March 25, 2021 • 35 mins
Oh say can you FreakShow! Erika and Whitney become minstrel characters, “Mista’ Tambo n’ Mista’ Interlocutor,” to present the perverse-circus-sideshow oddities of America’s institutional and corporate racism. Star experts join them to bear witness and unveil slavery‘s toxic legacy, woven within modern corporate policies and legislation. Professor Adam Rothman chronicles the sordid history behind one of America's finest educational institutions, Georgetown University. Voting rights activist Desmond Meade disrupts the panhandle circus with Florida Amendment Four to restore voting rights to 1.4 million people with felony convictions. Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee illustrates how the sad perversities of fighting for systemic injustice persists. And the MLK of tipped wage workers, Saru Jayaraman, nails the corrosive tradition of tipping to slavery and the ongoing fight for fair wages within America’s largest private sector workers. Finally, Erika croons a new Swanee tune that makes the White Superiority hit list! “Step back Beyoncé!”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
I'm Erica Alexander, and I'm Whitney down. Welcome to Reparations,
the big payback production of Color Farm Media, I Heart
Radio and the Black Effect Podcast Network. Step right up, pery, hurry,
step right up. The show's about to begin. Wait, I'm
(00:27):
not ready, hard it's a trick question. No one is
ready for a discussion about institutional racism, at least no
one who's benefited from it institutional racism. Okay, Okay, I'm
getting ready. I'm your friendly host and guide, Mr Tam Bowles.
I'm here to spill all the freaky t and coming
to the stage. Put your hands together for the ever
(00:49):
lovely Mr. And to lock it all. Who is that?
Who I am? I mean, I don't know what to say.
Don't worry. I'll be doing most of the label up
in this piece as usual, as we present the Freak Show.
See Corporate American prophets and the stagger and wealth of
(01:10):
America as a whole as the legacy of slavery. Yes,
it's the freak Show. See powerful educational institutions founded on
slave money. It's freaking slave money. Got it? Keep up? Son?
See eerie echoes of slavery and modern day labor practices.
(01:32):
I'm talking about tipping. It's freaky, deeky Are you even
following me? So you're talking about a critical view of
some key American institutions through the lens of contemporary racialized perspective,
tracing through lines of slavery and the perverse and ongoing
control of black bodies all the way up to and
including the power structures of the present day. Wow, you
(01:59):
changed on me, baby, Just trying to keep the customer satisfied.
Mr dam Bo, that's the spirit. Step right up, folks.
What's our first exhibit? Our first exhibit is truly truly freaky.
It concerns one of America's oldest educational institutions, located on
(02:19):
the Potomac River in the beating heart of our fine
nation's capital. Bill Clinton went to school there and actor
Brodd Bradley Cooper did too. They're the lawyers. They've got
lots of lawyers. I'm talking about Georgetown University. Georgetown. I
(02:40):
had them in the final four, Yes, sir, Mr Interlockerta.
They're famous and they're famously will endowed, if you know
what I mean. Wait what but it wasn't always that
way in there In lies to tell. For our first exhibit,
we spoke to Georgetown professor Adam Rothman of the school's
Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation. There's a couple
(03:03):
of ways of thinking about Georgetown's relationship to slavery, one
over the long term, and then one having to do
with an immediate moment in time. In the long term,
Georgetown was founded by Catholic elite that derived its wealth
and status from slavery. The original model for the university
was that the education of white boys and men would
(03:25):
actually be subsidized by slave labor on plantations in Maryland
that had been owned by the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits,
and Georgia itself was also a site of slave labor.
Enslave people worked on campus. Students actually brought slaves to
campus and hired them out to the university to pay
off their fees. University hired enslaved people from local owners
(03:48):
to do odd jobs around the university. So in a
lot of ways, the university was really intricately tied to slavery.
But the real existential moment of connection comes in the
eighteen thirties. It turns out that the plantations that were
run by the Jesuits were actually not profitable, and so
for twenty years the Jesuits they had a debate really
about what to do about their human property. They owned
(04:11):
nearly three hundred people. The Jesuit leadership came to the
conclusion that they should sell off virtually the entire community
of people that they owned. So they did that in
eighteen thirty eight. They sold two two people to two
buyers in Louisiana for a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars,
and they took the initial down payment from that sale
(04:31):
of about two dollars, and they used it to pay
off the crushing debt that the college had accrued without
that sale, without the proceeds from the sale of those people,
you know, it's not clear that the university would have survived.
And that's why I say that Georgetown owes its very
existence to slavery. There are thousands of living descendants of
(04:53):
the g U two City two has also completely changed
the conversation about the meaning of this history because now
we have a rual. We have people living today whose
own families were touched by this trauma of sale and
forced transportation to the Deep South, and their lives were
shaped by this experience in ways they didn't even know
(05:14):
before the revelations of this history came out. I mean,
the descendant community itself had lots of ideas about how
the university should reconcile with its history, and all of
a sudden, the conversation was not just an internal conversation
of the university. There was an outside partner who had
been wronged who wanted to voice into conversation. So those
conversations have been going on for some time. There have
(05:37):
been some things that have gone on, like in April
of two thousand and seventeen, there was a big service
at Georgetown where both the president of Georgetown and the
head of the North American Jesuits apologized in the presence
of members of the descended community for their roles in
the history of slavery and in the trauma of the sale,
the sin of the sale. That was the language they used.
(05:58):
But since then, I think it's been slow owing. There
have been conversations between the university and Jesuit leadership and
leadership of the descentate community about how to move forward.
It's hard to wait for those conversations to play out.
So last spring undergraduate students of Georgetown organized a student
referendum to enact a student fee, an activity fee of
(06:22):
twenty seven and twenty cents a semester that would pay
for a reconciliation fund to support programs it would benefit
the G two two descent community. Was an amazing thing
to watch on campus. In the end, the students voted
overwhelmingly to support the student activity fee. It was the
highest turnout for a student referendum in Georgetown's history, so
it was an overwhelming victory for the advocates for what
(06:47):
was effectively a novel scheme of reparations. The G two
two was sold for thousand dollars in eighteen thirty eight,
which is the equivalent of about three million dollars in
today is money. The student proposal would have raised about
four thousand dollars a semester, so in five years that
(07:10):
fee would raise basically the equivalent of the amount of
the sale. But when we started talking numbers like that,
that's where it gets tricky, both in terms of how
you actually calculate the present value of what enslaved people
contributed to Georgetown University, and beyond that, the question about
(07:30):
whether you can actually put a price, whether you can
actually put any kind of number on the value of
what is owed to the descendants of enslaved people. I
know members of the descendant community themselves who actually object
to monetary reparations because they object the idea of putting
a price on the value of their ancestors life and labor.
(07:53):
I can't design the program of reparations myself as a
white historian, but I can say, and this is I
think what's happened in Georgia, and I and say, look,
here's the documentation of what actually happened. Think about this,
reflect on it, and it might move you. So there
are a lot of harms to slavery. The robbery of
the fruits of people's labor was one of them, But
(08:15):
another one was just the denial of history and the
separation of families. We saw that in the sale. But
one of the things that I think has happened with
the recovery of this history is that people have learned
more about their own families and that psychic trauma of
the suppression of history that came with slavery, that at
(08:36):
least has been pride apart a little bit, and that
I think is by no means a full reparation by
any start of the imagination. But it's a step towards understanding,
and I think that's important. Adam Rothman, Georgetown professor and
Twitter ninja, what's our next exhibit? Would that be? Exhibit be? Actually,
(08:59):
that would be Exhibit D D for Desmond Meade. He's
a voting rights activists who led the successful fight to
pass Florida Amendment for a two thousand eighteen initiative that
restored voting rights to over one point four million Floridians
with previous felony convictions. He's one of Time magazines one
hundred most influential people in two thousand nineteen. That's pretty
(09:23):
freaky right there. What's truly freaky, though, is how hard
the Republicans, including the Santists the governor, are pushing back.
It's because they recognize the policing and control of black
bodies into prison and out of prison. The denial of
full citizenship after prison is a building block of white supremacy,
and white supremacy will not give up without a fight.
(09:46):
White supremacy is the freak show. Freaking deacon told you
when I was convicted of a felony offense I lost
my civil rights, which meant I lost the right to vote,
the right to serve on the are, the right to
run for office. And then there are other collateral consequences
that are associated with the laws of civil rights. When
(10:08):
we passed Amendment forward, amendment for debt with with the
right to vote, and so when we passed the memor
for I got to write the vote back right, but
my civil rights was haven't been restored. And so what
that meant was that even though I got the right
to vote back, and even though I graduated from law
school with a law degree right and I made the
(10:28):
deans list my last year, I still can't practice law
because I can't apply to the Florida Bar to take
the bar exam until my civil rights have been restored.
What that means is, even though I've had a very
successful career, I can't even buy or rent a home
in a lot of places in Florida because my civil
(10:48):
rights has not been restored. And so the restoration of
civil rights impact employment opportunities as well in the housing opportunities.
And so what this policy changed their was allowed people
to have their civil rights restored along with their voting rights.
Even though it's all like a package deal now, and
folks now have more opportunities to buy and rent homes,
(11:13):
They have more opportunities to get occupational licenses, get a
much better paying job, and be able to provide for
their families. So let me tell you, and that is
impacting every one at the one point for a million
that benefited from the passing of Amendment four have an
opportunity to have their civil rights restored. I am so
grateful that God has chosen me to be a part
(11:35):
of this process to make that happen, and I'm honored.
You know, one of the stories that I like to
tell is one day slave master awakens and here that
wait a minute, those same people who you didn't think
was even a whole of a man and families you've
destroyed and murdered and eaten the flesh off their bone, though,
(11:57):
famed people that you spent on them, now have just
as much right as you do. And not only do
they have the same rights as you do, they started
exercising those rights. And the same people that you had
your foot on their neck for more than eight minutes
of forty six seconds are now becoming judges and sheriffs
and congressmens and having authority over you, and that was
(12:21):
a scary sight. And so mass incarceration was the fallback
to where it Okay, well, why don't we create these
laws that would criminalize things that newly freed slaves would do.
In doing so, then we're able to grab them and
arrest them and convict them. And while we convict them,
we're gonna strip them away of this new right that
(12:42):
they have to vote right then to serve on jury
and and to run for office. And then we're gonna
take them and we're gonna throw them back into the
cage that reminds them of the ships that they were
brought over from when we brought them over from Africa.
And then when we get ready, we could take them
out of those cages and take outsource them as prison labor,
(13:03):
right back into the same fields in which they was
liberated from. And then for those that were not able
to capture like that, we're gonna use the same folks
that are once called slave patrols that but they have
evolved into what police right, We're gonna use those same
folks to exact state sanctioned violence to intimidate and threaten
(13:26):
and the rest who we can, and kill who we can,
and hang who we can, and burn who we can.
To drive home a point that you do not deserve
to be treated with dignity and respect, that you are
underneath us, and you will not participate in our elections.
You would not have a say in how this country
is ran because you're not equal. The driving force was
(13:48):
the combining of slave patrols, which is police, with our
incarceration and judicial system, and together you have a system
that not only terrorized you on the streets, but it
is designed to capture you and incarceraate you, and enslave
you in prison. You know, even though the private prison
(14:09):
industry is a small portion of its prison industrial complex system,
what we do recognize is that there is an ecosystem
that profits off of the bondage of people of color.
You see it an immigration attention, and of course you
see it in our criminal legal system. The wealth that's
(14:29):
in this country is directly related to the profit that
was made off of the backs of our ancestors that
was stolen from Africa. So how do we get folks
to understand that reparations is not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Reparations is writing in the justice that would end up
(14:53):
benefiting all parties involved, say Mr Tambo, Yes, Mr Interlocker,
I'm beginning to get the impression that reparations is about
far more than just slavery. Go on that, in fact,
reparations might have to cover a whole network of structures
(15:16):
of inequality and repression embedded in the American experiment from
the beginning to ensure the second class status of Black Americans.
It's slavery, yes, but it's also the electoral college. It's
red lining from Jim Crone beyond George Floyd and Brianna Taylor.
(15:36):
It's like, I don't even know you anymore, but you're
not wrong. Here's son, let me sing it to you.
De Ray sism and the White side prim c deep
(15:57):
in resting from me Dinapolis down to Memphis to the see.
That's where my people here races institutions down on our
backs or rais or you get vote if you don't
(16:19):
pay the poll tax or spill my name bakes l
to tem Us where we can't go no matter what
we pay. All time sleep patrols become fo That's the
American way. Do read Sisamander, whites up, primsy everybody. Everybody know. Oh,
(16:54):
that's America's defining legacy. It's hard. Who ha step back
(17:14):
beyond sne Oh, who's next. Our next exhibit is an
interview with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson. Lee represented the fine people
of the Texas eighteenth. Since you know her, you love her,
(17:35):
and she's been on the front lines of the fight
for reparations, she too has something to say about the
pushback against recognizing slavery and discrimination and the damage done
to black people in America since sixteen nineteen, and against
the search for an implementation of remedies. This is becoming
like a theme, the perversity of the fight against justice.
(17:59):
The freaky is real, the free is real. Slavery was
eliminated in eighteen sixty five around the passes of the
thirteenth Amendment. So people think that's history. That's a long
time ago, and why are we still talking about it.
The attitude is get over it. And so I think
it's important to restate some of those very pointed facts
(18:21):
of brutality in the inhumanity of slavery. Slaves were not people,
they were not counted as one human being. What did
it do to the African American family, male female? Psychologically?
What did it do to them so so logically? Where
did they wind up living? What did it mean when
(18:42):
they couldn't buy housing? How did they feel? What did
it generate? Did it generate mass and conservation? What did
it do to them economically? Why was the wealth gap
so huge even though there were success stories? What did
do with them politically? What did it do to them scientifically?
When there was a rage in the nineteen sixties that
(19:04):
assessed that African Americans were inferior, that's why they couldn't
do anything. They couldn't accomplish anything because they were inferior,
not because the laws of the land, which were clearly
part of the isolating and targeting of African Americans. They
didn't get anything to pile away, to es, grow, to deposit,
(19:27):
anywhere to pass on. But the ongoing effects of the
institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systematic structures
of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the
United States. What is the qualitative and quantitative number that
(19:48):
you put on touring in fifty years of free labor
with no workman's cop no insurance, no pension, which literally
helped build the economic genius and giantness of America. So
if we look in that manner, I think that the
(20:08):
truth will just be so real that you would have
to look to reparations. You lift one boat, you lift
all boats. You lift boats in America, in urban pockets,
in rural pockets. Then you lift America. The economy gets excited.
Can people see that? Can they see if I lift
(20:28):
this boat, then this boat over here live. Because firstly,
there are too many people in the United States that
live in poverty period, but we are African Americans are
the bulk of that poverty. So there was disparate treatment,
disparate access, disparate outcomes. And for that reason, I think
(20:49):
if there is an understanding of that pain and how
it translated, if people just quietly reflect, then fear will
move quickly away, because then the reality of the pain
will come forward and people will ask in collective voices,
how can we resolve this? Where is a reconciliation? Where
(21:10):
is the easing of the pain. So reparations is to fairly,
calmly seek reconciliation over those painful years, more than two
centuries of pain and brutality, and to address it in
the twenty one century and then I think it's a
question of money. And my answer to that is there
(21:35):
are a myriad of solutions. Let us start the journey
so that the academicians and groups that have are advocating
for many different answers, they can all be heard, and
maybe as we hear them, it will be very simple
to find a way to address the response. Have you
(21:57):
ever heard the saying behind every great fortune there is
a green crime. Yes, I read it in The Godfather. Well,
the French author Balzac said it, and a Frenchman would know.
And when it comes to the riches of America, ain't
it the truth? Ain't it the truth? One woman has
made a regular specialty of linking various blue chip blue
(22:21):
chip I say, Lincoln blue chip corporations and their fortunes
to the slave trade. Her work and documenting that ETNA
Insurance had written insurance policies on enslaved Africans. Oh, boy,
I think I see where this is going exactly with
the slaveholders as beneficiaries, led to ETNA making a twenty
(22:42):
million dollar payment to the African American community. This was
the first reparations court victory in American history. In two
thousand six, Deadria Farmer Pelman good woman, Yes, indeed she
is very good woman. Now look, boy, I saved a
good story for our last exhibit. Did you ever wonder
(23:08):
why we tip restaurant workers? You mean, instead of giving
them a fair wage? Right? You catching on? But do
you think it's because they won't it that way? And
did you ever notice that the the dog or the
skin color of the staff gets What if I told
you that tipping in restaurants in this country is like
the electoral college, just one more legacy of slavery. Here's
(23:31):
activist Sorrow Jaroman to tell us how it is. The
restaurant industry has become the nation's second largest and absolute
fastest growing private sector employers, and yet despite the industry
size and its growth, it has been for decades the
absolute lowest paying employer in the United States of America,
(23:53):
which is bad for a country to have the largest
and fastest growing industry be the lowest paying industry. And
that fact is due to the money power and influence
of a trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association. We
call it the Other n r A. The Other n
r A s history does actually go all the way
back to emancipation, the restaurant lobby and one other industry,
(24:18):
the Pullman train company, wanted the right to hire newly
freed slaves black people and continue to not pay them
for their labor and instead have them rely entirely on
this new idea that had just come from England or
from Europe at the time, called tipping, and so at Emancipation,
tipping was mutated from being an extra or a bonus
(24:41):
on top of a wage to becoming the wage itself.
And we started with a zero dollar wage for tipped
workers at Emancipation that became law in night when everybody
got the right to a federal minimum wage for the
first time as part of the new Deal, except for
groups of black workers, farm workers, domestic workers, and tipped
(25:03):
restaurant workers who are told, you get a zero dollar
wage as long as tips bring you to the full
minimum wage. And we went from zero and ninety eight
all the way up to the incredible two dollars and
thirteen cents an hour, which is the current federal minimum
wage for tipped workers in the United States of America.
And as I said at the beginning, that is not
(25:24):
the wage for a tiny sliver of the American workforce.
It's the wage for the nation's largest private sector employer,
largest private sector employer of women, largest private sector employer
of people of color, largest employer of immigrants, largest employer
formally incarcerated individuals, largest employer period gets away with legally
(25:45):
paying its workers two dollars an hour at the federal
level and under five dollars an hour in four out
of five states, all because of this legacy of slavery
and the ongoing power of this trade lobby. So the
restaurant industry is notoriously racially segregated. Workers of color in
(26:07):
our industry are segregated into lower paying segments of the industry.
There in casual restaurants and fast food restaurants rather than
fine dining, and even in fine dining, they tend to
be bussers and runners and kitchen staff as opposed to
fine dining servers and bartenders. Now, on top of that,
(26:27):
if workers of color make it the rare exceptions where
they make it to be servers and bartenders in fine
dining restaurants, there is irrefutable data that they earn less
in tips because of customer bias. There is now mountains
of evidence that tipping is not correlated with the quality
of the service. Tipping is a reflection of all of
(26:49):
America's biases from the inception of America, and what it
is correlated with is the race and gender of the server,
her eye color, her skin color, her hair color, her
hair texture, her breast size, whether she's willing to touch
the customer or be touched. And so that segregation of
workers of color into back of house versus front of house,
(27:14):
which is eerily reminiscent of the way in which slaves
on plantations or even in reconstruction, people of color were
treated and differentiated. And then on top of that, the
differential in the way people are tipped. All of that
results in a five dollar per hour wage gap between
(27:34):
black women and white men in our industry. That differential
creates generational poverty depending on where you live in forty
three states in the United States, so most likely wherever
you go out to eat, every time you tip in
a restaurant, every worker that you are interacting with is
(27:55):
being paid less than the minimum wage because you are
tipping them. It actually is the employer the legal permission
to pay the person less because you tip them. The
sub minimum wage exacerbates the inequality and it forces all
of these folks to live off of tips. The fact
that people of color earn less in tips even when
(28:16):
they have the same positions, it is a reflection of
still deep seated racism in the United States. Even when
workers of color make it to higher paid positions, they
cannot earn the same in tips because of this racism,
and so racism doesn't pay off. Playing into customer racism
doesn't help, and paying people to dollars also doesn't help
(28:39):
you in the long run. What does help you is
increased mobility for people of color that diversifies your clientele
base and paying people a wage that allows them to
stay in the restaurant and hone their craft. These are
not jobs job or they don't have to be a
lot of people in this industry take great pride in
this work. They can sider themselves to be skilled professionals.
(29:03):
The only reason why these skilled occupations are not seen
as professions is the way they are treated and paid.
And we need to see them as skilled professions if
we want to both break the apartheid and raise all
of these jobs to be living wage professions. Well, Whitney,
(29:24):
did you ever think you'd be talking like fog Horn
Leghorn about the Freaky Dickie show of corporate institutionalized racism Erica.
You know, I never thought that i'd be in a
minstrel show voluntarily, So this is definitely a new experience
for me. You know what, You not many white men
have this on their resume anymore. I mean, justin Trudeau.
(29:46):
The come on, let's be real. There's some people who
have done it, and you're doing it for a good cause.
You did a great job, you're a great sport about it.
So you're thinking I should put this on my resume
for which job? Are you thinking them? And apply to?
Not think you should? Absolutely, if I were you, I'd
put it at the top. I'm just glad you didn't
ask me to sing. You know I had did that
for you next time. You can't get out of all
(30:08):
of it. But really we were talking about something that's
very important for people to understand that they had to
twist it and mangle it and deform it in order
for it to grow as institutions, and they did. They
created all sorts of heinous policies and legislation because they
could create black people as the freak show. You know
(30:30):
what's interesting actually, Erica for me doing this is that
it was so uncomfortable for me to actually do a
minstrel show with you both. The experience of doing it
was like out there, but also then that realization it's
kind of like the leading into owning it being a
white person, they we always want to push a Sykee
that's not me, that history is not me, that's not
(30:51):
related to me, And then when you actually embody it
an inhabitant, it kind of like drives something home that yeah,
it actually is me. It is my legacy. And sometimes
I feel like, oh, well, are we letting white people
off the hook because they're able to like tiptoe away
from it as opposed to owning it. So I felt
that was kind of the experience for me and doing this.
It's like, I can't tiptoe away from a minstrel show. Again,
(31:12):
we're living in a minstrel show if you can take
away the entertainment and the black face. But the black
face was meant to activate white persons, the exaggerated version
that they thought blackness was. You know, if you think
about it, black people were Africans learned English from white people,
(31:32):
so if they were talking like that, which they weren't,
they have been talking like the people who taught them English.
The other thing is that it was meant to be absurd,
and you know we we did it sort of quick ends,
you know, like an entertainment thing. But they did it
often to make them seem lazy and shiftless. I was
got going to ways and black people were never lazy
(31:55):
and slift shiftless. If we were, we got beat, we
got killed. So I think one of the biggest lie
was to create this type of minstrelsy. And to this
day you hear a lot of people go, what about
their work ethic they're not used to working and who
they think built America? Are they crazy? Who they think
takes the late bus and the early bus in the morning,
(32:17):
not just black people people of color. We are taking
care of their children, wiping their butts when they get
old and are dying. And we are also the doctors
and the scientists. So now it can't be denied that
we are in every available space in America. And yet
(32:37):
these things are so inside of the zeitgeist, whether we
see them or not, they still exist. Well, I'm looking
forward to next week. Awesome, next time on reparations, the
big payback. The cases for and against reparations do get
out in the boxing ring. Will you in reparations? I
(33:00):
think everything that has touched us in a way that
profited from us and we did not owes us. You
don't owe me shit. All you owe me is respect
and opportunity. Not only are reparations of cash payout, they
need to be long term and systemic, purposeful systems and
(33:21):
organizations set up that puts black people who were brought
here his beast and shadow on a pathway to having
their full rights in prible to just recognized and enjoy.
We gotta stop playing the victim. Well, this happened during slavery,
so this is why this is still having them today
or why you're not you know and blah blah blah.
But no, those things have changed at some point. The
(33:43):
descending of someone that was brought here in sixteen nineteen
deserves to steer this raggedy as chip through these trouble water.
That is an element of reparations that is long deserved.
We want to talk about rep racing again. It's real.
So we need to get in live because the Indians
(34:06):
deserved reparation before we do because they were enslaved too.
What doc is is a reckoning of the evil and
the original scene that America did. They enslaved people look
like our black Head. This podcast is produced by Eric Alexander,
Ben Arnon and Whitney Dow. The executive producers are Charlomagne
(34:29):
the God and Dolly s. Bishop. The Supervising producer is
Nicole Childers and the lead producer is Devin Mattock Robins.
The producer writer is Sis Castle and the associate producers
Kevin Famm, with additional research support provided by Nile Blast.
The White Supremacy Swanny songs written by Tony Purrier, piano
by Robert Turner and vocal arrangement by Sir R. Brown Alexander.
(34:51):
Original music by dj D t P Reparations. The Big
Payback is a production of color Farm Media, I Heart
Radio and The Black Effect Podcast Network in association with
Best Case Studios. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(35:12):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
I'm Erica Alexander, and I'm Whitney down. Welcome to Reparations,
the big payback production of Color Farm Media, I Heart
Radio and the Black Effect Podcast Network. Step right up, pery, hurry,
step right up. The show's about to begin. Wait, I'm
(00:27):
not ready, hard it's a trick question. No one is
ready for a discussion about institutional racism, at least no
one who's benefited from it institutional racism. Okay, Okay, I'm
getting ready. I'm your friendly host and guide, Mr Tam Bowles.
I'm here to spill all the freaky t and coming
to the stage. Put your hands together for the ever
(00:49):
lovely Mr. And to lock it all. Who is that?
Who I am? I mean, I don't know what to say.
Don't worry. I'll be doing most of the label up
in this piece as usual, as we present the Freak Show.
See Corporate American prophets and the stagger and wealth of
(01:10):
America as a whole as the legacy of slavery. Yes,
it's the freak Show. See powerful educational institutions founded on
slave money. It's freaking slave money. Got it? Keep up? Son?
See eerie echoes of slavery and modern day labor practices.
(01:32):
I'm talking about tipping. It's freaky, deeky Are you even
following me? So you're talking about a critical view of
some key American institutions through the lens of contemporary racialized perspective,
tracing through lines of slavery and the perverse and ongoing
control of black bodies all the way up to and
including the power structures of the present day. Wow, you
(01:59):
changed on me, baby, Just trying to keep the customer satisfied.
Mr dam Bo, that's the spirit. Step right up, folks.
What's our first exhibit? Our first exhibit is truly truly freaky.
It concerns one of America's oldest educational institutions, located on
(02:19):
the Potomac River in the beating heart of our fine
nation's capital. Bill Clinton went to school there and actor
Brodd Bradley Cooper did too. They're the lawyers. They've got
lots of lawyers. I'm talking about Georgetown University. Georgetown. I
(02:40):
had them in the final four, Yes, sir, Mr Interlockerta.
They're famous and they're famously will endowed, if you know
what I mean. Wait what but it wasn't always that
way in there In lies to tell. For our first exhibit,
we spoke to Georgetown professor Adam Rothman of the school's
Working Group on Slavery, Memory and Reconciliation. There's a couple
(03:03):
of ways of thinking about Georgetown's relationship to slavery, one
over the long term, and then one having to do
with an immediate moment in time. In the long term,
Georgetown was founded by Catholic elite that derived its wealth
and status from slavery. The original model for the university
was that the education of white boys and men would
(03:25):
actually be subsidized by slave labor on plantations in Maryland
that had been owned by the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits,
and Georgia itself was also a site of slave labor.
Enslave people worked on campus. Students actually brought slaves to
campus and hired them out to the university to pay
off their fees. University hired enslaved people from local owners
(03:48):
to do odd jobs around the university. So in a
lot of ways, the university was really intricately tied to slavery.
But the real existential moment of connection comes in the
eighteen thirties. It turns out that the plantations that were
run by the Jesuits were actually not profitable, and so
for twenty years the Jesuits they had a debate really
about what to do about their human property. They owned
(04:11):
nearly three hundred people. The Jesuit leadership came to the
conclusion that they should sell off virtually the entire community
of people that they owned. So they did that in
eighteen thirty eight. They sold two two people to two
buyers in Louisiana for a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars,
and they took the initial down payment from that sale
(04:31):
of about two dollars, and they used it to pay
off the crushing debt that the college had accrued without
that sale, without the proceeds from the sale of those people,
you know, it's not clear that the university would have survived.
And that's why I say that Georgetown owes its very
existence to slavery. There are thousands of living descendants of
(04:53):
the g U two City two has also completely changed
the conversation about the meaning of this history because now
we have a rual. We have people living today whose
own families were touched by this trauma of sale and
forced transportation to the Deep South, and their lives were
shaped by this experience in ways they didn't even know
(05:14):
before the revelations of this history came out. I mean,
the descendant community itself had lots of ideas about how
the university should reconcile with its history, and all of
a sudden, the conversation was not just an internal conversation
of the university. There was an outside partner who had
been wronged who wanted to voice into conversation. So those
conversations have been going on for some time. There have
(05:37):
been some things that have gone on, like in April
of two thousand and seventeen, there was a big service
at Georgetown where both the president of Georgetown and the
head of the North American Jesuits apologized in the presence
of members of the descended community for their roles in
the history of slavery and in the trauma of the sale,
the sin of the sale. That was the language they used.
(05:58):
But since then, I think it's been slow owing. There
have been conversations between the university and Jesuit leadership and
leadership of the descentate community about how to move forward.
It's hard to wait for those conversations to play out.
So last spring undergraduate students of Georgetown organized a student
referendum to enact a student fee, an activity fee of
(06:22):
twenty seven and twenty cents a semester that would pay
for a reconciliation fund to support programs it would benefit
the G two two descent community. Was an amazing thing
to watch on campus. In the end, the students voted
overwhelmingly to support the student activity fee. It was the
highest turnout for a student referendum in Georgetown's history, so
it was an overwhelming victory for the advocates for what
(06:47):
was effectively a novel scheme of reparations. The G two
two was sold for thousand dollars in eighteen thirty eight,
which is the equivalent of about three million dollars in
today is money. The student proposal would have raised about
four thousand dollars a semester, so in five years that
(07:10):
fee would raise basically the equivalent of the amount of
the sale. But when we started talking numbers like that,
that's where it gets tricky, both in terms of how
you actually calculate the present value of what enslaved people
contributed to Georgetown University, and beyond that, the question about
(07:30):
whether you can actually put a price, whether you can
actually put any kind of number on the value of
what is owed to the descendants of enslaved people. I
know members of the descendant community themselves who actually object
to monetary reparations because they object the idea of putting
a price on the value of their ancestors life and labor.
(07:53):
I can't design the program of reparations myself as a
white historian, but I can say, and this is I
think what's happened in Georgia, and I and say, look,
here's the documentation of what actually happened. Think about this,
reflect on it, and it might move you. So there
are a lot of harms to slavery. The robbery of
the fruits of people's labor was one of them, But
(08:15):
another one was just the denial of history and the
separation of families. We saw that in the sale. But
one of the things that I think has happened with
the recovery of this history is that people have learned
more about their own families and that psychic trauma of
the suppression of history that came with slavery, that at
(08:36):
least has been pride apart a little bit, and that
I think is by no means a full reparation by
any start of the imagination. But it's a step towards understanding,
and I think that's important. Adam Rothman, Georgetown professor and
Twitter ninja, what's our next exhibit? Would that be? Exhibit be? Actually,
(08:59):
that would be Exhibit D D for Desmond Meade. He's
a voting rights activists who led the successful fight to
pass Florida Amendment for a two thousand eighteen initiative that
restored voting rights to over one point four million Floridians
with previous felony convictions. He's one of Time magazines one
hundred most influential people in two thousand nineteen. That's pretty
(09:23):
freaky right there. What's truly freaky, though, is how hard
the Republicans, including the Santists the governor, are pushing back.
It's because they recognize the policing and control of black
bodies into prison and out of prison. The denial of
full citizenship after prison is a building block of white supremacy,
and white supremacy will not give up without a fight.
(09:46):
White supremacy is the freak show. Freaking deacon told you
when I was convicted of a felony offense I lost
my civil rights, which meant I lost the right to vote,
the right to serve on the are, the right to
run for office. And then there are other collateral consequences
that are associated with the laws of civil rights. When
(10:08):
we passed Amendment forward, amendment for debt with with the
right to vote, and so when we passed the memor
for I got to write the vote back right, but
my civil rights was haven't been restored. And so what
that meant was that even though I got the right
to vote back, and even though I graduated from law
school with a law degree right and I made the
(10:28):
deans list my last year, I still can't practice law
because I can't apply to the Florida Bar to take
the bar exam until my civil rights have been restored.
What that means is, even though I've had a very
successful career, I can't even buy or rent a home
in a lot of places in Florida because my civil
(10:48):
rights has not been restored. And so the restoration of
civil rights impact employment opportunities as well in the housing opportunities.
And so what this policy changed their was allowed people
to have their civil rights restored along with their voting rights.
Even though it's all like a package deal now, and
folks now have more opportunities to buy and rent homes,
(11:13):
They have more opportunities to get occupational licenses, get a
much better paying job, and be able to provide for
their families. So let me tell you, and that is
impacting every one at the one point for a million
that benefited from the passing of Amendment four have an
opportunity to have their civil rights restored. I am so
grateful that God has chosen me to be a part
(11:35):
of this process to make that happen, and I'm honored.
You know, one of the stories that I like to
tell is one day slave master awakens and here that
wait a minute, those same people who you didn't think
was even a whole of a man and families you've
destroyed and murdered and eaten the flesh off their bone, though,
(11:57):
famed people that you spent on them, now have just
as much right as you do. And not only do
they have the same rights as you do, they started
exercising those rights. And the same people that you had
your foot on their neck for more than eight minutes
of forty six seconds are now becoming judges and sheriffs
and congressmens and having authority over you, and that was
(12:21):
a scary sight. And so mass incarceration was the fallback
to where it Okay, well, why don't we create these
laws that would criminalize things that newly freed slaves would do.
In doing so, then we're able to grab them and
arrest them and convict them. And while we convict them,
we're gonna strip them away of this new right that
(12:42):
they have to vote right then to serve on jury
and and to run for office. And then we're gonna
take them and we're gonna throw them back into the
cage that reminds them of the ships that they were
brought over from when we brought them over from Africa.
And then when we get ready, we could take them
out of those cages and take outsource them as prison labor,
(13:03):
right back into the same fields in which they was
liberated from. And then for those that were not able
to capture like that, we're gonna use the same folks
that are once called slave patrols that but they have
evolved into what police right, We're gonna use those same
folks to exact state sanctioned violence to intimidate and threaten
(13:26):
and the rest who we can, and kill who we can,
and hang who we can, and burn who we can.
To drive home a point that you do not deserve
to be treated with dignity and respect, that you are
underneath us, and you will not participate in our elections.
You would not have a say in how this country
is ran because you're not equal. The driving force was
(13:48):
the combining of slave patrols, which is police, with our
incarceration and judicial system, and together you have a system
that not only terrorized you on the streets, but it
is designed to capture you and incarceraate you, and enslave
you in prison. You know, even though the private prison
(14:09):
industry is a small portion of its prison industrial complex system,
what we do recognize is that there is an ecosystem
that profits off of the bondage of people of color.
You see it an immigration attention, and of course you
see it in our criminal legal system. The wealth that's
(14:29):
in this country is directly related to the profit that
was made off of the backs of our ancestors that
was stolen from Africa. So how do we get folks
to understand that reparations is not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Reparations is writing in the justice that would end up
(14:53):
benefiting all parties involved, say Mr Tambo, Yes, Mr Interlocker,
I'm beginning to get the impression that reparations is about
far more than just slavery. Go on that, in fact,
reparations might have to cover a whole network of structures
(15:16):
of inequality and repression embedded in the American experiment from
the beginning to ensure the second class status of Black Americans.
It's slavery, yes, but it's also the electoral college. It's
red lining from Jim Crone beyond George Floyd and Brianna Taylor.
(15:36):
It's like, I don't even know you anymore, but you're
not wrong. Here's son, let me sing it to you.
De Ray sism and the White side prim c deep
(15:57):
in resting from me Dinapolis down to Memphis to the see.
That's where my people here races institutions down on our
backs or rais or you get vote if you don't
(16:19):
pay the poll tax or spill my name bakes l
to tem Us where we can't go no matter what
we pay. All time sleep patrols become fo That's the
American way. Do read Sisamander, whites up, primsy everybody. Everybody know. Oh,
(16:54):
that's America's defining legacy. It's hard. Who ha step back
(17:14):
beyond sne Oh, who's next. Our next exhibit is an
interview with Congresswoman Sheila Jackson. Lee represented the fine people
of the Texas eighteenth. Since you know her, you love her,
(17:35):
and she's been on the front lines of the fight
for reparations, she too has something to say about the
pushback against recognizing slavery and discrimination and the damage done
to black people in America since sixteen nineteen, and against
the search for an implementation of remedies. This is becoming
like a theme, the perversity of the fight against justice.
(17:59):
The freaky is real, the free is real. Slavery was
eliminated in eighteen sixty five around the passes of the
thirteenth Amendment. So people think that's history. That's a long
time ago, and why are we still talking about it.
The attitude is get over it. And so I think
it's important to restate some of those very pointed facts
(18:21):
of brutality in the inhumanity of slavery. Slaves were not people,
they were not counted as one human being. What did
it do to the African American family, male female? Psychologically?
What did it do to them so so logically? Where
did they wind up living? What did it mean when
(18:42):
they couldn't buy housing? How did they feel? What did
it generate? Did it generate mass and conservation? What did
it do to them economically? Why was the wealth gap
so huge even though there were success stories? What did
do with them politically? What did it do to them scientifically?
When there was a rage in the nineteen sixties that
(19:04):
assessed that African Americans were inferior, that's why they couldn't
do anything. They couldn't accomplish anything because they were inferior,
not because the laws of the land, which were clearly
part of the isolating and targeting of African Americans. They
didn't get anything to pile away, to es, grow, to deposit,
(19:27):
anywhere to pass on. But the ongoing effects of the
institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systematic structures
of discrimination on living African Americans and society in the
United States. What is the qualitative and quantitative number that
(19:48):
you put on touring in fifty years of free labor
with no workman's cop no insurance, no pension, which literally
helped build the economic genius and giantness of America. So
if we look in that manner, I think that the
(20:08):
truth will just be so real that you would have
to look to reparations. You lift one boat, you lift
all boats. You lift boats in America, in urban pockets,
in rural pockets. Then you lift America. The economy gets excited.
Can people see that? Can they see if I lift
(20:28):
this boat, then this boat over here live. Because firstly,
there are too many people in the United States that
live in poverty period, but we are African Americans are
the bulk of that poverty. So there was disparate treatment,
disparate access, disparate outcomes. And for that reason, I think
(20:49):
if there is an understanding of that pain and how
it translated, if people just quietly reflect, then fear will
move quickly away, because then the reality of the pain
will come forward and people will ask in collective voices,
how can we resolve this? Where is a reconciliation? Where
(21:10):
is the easing of the pain. So reparations is to fairly,
calmly seek reconciliation over those painful years, more than two
centuries of pain and brutality, and to address it in
the twenty one century and then I think it's a
question of money. And my answer to that is there
(21:35):
are a myriad of solutions. Let us start the journey
so that the academicians and groups that have are advocating
for many different answers, they can all be heard, and
maybe as we hear them, it will be very simple
to find a way to address the response. Have you
(21:57):
ever heard the saying behind every great fortune there is
a green crime. Yes, I read it in The Godfather. Well,
the French author Balzac said it, and a Frenchman would know.
And when it comes to the riches of America, ain't
it the truth? Ain't it the truth? One woman has
made a regular specialty of linking various blue chip blue
(22:21):
chip I say, Lincoln blue chip corporations and their fortunes
to the slave trade. Her work and documenting that ETNA
Insurance had written insurance policies on enslaved Africans. Oh, boy,
I think I see where this is going exactly with
the slaveholders as beneficiaries, led to ETNA making a twenty
(22:42):
million dollar payment to the African American community. This was
the first reparations court victory in American history. In two
thousand six, Deadria Farmer Pelman good woman, Yes, indeed she
is very good woman. Now look, boy, I saved a
good story for our last exhibit. Did you ever wonder
(23:08):
why we tip restaurant workers? You mean, instead of giving
them a fair wage? Right? You catching on? But do
you think it's because they won't it that way? And
did you ever notice that the the dog or the
skin color of the staff gets What if I told
you that tipping in restaurants in this country is like
the electoral college, just one more legacy of slavery. Here's
(23:31):
activist Sorrow Jaroman to tell us how it is. The
restaurant industry has become the nation's second largest and absolute
fastest growing private sector employers, and yet despite the industry
size and its growth, it has been for decades the
absolute lowest paying employer in the United States of America,
(23:53):
which is bad for a country to have the largest
and fastest growing industry be the lowest paying industry. And
that fact is due to the money power and influence
of a trade lobby called the National Restaurant Association. We
call it the Other n r A. The Other n
r A s history does actually go all the way
back to emancipation, the restaurant lobby and one other industry,
(24:18):
the Pullman train company, wanted the right to hire newly
freed slaves black people and continue to not pay them
for their labor and instead have them rely entirely on
this new idea that had just come from England or
from Europe at the time, called tipping, and so at Emancipation,
tipping was mutated from being an extra or a bonus
(24:41):
on top of a wage to becoming the wage itself.
And we started with a zero dollar wage for tipped
workers at Emancipation that became law in night when everybody
got the right to a federal minimum wage for the
first time as part of the new Deal, except for
groups of black workers, farm workers, domestic workers, and tipped
(25:03):
restaurant workers who are told, you get a zero dollar
wage as long as tips bring you to the full
minimum wage. And we went from zero and ninety eight
all the way up to the incredible two dollars and
thirteen cents an hour, which is the current federal minimum
wage for tipped workers in the United States of America.
And as I said at the beginning, that is not
(25:24):
the wage for a tiny sliver of the American workforce.
It's the wage for the nation's largest private sector employer,
largest private sector employer of women, largest private sector employer
of people of color, largest employer of immigrants, largest employer
formally incarcerated individuals, largest employer period gets away with legally
(25:45):
paying its workers two dollars an hour at the federal
level and under five dollars an hour in four out
of five states, all because of this legacy of slavery
and the ongoing power of this trade lobby. So the
restaurant industry is notoriously racially segregated. Workers of color in
(26:07):
our industry are segregated into lower paying segments of the industry.
There in casual restaurants and fast food restaurants rather than
fine dining, and even in fine dining, they tend to
be bussers and runners and kitchen staff as opposed to
fine dining servers and bartenders. Now, on top of that,
(26:27):
if workers of color make it the rare exceptions where
they make it to be servers and bartenders in fine
dining restaurants, there is irrefutable data that they earn less
in tips because of customer bias. There is now mountains
of evidence that tipping is not correlated with the quality
of the service. Tipping is a reflection of all of
(26:49):
America's biases from the inception of America, and what it
is correlated with is the race and gender of the server,
her eye color, her skin color, her hair color, her
hair texture, her breast size, whether she's willing to touch
the customer or be touched. And so that segregation of
workers of color into back of house versus front of house,
(27:14):
which is eerily reminiscent of the way in which slaves
on plantations or even in reconstruction, people of color were
treated and differentiated. And then on top of that, the
differential in the way people are tipped. All of that
results in a five dollar per hour wage gap between
(27:34):
black women and white men in our industry. That differential
creates generational poverty depending on where you live in forty
three states in the United States, so most likely wherever
you go out to eat, every time you tip in
a restaurant, every worker that you are interacting with is
(27:55):
being paid less than the minimum wage because you are
tipping them. It actually is the employer the legal permission
to pay the person less because you tip them. The
sub minimum wage exacerbates the inequality and it forces all
of these folks to live off of tips. The fact
that people of color earn less in tips even when
(28:16):
they have the same positions, it is a reflection of
still deep seated racism in the United States. Even when
workers of color make it to higher paid positions, they
cannot earn the same in tips because of this racism,
and so racism doesn't pay off. Playing into customer racism
doesn't help, and paying people to dollars also doesn't help
(28:39):
you in the long run. What does help you is
increased mobility for people of color that diversifies your clientele
base and paying people a wage that allows them to
stay in the restaurant and hone their craft. These are
not jobs job or they don't have to be a
lot of people in this industry take great pride in
this work. They can sider themselves to be skilled professionals.
(29:03):
The only reason why these skilled occupations are not seen
as professions is the way they are treated and paid.
And we need to see them as skilled professions if
we want to both break the apartheid and raise all
of these jobs to be living wage professions. Well, Whitney,
(29:24):
did you ever think you'd be talking like fog Horn
Leghorn about the Freaky Dickie show of corporate institutionalized racism Erica.
You know, I never thought that i'd be in a
minstrel show voluntarily, So this is definitely a new experience
for me. You know what, You not many white men
have this on their resume anymore. I mean, justin Trudeau.
(29:46):
The come on, let's be real. There's some people who
have done it, and you're doing it for a good cause.
You did a great job, you're a great sport about it.
So you're thinking I should put this on my resume
for which job? Are you thinking them? And apply to?
Not think you should? Absolutely, if I were you, I'd
put it at the top. I'm just glad you didn't
ask me to sing. You know I had did that
for you next time. You can't get out of all
(30:08):
of it. But really we were talking about something that's
very important for people to understand that they had to
twist it and mangle it and deform it in order
for it to grow as institutions, and they did. They
created all sorts of heinous policies and legislation because they
could create black people as the freak show. You know
(30:30):
what's interesting actually, Erica for me doing this is that
it was so uncomfortable for me to actually do a
minstrel show with you both. The experience of doing it
was like out there, but also then that realization it's
kind of like the leading into owning it being a
white person, they we always want to push a Sykee
that's not me, that history is not me, that's not
(30:51):
related to me, And then when you actually embody it
an inhabitant, it kind of like drives something home that yeah,
it actually is me. It is my legacy. And sometimes
I feel like, oh, well, are we letting white people
off the hook because they're able to like tiptoe away
from it as opposed to owning it. So I felt
that was kind of the experience for me and doing this.
It's like, I can't tiptoe away from a minstrel show. Again,
(31:12):
we're living in a minstrel show if you can take
away the entertainment and the black face. But the black
face was meant to activate white persons, the exaggerated version
that they thought blackness was. You know, if you think
about it, black people were Africans learned English from white people,
(31:32):
so if they were talking like that, which they weren't,
they have been talking like the people who taught them English.
The other thing is that it was meant to be absurd,
and you know we we did it sort of quick ends,
you know, like an entertainment thing. But they did it
often to make them seem lazy and shiftless. I was
got going to ways and black people were never lazy
(31:55):
and slift shiftless. If we were, we got beat, we
got killed. So I think one of the biggest lie
was to create this type of minstrelsy. And to this
day you hear a lot of people go, what about
their work ethic they're not used to working and who
they think built America? Are they crazy? Who they think
takes the late bus and the early bus in the morning,
(32:17):
not just black people people of color. We are taking
care of their children, wiping their butts when they get
old and are dying. And we are also the doctors
and the scientists. So now it can't be denied that
we are in every available space in America. And yet
(32:37):
these things are so inside of the zeitgeist, whether we
see them or not, they still exist. Well, I'm looking
forward to next week. Awesome, next time on reparations, the
big payback. The cases for and against reparations do get
out in the boxing ring. Will you in reparations? I
(33:00):
think everything that has touched us in a way that
profited from us and we did not owes us. You
don't owe me shit. All you owe me is respect
and opportunity. Not only are reparations of cash payout, they
need to be long term and systemic, purposeful systems and
(33:21):
organizations set up that puts black people who were brought
here his beast and shadow on a pathway to having
their full rights in prible to just recognized and enjoy.
We gotta stop playing the victim. Well, this happened during slavery,
so this is why this is still having them today
or why you're not you know and blah blah blah.
But no, those things have changed at some point. The
(33:43):
descending of someone that was brought here in sixteen nineteen
deserves to steer this raggedy as chip through these trouble water.
That is an element of reparations that is long deserved.
We want to talk about rep racing again. It's real.
So we need to get in live because the Indians
(34:06):
deserved reparation before we do because they were enslaved too.
What doc is is a reckoning of the evil and
the original scene that America did. They enslaved people look
like our black Head. This podcast is produced by Eric Alexander,
Ben Arnon and Whitney Dow. The executive producers are Charlomagne
(34:29):
the God and Dolly s. Bishop. The Supervising producer is
Nicole Childers and the lead producer is Devin Mattock Robins.
The producer writer is Sis Castle and the associate producers
Kevin Famm, with additional research support provided by Nile Blast.
The White Supremacy Swanny songs written by Tony Purrier, piano
by Robert Turner and vocal arrangement by Sir R. Brown Alexander.
(34:51):
Original music by dj D t P Reparations. The Big
Payback is a production of color Farm Media, I Heart
Radio and The Black Effect Podcast Network in association with
Best Case Studios. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
(35:12):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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