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May 6, 2021 30 mins

It's groundhog day in America. As Erika and Whitney mourn the brutal death of Andrew Brown Jr, another unarmed Black man shot and killed by police, they ask themselves; Does America have the willpower to make reparations to the descendants of slaves? To find answers they travel across the ocean to Poland to hear the story of 77-year-old Mr. Waldemar Ogrodniczak. His Polish parents were forced laborers in WWII, taken from Poland to Germany to build the Third Reich and now as an adult, Waldemar continues his decades-long search for redress and reparations from the German government. Meanwhile, Erika grabs the comedy mic and serves up a spicy monologue to demonstrate the perils of the begrudged debtor who avoids being confronted by the aggrieved creditor. "Stop triggering me, man!" Finally, natural-born genius Killer Mike, helps them to face the ugly truth, that America's biggest business is the business of race, and that business may be too big to fail. 


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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I'm Erica Alexander and I'm Whitney Down. Welcome to Reparations,
The Big Payback, a production of Color Far Media, I
Heart Radio and The Black Effect Podcast Network. We're not
interesting in a racial hamising. We don't want your neighborhood.
We want ours to be just as good. See, we
don't want to store in your neighbor but we don't
want you coming in our neighborhood and open up store
and exploiting us and then go home and throw Obama

(00:25):
if we moved next door out in the suburbs. We
don't want your schools, but we want our schools to
be the highest and the best spottle for our black projecting.
See what people don't understand we are saying, and we're
not asking you. See the diet is cast as I said,
We're not asking, We're saying, this is the where it's
gonna be. Now you get this street. You can kill
all the black folks you want to, baby, but you

(00:48):
will not kill the freedom of black folks. It's coming.
We're gonna get it. We're fought in every one of
your damn lives the wars, baby, and you give us nothing.
Now the war is gonna be here because we're gonna
be free. Are you kill all you want to? What?
We kill? Two? So Erica? How are you doing this week? Whitney? Honestly,

(01:09):
I don't know. The most recent killing of an unarmed
black man, Andrew Brown Jr. The one in Elizabeth City,
North Carolina, has to be feeling pretty pessimistic. It never
seems to end, does a Yeah, this one was like
an execution. The sheriff's deputies rolled up to serve a warrant,
or so they say, But from the little video the

(01:30):
city has released, you can see that four seconds later
Brown was dead from a gunshot to the back of
the head. And once again they still won't release the
police body camp footage. It's traumatizing, as I think it's
meant to be what you think. There's an agenda to
all these killings. Yes, I do, and we get to
that in a minute. But it's not just traumatizing. It's sad.

(01:54):
It's just immensely, immensely sad. Black America is a nation
within a name, a nation in a perpetual state of grief,
A huge family that can't go more than a day
or two without a funeral. Every day we get the
shots of the crying family, the attorneys calling for justice,
the marchers marching, Al Sharpton preaching over the casket. They

(02:17):
should just save themselves the trouble and expense in the killings, right, yeah,
that part. Just make stock footage of it all and
run it over and over. You know, I see your point.
It seems like the original sin of slavery and Jim
Crow never went away. They just morphed into this weird
apartheid regime enforced by murder, daily murder. Now, if that's

(02:40):
not an agenda to keep black people in line, it'll
do to an agenda gets here. I don't know what
to say, Erica. I'm sorry. It seems so small in
the face of it all. Still, I'm sorry. Thanks. This
revolution is filled with so many ironies. Really, first you
tell us that it is men need to keep your word,

(03:01):
all right, If you are a man, you keep your word.
And now all of the black people in this country
are demanding, and even the black people in the whole
world are demanding, is that you keep your word. You
told us we were free, Well, then show us that
we're free. You told us that there is justice, equality
for all in this country. Will, then, kids, stick to

(03:23):
your word and let us see the justice inequality for all,
or else, admit to us that you're not a man,
you're a word. You're afraid of us. You're afraid to
give us equal stand. You're afraid that if you give
us equal ground, that we will match you and we
will override you. And if that's what you're afraid of us,
then then tell us that just what you're afraid of.

(03:44):
But don't keep hiding it from us and holding this
up to us. And every time we ask you for something,
you give us a little bit of something, and it's
all token is and we don't want tokenism. And they're
most black men in this world that don't want charity.
And yet still every time we ask you for something,
you give us a little piece. You're little piece. You're
playing games with us. Why not children? Well, well, big man,

(04:07):
I've seen my father have to put it. We're all
kinds of stuff. He was a big man. He raised
the family. He went downstown and he had to go
around to the bank door with his wife. We're not
asking for anything. We're not asking for any favorite. All
we want is what's ours. Here we are talking about reparations,

(04:27):
And what if the truth, the ugly truth, is that
America will never pay reparations to black people for slavery,
for Jim Crow, for what Lincoln called the wealth piled
by the bondsman, two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,
for any of it. Do you really think that's the case, Areca,
After everything we've discussed here, hasn't any of this given

(04:48):
you a sense of hope? Well? Yes, of course. I
mean with all the good work being done by Congressman
Sheila Jackson Lee and all the women Robin Ruth Simmons, Yeah,
I mean there's a possibility that kind work may take
it up. But look at all the refusal by some
in Congress even to talk about reparations, even to study reparations.

(05:08):
What if there's something in the American psyche that just refuses,
refuses to let this get dragged across the finish line,
you know, And what do you think that would be?
Paging Dr Freud? Paging Dr Freud? No, seriously, Erica, I
get the large segments of American population and some kind
of denial. We've heard it time and time again. I

(05:30):
did known slaves. It's not up to me, this doesn't
have anything to do with me. Haven't we done enough?
I mean, look at Obama, look at Kamala Harris, look
at the NBA, they're all millionaires exactly. Look at little
nas X, he's a country music millionaire. So and then,
of course there's American exceptionalism, right, the idea that we're

(05:51):
so special, so different, so good, we're such a beaconto
the world, that our country's wealth and prosperity couldn't possibly
have been built on the crime of slavery. That's right.
We believe we're special and different because of capital d
democracy in seventeen seventy six and the Noble Experiment and
all that. What a downer to hear that, that's all bullshit.

(06:12):
And so we deny What do you mean we Chemo Sabi, Yes,
we deny. Or White America official America denies. For us,
it's the national myth of American exceptionalism. It's almost the
national drug. Other countries have their own unique reasons for
denying or not. You look at Germany and Japan and

(06:34):
war guilt and reparations for World War Two. Yeah, I mean,
look at Germany for all horrific crimes as a nation,
and they were horrific on an unprecedented scale. Germany is
recognized for having faced up to what they did. They
can't deny it, and they don't deny it. They've admitted
their guilt and starting the war. They also paid reparations
for starting World War One. They've admitted their guilt in

(06:55):
the Holocaust, They've owned it, and they've written history books
that way, and most important me for our discussion, they've
paid billions and billions in reparations to individual victims, to
other neighbor nations and to use as a class and
of course, German reparations helped build the state of Israel
as a unique nation. They've taken on the job of
making men's in a real way, yes, but it can

(07:18):
be more complicated than that on the ground for real
victims of Germany's aggression. Here's the testimony of one man
who was a child at the time of the German
conquest of Poland during World War Two, Mr Waldemar. Many Poles,
including Mr. Waldemar's parents, were taken as forced laborers from
Poland to Germany. His story illustrates the difficulty of actually

(07:38):
getting reparations in a country whose policy it is to
pay reparations. Mr Waldemar seventy seven years old and hasn't
gotten anything yet, but to his way of thinking, it
would never be enough. Tell it'spres lata Ignorovanni indogionist Zampen.

(08:03):
The subject of the reparations for the polls has been
always avoided since the times of the Federal Republic of Germany,
and it has never been ultimately finalized. To this day.
Each subsequent German government has ignored the settlement issue of
guilty German aggressors who took advantage of human beings to

(08:23):
build a magnitude of the Third Reich. The system and
the Nazi ideology does not justify martyrology. It confirms it.
An ultimate financial settlement in the form of reparations is
the only way to remedy the wrongs of the perpetrators.
My personal situation was that as a pole I was

(08:45):
born on September two four in nither Schlema, Germany. I
was a child to my parents, Stanislav and Alfreda, who
were taken from Poland to Germany as a forced labor
staff to work in a paper factory. When I became
an adult, I went to Polish German Reconciliation Foundation to
get compensation, but I was denied because I was told

(09:09):
that I was in Germany for a voluntary basis and
not forced to be there. The time to talk about
human harm and appreciation never expires. I, as my parents child,
never got any financial compensation. I found out later that
the heads of the Polish German Reconciliation Foundation granted each

(09:29):
other in total three hundred sixty two thousands lotti, which
equals to over ninety five thousand dollars, and the CEO
back then got hundred thousands lotti which equals to over
twenty six thousand dollars for the harm of the sufferers.
This was a big issue in the Polish media. A
couple of years ago, I visited my birthplace in Germany.

(09:52):
This small house in which I was born is still there.
Times are different and people are different. The Germans live
in good prosperity, glory to the heroes of the war,
but they were said not to be owed anything. Nowadays,
the Germans are great economic strength. Why my father, as

(10:14):
a forced laborer, had natural skills to service machines, cars,
technical vehicles and tractors, but he could not service it
without proper certifications. Then the German factory sent him to
professional training against Vico. That means that even in war times,
in relation to a forced labor, the law was organized

(10:35):
very well. My grandparents, who were there too, used to
say the times were difficult. We strived just to survive.
According to my memory, the people felt cheated by the
pre war German government. Also after the war there was
a tendency to quickly forget about such painful events. Reparations

(10:57):
were ridiculously low. All the nations and all the people
in the world deserve civilized and worthy treatment. Reparations are
the matter that should be precisely scrutinized. America was raised
on the Native American's graves. What happened to the black
people in slavery times was a disgraceful act. They say,

(11:18):
this is the country of freedom, but the natives are
in reserves. When the black people fought for America, they
showed their dedication to the country. They fought for their
American freedom. If they have relatives living to this day,
they should be rewarded for that. We also should strongly
separate America from Columbus times and after the formation of

(11:40):
the American country the USA should only be accountable exclusively
for what happened to the slaves once the nation was formed.
We obviously can't question a terrible loss of the black
lives before that, But it would be really difficult to
verify who would be eligible to get the money. So
then how to calculate it? Certainly from one thousand, seven

(12:03):
hundred seventy six, but how many generations back? For The
danger lies in the commission's decision. What if someone is
not granted, will there be another rebellion? How to educate
people about the reparations so that there were not people
who would have felt left out. I believe that the
reparations should be granted to the oldest eligible descendants in

(12:27):
the family, or the children if they have already died.
In contemporary Poland, I became a member of an organization
called Office for Veterans and Repressed People. They have been
existing only for the past two years. I was issued
an idea which states I was due to my parents
obvious situation there someone who was in the work camp

(12:50):
to become a member. The major condition was to be
born either in Germany or in the Soviet Union before
the end of World War Two, Having this organization as
a back up, I can reapply to the Polish German
Reconciliation Foundation to get a reasonable reparation. They said, I
can do it. That is my right, and I'm going

(13:10):
to take advantage of it. Still though, however, clumsily or
stingially at times, Germany has acknowledged worldwide as clearly having
been in the reparations business. Right. Yes. Well. Japan, by contrast,
is like who us, No way, we don't want to

(13:33):
talk about that. You can't make us, No, no, no no,
no no, you can't make us China, Korea, Southeast Asia,
the rape of Nanjing for slave labor, comfort women. You
don't know what you're talking about. Talk about denial. It
takes daily maintenance. And they're so stuck on this Erica
and they won't be moved, you know, they cling to

(13:55):
their own special kind of specialness. You know, Japan is
too unique, two above it all too much of a
rare and beautiful chrysanthemum, any of these ugly things. And
as the World War two generation is all but gone,
and as each year goes by, they've kind of hardened
into this position. You hear in America that was such

(14:15):
a long time ago. It's such a deflection. We have
a nice new emperor. Have you seen our bullet trains?
They're very fast and for them, we're talking what only
eighty years Well, meanwhile, in America, slavery ended one hundred
and sixty years ago. And you know, Erica, most Americans,
black or white, can't remember what they had for lunch yesterday,

(14:38):
and a lot of times they don't want to remember. Yeah,
what's that? But how much harder than slavery and Jim Crow.
Along with the myth of American exceptionalism comes this idea
of America as a young country, a forward looking country,
young country on the move, heading for the new frontier.
We don't do looking back. Yeah, we pay Ken Burns

(15:00):
to look back to the rest of us don't have to.
That's right, exactly right, But oh my god, ken Burns
talk about verbations. We go on all day about him,
but hey, we ain't got that kind of time. Let's
talk about the motto of the city of Atlanta. Atlanta
the city too busy to hate, perfect for the new South.
Talk about a successful rebranding. But then here it comes

(15:23):
to black people always dragging everything down and white America
official America's like, why do you people have to make
everything about race? You people? What you mean? You people?
Which is funny coming from the people who invented race
as a construct in order to feel better about kidnapping
my black ass from Africa and bringing me here to

(15:44):
do all that free work than keeping me from having
rights or freedom or justice and murdering random members of
my family to keep me in line. Yeah, I'm making
it all about race. I hate when you do that.
Then again, I'm also too busy to hate. How nice
for you. I've got an even worse scenario for you, though,

(16:05):
worse than Black America not getting reparations. What would be
worse than not getting reparations? Whitney? You ever owe somebody money? Me,
I'm a documentary filmmaker. I never don't owe somebody money.

(16:28):
You ever owe somebody money? And you get this feeling
when you owe somebody money and you see them coming around,
you start to hate them, right, like funk that guy right,
and you feel like they're looking at you. They're looking

(16:50):
at you like you posted on Facebook that you had
a nice meal. But how are you gonna do that?
When you owe me money? How do you get for
one Red Lobster Special when you won't between nine fifty.
I feel like they're clocking everything you do and you
hate them, you would hate them. Get off my Facebook, man,

(17:15):
what asshole? That's can't be tasting funny anyway. And this
goes on and they're looking at you with that look
like you know the look, come on, you know the
look there it is m mm hmmm, and there's this

(17:38):
bad blood. And then one day the apocalypse, they asked
you for the money. They ask you for the money.
It's like, oh, use this song only coming here? Why

(18:00):
are you coming over here? They're go look the money
and they get all up in your grill and they
ask you for a goddamn money. They're like, um, I say,
I hate to bother you and I was just wondering
and you're like, put abusing me and back up, Jesus.

(18:24):
I mean, god damn, I'm triggering as a bunk right now.
Don't you see what did I have? Fift? Do you say,
let me get back to you, asshole? Well that's America.

(18:52):
They owe us money. Everyone knows it. Their friends around
the world know it. So what happens they start to
hate us. I mean they already hate this, but now
a new and different kind of grudges building, Like I
bet those black folks are out there clocking my Facebook page,
Like I just spent a trillion dollars on going back
to space, but I can't pay reparations. So you're saying
the very act of asking for reparations, Yes, the series

(19:15):
right now, ask the getting close like we're doing now,
we'll have the very perverse effect of making things worse
for black Americans. Stop triggering me, man, Stop triggering me. Yeah,
we don't get the money, and we're more screwed than
we were before, and black people are getting angrier. We

(19:36):
won't agreement about which we can live or you cute
if you won't listen to me when I'm making a
feel for the Negros, because you have no concerned for
the negros, listen to me when I'm making a feel
for murder. You claim you law America. Are we love America?

(20:03):
But you are traveling us back and you are making
a Sampson out of us, and we are gonna put
down the pillow. Should you try to pretend that I'm
crazy because I brought the America to be saved, and
then you think we have no right to ask for something.

(20:28):
Is it too much to ask you to grant us
human dignity? Should we be put down and shot to
death for this request? If so, you can aim your guns.
What the hell do you think we care about dying
if you're gonna deny the right to live? Wow, Erica,

(20:51):
that's pretty bleak. So you're saying that, after all we've
talked about, that's the examples we've heard, the people, we've
talked to, the different initiatives. Even after contributing to the
discourse ourselves with this discussion, however much we moved needle forward.
What you're saying is you're still pessimistic. Well, I look,
I I don't know if that's the word. I'd use pessimistic.

(21:13):
What's a worse word than pessimistic, because uh, that's what
I feel. But that metaphor I used earlier of dragging
something like over the finish line. Yeah, I don't know
if there's an energy or the will for it in
this country. I just I don't know. I don't know
that I've been money on it. Reparations are almost the
photo negative of the Obama presidency. What do you mean

(21:36):
hard versus easy? Time consuming versus quick painful versus painless.
I remember when Obama was running, my late father in law,
black man born in Virginia, kept saying, they're never gonna
let that black man become president. I remember him crying
the night of Obama won. What he maybe hadn't reckoned

(21:59):
with was how badly white America wanted to be forgiven
for the crime of slavery. How voting for Obama was
a simple way in their minds, at least to expiate
that sin in one easy step, to get a get
out of jail free car, to say, see, I'm not
my ancestors. I voted for a black man, get out
of jail free. But it's not that simple or that easy,

(22:20):
exactly doing the work, the hard work of looking squarely
at that sin, taking the time to calculate its terrible cost,
acknowledging the hurt and the damage done, and paying money
as a real tangible way of atoning for and exploiting
that great sin. That's going to be hard, if it's
going to be at all. If it's going to be

(22:43):
at all, you know, Erica. Maybe the ugly truth is
that race racism is the ultimate business model. It's been
more than successful for the centuries. Just look at the
shining Empire. We we white people, built on its foundation, yep.
And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's worked
for hundreds of years. And that may be the realist,

(23:05):
ugliest truthliest truth of all. And you know who understands
the ugliest truths and tries to make them plain so
we can look them in their ugly face. My main man,
that natural born genius killer Mike. The ugly truth is
racism has been extremely profitable for America. It gave America

(23:27):
an economic jump start when it was a young country
trying to compete with empires like the United Kingdom in France.
America used free labor, cotton, and the Industrial Revolution to
get a jump start to the world stage. Post slavery
and with the advent of the Thirteenth Amendment, which disallows

(23:47):
slavery except for imprisonment, we saw a huge spike in
the black male prison population throughout the South, and chain
gangs were used to build everything from rhodes to actual hounds,
a practice still followed today, as in Mississippi we see
federal and state officials fighting over who gets to use

(24:08):
cheap and free convict labor to do upkeep of buildings.
Besides that free labor, we are currently building new private
prisons to put in small towns to serve as economic
injectors in those towns. Those towns, oftentimes and the greater
State have made contracts with private prisons to keep them

(24:31):
seventy to eighty percent field, thus giving the motivation to
target i think, in one particular group of people and
to target them for a rest, for not the punishment
of a crime, but for the perpetuation of private prisons.
We have a problem in this country and that we
like to use cheap labor to create wealth. On the

(24:53):
other side, and the community that has been used for
cheap labor the most are black people. I've leave that
as a country, we can be the country we aspire
to be, where there's liberty and justice for all, but
we can no longer do this if we are married
to the classic capitalistic system in which we use and

(25:14):
abuse the people that were brought here for free or
cheap labor, just like we do migrant workers now, just
like we've done Africans in the past, just like they
did the Chinese during the making of railroads, just like
they've done even the Irish and the Latino population that
came into New York through Ellis Islands in the twenties,
thirties and nine. This country knows that a different way

(25:36):
is possible. The question is are we too lazy and
apathetic to try a different way. I was struck one
time when I saw a white man being arrested in
an airport and he said to the police, you can't
do me like this. I'm black. And just like Jane
Elliott has said before in her classes when she asked
white people, if you know these things are happening, you
know they're going wrong, why don't you do anything about it?

(25:58):
Because they wan't volunteer to be black. They know if
I volunteer to be black, I can put across here.
Whether it's speeding tickets or whether it's we know every
police shooting has happened in a area where the credit
scores below five fifty. It is easy to target black,
and not only black with the poor. Racism is an
advent of classism. Classism is an advent of the bourgeoisie

(26:19):
and the elite, meant to oppress the peasant class. If
we don't start to fight racism right now in this country,
then we will forever remain an empire that uses the
free labor of black people to exploit and capitalize off of.
We have an opportunity in this moment to give people
what we truly promise as freedom and justice for all
that means. We must fight, fight, fight, every step of

(26:42):
the way against racism. And it's not enough to be
non racist, you must be vehemently anti racist. Next time
on reparations, the big payback here I am in gun
it is hot to say the least they ever have

(27:05):
a great back to Africa movement unless they get better
air conditioning. I gotta ask you a question because I
hadn't thought of this until the other night. But here
we aren't gone, and here we are at the dungeon,
slavey dungeon. The people who helped these people getting or Africans,
do they have any sort of responsibility or accountability to
the diaspora. I think the answer would have to be yes,

(27:28):
they have to take some responsibility. But I think that
we also have to put it in a certain historical context,
because you know, slavery had always existed in the world.
There was no time and there wasn't slavery and the
Africans themselves practice slavery. Every place in the world there
was slavery, and so when slavery was introduced as part

(27:53):
of the European African trade, historically there would have been
no way for the Africans would always existed knowing there
was slavery. To understand, the chattel slavery is a new institution.
It did not exist in the world before. Chattel slavery
is that slavery where you, the slave, are the same
as a cow. You are chattel, you are furniture, you

(28:16):
are you, You're not a human being. So the slavery
that was invented for the New World to grow cotton
and sugar and whatever was a slavery that was a
new invention. So you can't really you have to take
responsibility to the Africans have to take responsibility, but you
have to put in the context of what they knew.

(28:37):
So the Africans who said when the Europeans came and
said okay, well we can give you this and this
and this, and you can give us slaves, and they thought, okay,
that's a good deal. How can they be responsible for
knowing what was going to happen across the Atlantic and
then you also have to look historically at when many
of the big chiefs found out or got word that

(28:58):
this was something told different that was going on, many
of them intervened to stop the trade of slaves. So
that's not to say that means that they're completely innocent,
but you can't then just whitewash them or blackwash them,
or however you want to say, with the same brush
as those who did the actual execution of this unique

(29:21):
slavery called chattel slavery that had not existed in the
world before. This podcast is produced by Eric Alexander then
are Non and Ntaw. The executive producers are Charlemagne the
God and Dolly s. Bishop. The supervising producer is Nicole Childers,
and the lead producer is Devin Mavick Robins. The Associate

(29:44):
producer is Kevin Pham, with additional research support provided by
Nile Blast. This episode was written by Tony Perrier. Original
music by d J D T P. Special thanks to
Mr valdamot Ogret Nitzak and his daughter Sylvia Ogretnitzak, who
prepared and wrote his story reparations. The Big Payback is

(30:09):
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, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to
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