslaved in the United States after the formation of
the Republic. Second, they would have to prove that they
self identified as black, Negro, Afro American, or African American
at least twelve years before the enactment of the reparations
(42:13):
program or the establishment of a congressional or presidential commission
quote to study and develop reparations for African Americans unquote,
whichever comes first. Does such a thing exists now? No,
not to my knowledge. Uh. Yeah. So the idea is
that we wouldn't want people to have to bear a
significant financial burden to establish their eligibility. And since one
(42:37):
of the criteria for eligibility is demonstrating that you have
at least one ancestor that was enslaved in the United States,
we could have the federal government provide that investigation as
a service to individuals to me the genealogical component in
order for it to be really really helpful and be effective.
(42:57):
Is another thing you've got to build out in this operation.
This is that this is a big operation to identify
who gets the money. Well, well, I mean this is
something that is as a debt that is overdue for
a hundred fifty five years, and it's a debt that
now is owed to forty million people. So yes, it's
a substantial operation. I mean, if if if the debt
(43:19):
had been met in eighteen sixty five, it would have
involved the allocation of approximately on the low end estimate
of about forty million acres of land to the four
million newly emancipated Americans. And that that was not something
that was done. Today we're now talking about forty million people.
(43:40):
It doesn't mean that you would have solved every problem.
I think there's a quotation that we provide in the
text from Malcolm X that kind of captures the scope
of the issue, where Malcolm X talks about having a
knife plunged into his back nine inches and he makes
a distinction between pulling the knife fount and healing the wound.
(44:02):
From our perspective, reparations is a matter of healing the wound.
But there's a host of steps that need to be
taken to make sure that the knife is pulled out
and that it stays out. And those are steps that
do not involve necessarily the types of payments that we're
talking about, but the types of payments we're talking about
are essential, and they would have to take place for
(44:24):
the purposes of really altering the framework, the substance, and
the morality of this society in such a way that
we really truly have an inclusive democracy, something we've never
actually had. Thank you very much for taking time to
do this with us. Best of luck with your next book.
Thanks very much. William Darety teaches at Duke University and
(44:48):
is the co author with his wife Kirsten Mullen, of
From Here to Equality, Reparations for Black Americans in the
twenty one century. I'm at like Baldwin. Here's the Thing
is brought to you by I Heart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo and Carrie donohue. Our editor is Zack
mcneie and our engineers Frank Imperial. Special thanks to Sarah
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