This episode is dedicated to Sarah Miller Arnon, mother of our producer Ben Arna. Sarah was a loving mother, wife, teacher, and guiding light. We love you, Sarah until we meet again. I'm Erica Alexander.
That I'm Whitney Dow.
Welcome to Reparations. The Big Payback, a production of Color Farm Media, iHeartRadio, and The Black Effect Podcast Network.
That theme of paying back is also a very deeply churched name. When I grew up, there was a songwek saying called heyday is coming after Awhile, And there were a number of songs that suggested that injustice just doesn't get away. Now, when I think about the moral piece of this, I want to look at it through two lenses.
One lens is the religious land of Judeo Christian perspective, and then the other is from the constitutional And the third one might be that many people don't realize Erica, that for years there was no separate study of economics in this country or in the world, that the study of economics was a part of morral philosophy. In other words, you would study.
Did you hear that?
Did I hear what? Reverend Barber?
No? No? After Reveren Barber that.
Silence, Yes, I heard it. Why are we listening to silence?
Erica?
Well, you know, as a reminder of where we're all going at this brief life's end, you know. And the other day we went on a field trip to visit my dad's cemetery out in New Jersey and I hadn't been there in over thirty years. And we'll get into why that is. But remember after we talked, before we left, we just stood there for a little while and listened to the silence.
I remember that. But why are you thinking about that right now?
Because we've been going so fast. We threw ourselves into this big reparations world and all that comes with it. So maybe we need a moment to settle down and just listen, stop talking, And if we did, maybe we'd be able to hear the angels speak. I don't know. Maybe I mean also to remember why we wanted to do this. What do we want to get out of it? What did you want to get out of it?
Well?
I think that I wanted to get a couple of things out of it, something for myself that I wanted to get a deeper understanding of this idea of reparations and what it might mean for our country, because I think that so much of the time you think you understand something and you don't really understand it. You have sort of a vague idea about it, and once you dig into it, you realize it's so much more complicated then something I want on a larger scale. I really
I've always talked about Eric. I know you laugh at it, but this idea that I'm trying to say white people and I really want.
What I mean by that, I wanted to bring.
White ears to this story that I think that so much of the time white people think that the story of reparations really is something for black people, so they could hear themselves in that story. And I think if you can bring white ears to the story, you also have the opportunity to bring white hearts as well.
It's kind of like Reverend Barber.
Who's decade his life to the Poor People's Campaign and the work of Martin Luther King, and he has this goll of fusion politics, and what that means is that the fates of black and white people are linked together. They're fused together, that we aren't on these separate journeys that were connected, and so what affects one affects the other.
And I think sort of what we've done here, Eric, I hope we've done is we've kind of been trying to do fusion storytelling, where we show that the black and white story are intimately together and you can't understand one without the other.
Yeah.
Well, it's been a hell of a journey, and I got to give it up for the race advocates, people like Reverend Barber, the Poor People's Campaign, He's amazing. I don't know how they all stay sane in this world. It's exhausting. I mean, we're definitely not the same people we were when we started this, or perhaps we were always our same selves, and this process created extraordinary conditions to test the outer limits of who we thought we were versus who we really are. As you can see,
I've become confusions in between all this. But yeah, stress it's a purifier. Pain and suffering too.
Well, what do you mean by that, Erica, that it's a purifier, Like who's a pure fine?
I don't know. You know, that's actually a deep question, because if you know, if stress and pain could purify something, you think the United States would be in a better space. But I think it's been so successful at what it's done in terms of the oppression on people of color and black people, that it really hasn't experienced the pain enough and suffering of that to change. I really don't. But before our trip to the cemetery, had I ever told you about my dad's death?
No, we've talked a lot about your family, of course your mom know, not specifically about your father's passing.
Why do you want to talk about him now?
Well, because my father's story is a tell of morality, and that topic indirectly is relevant to what we are talking about. What lies underneath this whole reparations talk is one of personal character and accountability morality. So okay, let's talk about it, and let's talk about our road trip. Glad we took Revern Barber along with us to sit shotgun. He knows a little something about the road we were traveling.
He certainly does. In fact, he led the way you.
Would study moral philosophy, And as a part of moral philosophy, you've studied economics because the suggestion was there was no way to be moral if you were emmral with your money and ear marl with the way you treated people based on their relationships with money and wealth that was separated in America in large part due to slavery, because you can't, on the one hand, say that the economics is a moral issue when you build a system on slavery that has five underpinnings, and the first of it
is evil economics and an evil economics. And I've kind of coined these five evil economics, meaning that the end justifies the means. So if your goal is to get wealthy and to exceed other nations that have been in existence thousands of years before you, and the only way to do that is to turn people into property, then the end your wealth justifies the means, which is a form of evil economics.
Do you know where the grid is?
I had no idea.
She said it was under a big oak. I was hoping that there would be somebody here we could ask.
So Erica, how did your dad die?
Well, it was pretty brutal. Let me put it to you this way. If he had been an animal, they would have put him down years before, just to end his suffering. But I don't know, Whitney. The details are like pain pornography, and I don't want to get into that.
So we're just coming out of the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey.
We're at Rose Mount Cemetery in New Jersey, Elizabeth, New Jersey, and my father is buried here and I don't know exactly where, but my mother said it was in front of a oak tree and the office is closed.
There's a lot of trees here.
I think that there's a big oak tree over there.
Yeah. So the identifying marker of this place is that everything's flat. There are no like standing graves. I don't know if that's just what they decided so they can maybe put more people here, but uh, it's not the prettiest place. Well. His name was Robert Lee Murray Alexander. It was a preacher and he lived a tough life.
He was also a complicated, fascinating person. Born in the South of West, he was an orphan and his hobole preacher life certainly took its toll, and in his short life he ran fast, but he wasn't built for speed. I don't know where it is. In fact, I haven't been here in over thirty years. He died in nineteen ninety three and we buried him and I haven't come back since. He was born with a bad heart. He
died of congestive heart failure and adult diabetes. He was I think fifty years old and he passed away in East New York, Brooklyn. We lived in the parsonage where my mother, Sammy, also an orphan and soon to be a widow, performed her vow to death to us part and she took care of him until he breathed his last And it wasn't easy because toward the end of his life his legs started to rot and turn ganggreen because of the circular it was so compromised. He died
January thirteenth, nineteen ninety three. It was just before I was going to start the Cosby Show, and funeral director had an interesting comment that he said to my mother. He said that my dad must have been paying a debt because it marked his flesh and bone is fair trade. He told my mother that he had never seen a body that had gone through as much pain and suffering and all his years of undertaking.
Wow, I see.
The next one issue would be sick sociology, and that is that people can be around each other physically, but there has to be a hierarchy. There has to be
a us them, you cannot have an equal society. The third pillar would be political pathology, and that is that all of your politics are designed to protect this evil economics and to protect this sociology, so much so that when you even write your documents, you have to make sure that the system of slavery is protected, because you can't even have a unity or a constitution without that. The last two bad biology. So in the seventeenth century,
a French scientist came up with this idea. You can read about this in one of Cornell West's book called Prophesied Deliverance, in which they said you could determine brain size by skin color. You saw some of this in the movie Django, and people thought it was just the movie. It was actually real. There were scientists who suggested that you could determine brain size by skin color. Therefore, skin color became a sign of one's lesser humanity, or actually
one's lack of humanity. And then the last one is heretical ontology. Ontology is the study of God's intentions. And so the argument was that God intended the evil economists, God intended the sixth sociology, God intended the political pathology. God intended the bad biology. God intended the system of slavery, which is in itself a hered heress. It is the abuse and missus of theology. So when you asked that question about from a moral perspective, I just wanted to lay that out first.
Now, to be clear, my father was no Hitler, no Polepot, no Dick Cheney, and yet in an unfair way here he was in East New York mythology. Now that's near Brownsville, and this is the early nineties. It's a real rough place that his physical body looked so tortured that it was a standout visual for pain and suffering. It's deep. But why aim, Why did my father, a local preacher, What did he do to deserve that? In my best guess is that he didn't do anything. He's just how
life is. Life is unfair, imbalanced, it's cruel. Right. He was a star in anyone's room. He was very charismatic. He was very smart. He was intelligent. He was a genius. He could pick up languages quick. He was very good at reading rooms, reading people. He was a healer. He was an extraordinary healer. Pastors noted how gifted he was, but also touched by the spirit. It was more than just a calling or something that his grandmother said he'd do. He was really made for it. But we try to
make sense of these things. So I rethought about it, and this is what I came up with. That my dad had violated a moral honor code and that the ramifications of that debt penetrated another dimension, and he would not be allowed to leave his human life without paying that bondsman. My great grandmother, who was present at his birth, she was a very powerful woman, they say, with a
very deep voice. Maybe that's where I get it from A little bit saw signs of his anointing and declared that he was special and that he was to be, in her words, a man of God, and that marked him with the brand. And my father was special. He was mostly fulfilled that mission as far as I'm concerned. But when his life choices morally didn't add up to his destined mission, the universe served him up a world of pain that match the likes of job as payment
for undelivered services. So America may be in the same situation. She may have to pay the reaper a hard price for failing to fulfill her mission. I really believe there's a bounty on America's head for the sin and failure of being so immoral. And if there is a God, then maybe in death my father has earned his place back into his good graces. But it was going to have to be through great pain and suffering.
In Judeo Christian thinking, in the Old Testament, there was always reparations, always represations. You never just took from people. In fact, every fiftieth year there was something called the season of Jubilee, and in that season of Jubilee, all slaves were to be free, all debts were to be canceled, all people were to be restored. And there was a thinking among the early Jewish rabbis and all that if that ever happened, if it ever actually happened, that the
Kingdom of God would come in his fullness. In the New Testament, Jesus clearly taught that if you stole from somebody, you didn't just replace what you stole. You had to replace two, three fourfold what you stole. And until that happened, there's a very powerful story of a tax person in the Scripture that says he wants to follow Jesus. Jesus doesn't say go get baptized. Jesus doesn't say, put some all on your head. Jesus doesn't say, say how the
new year. Jesus doesn't say that. He said, who have you stolen from? Zach kids? And he says, well, I stole them different. He said, okay, go and return to the folk that you have stolen from. And he goes out, and he returned. He said, I've done even more than just what I took. I restored three four four. And then Jesus say, now salvation has come. Now words, he couldn't just say I stole from all those folk, but oops, now want to be saved? Can you accept me? And Jesus says, said, you're forgiving.
No no, no, no no, no no no no.
You have to restore what you're stolen, and then salvation. So, whether we look at it historically or constitutionally or from a religious perspective, the issue of reparation is a serious theological, moral, and constitutional issue.
How do you feel standing here?
Oh, it's a not a nuh nice place. It's pretty ugly, feel like it's a Soviet type of compound, you know, the it's everything's flattened, the grass is patchy, and I don't know. If you didn't know grave yard was here, you just think it was a really badly unkept yard. And my father, who didn't pay attention to those types of things, probably would have liked to s to be in a nicer place. It's too bad he's not.
There's no headstones, it's all flat markers, and you're just the only thing that's vertical are some of the flowers that are poking up around. So we're pretty close by the uh Newark Airport and the highway. Mean, well, thank you for bringing me.
Here, Eric, thank you, And Dad, I'm sorry we don't have a marker for you.
But he did.
He doesn't live here anymore, so it doesn't matter what's here or not here. Took a reparations documentary and a discussion about race to get me back to see my father, which is interesting. Yeah, anyway, this journey is bigger than us. It's bigger than the sound of our voice and our understanding, but it is not bigger than a vision laid out long before we arrived here on this hot blue spin and rock you know America.
In the context of this conversation about morality, this idea that people often say that people shouldn't be judged by the worst thing they've ever done? Or they asked that question, should people be judged by the worst thing that they've ever done? And I think sort of collectively, that's what white Americans are grappling with now. Are we as white Americans? Can we escape this thing? Can we escape this immoral thing of slavery that's our legacy? Are we somehow captives
to this worst thing they've ever done? Can we ever outlive it?
Can we ever outrun it?
Can we ever change it? Is reparation something that could even change it? We're living in this time of reckoning right now. And is there anything that we can do that will balance the scale? Is there anything we can put on the other side of the scale that will equal the sins of the past.
Oh, well, that's a human thing. That's why reparations is a heavy subject, because it's weighed down by centuries of hand wrangling and debates over what it is to be human? Who gets to be human? And alongside the idea of debt and repayment between discrownal parties, we're also talking about moral debt. Again, this is outside of cash or gold or diamonds or oil, it's a moral repayment restitution. It's one that perhaps can men fences and create bridges to
a more perfect union. And that's epic stuff. We'll need more silence going forward so we can listen as we search and try to rescue the ingredients that can make our nation, in all its glory, a reality. It's important to ask the big questions, how do we do reparations? Well, that depends on us facing a national moral reckoning and thinking about my life and others I know who may be dealing with existential crises can lay the blueprint of how we approach these difficult questions and come up with
better answers. Yeah, better answers. Where do I always come up with better answers? I know, I'll ask my mom.
Sometime like, demand's more about than we can give. And I was thinking sometime we are malnourished, are under nurtured for the lives that are forced upon us. And I think that Robert gave what he could. Sometimes I believe that he might have been induced to things because of his male nourishment in life and looking at others wishing that he had this or that, and feeling inadequate. Sometimes, you know, deeds didn't match up because you're trying to
reach for that ring grab and sometime you fall. But I won't be harsh in how I judged his commitment. I think he wanted very much to be a leader, a person that gave, and those were the sentiments of his last days. That's the reason I say you look at someone's heart, because you can't really say you love someone unless you are willing to look at the whole of that person. They're good, they're bad, they're failures, their successes. I don't think that he became the person that he
wanted to become for many reasons. I think that there were times that life hit him so hard and he was so discouraged that he couldn't bounce back. He was afraid to say yes to life many times, and I think that that was one of his greatest regrets.
Do you feel, because we've been talking about reparations in the United States, that black people are kind of like in this really unholy marriage, that they feel the same way. That is very difficult to walk away from something that's not working for them, that actually harms them, that can actually do harm to them, continues to and they are unwilling to because of their ultimate humanity, or what do you think is going on there?
I think we stayed for very complex reasons, just as one would stay in a marriage for very complex reasons. And most of us have come to realize the sacrifice and the toll that our four parents paid in their own blood. And to walk away from this country, and no matter how hateful and onerous it may be, to walk away would be to ignore their sacrifice, to say that it was in vain. That is the way I feel.
They were not paid, but they built a country, they fought for a country, shed their blood, and were treating it less than human beings. If I walked away before their descendants had gotten their due in every way by having a full measure, that would be the greatest dishonoring of their sacrifice. So yes, I say, And I can't just live on the laurels and say my four parent sacrifice. It means that I must constantly work. There is a scripture in the Bible says you must work out your
soul's salvation. So to me staying in this country, contributing to it, seeing saying to it, no matter what you do to me, how you dishonor me. I will honor what belongs to me. If we walk away and it said we're giving up on this country. It's never going to be what it should be, then all of that would be lost. We can't allow that.
Lastly, I want to talk to you about morality to America's personal responsibility and immorality and moral calling that they put in their constitution. What would you say to the government now that they have the opportunity to step forward into that light? What is the forward motion for us all for America? The government? Morality and immorality.
Well, there is a lesson that we need to reckon. America taluts itself as being a Christian country in large part, but we seem to have lost our moral pompous and now the word democracy is threatened. You're hearing people say
that our constitution is outdated. You're hearing people say that it's all right if one particular group are our majority group, does whatever they wish, that the ends justify the means, and that the God that we have created and is not the one that has created us, and we seem to serve that God, to prefer to serve that God, then the one that says to us, love your enemy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be just toward every man. Stand fast in the faith
that was once delivered to you by your ancestors. Teach your children what I have done for you, and to you how I brought you, so that they will worship me and they will recognize the hand of God. All of those things are in the Bible, setting a light a path for us. But we have chosen to create our own God, one of gold, one of silver, one that says, take what you wish. It doesn't matter if the other fella starves, It doesn't matter if the other
fella doesn't have a home. That's our morality. Now. Our morality is, don't worry about righteousness getting you into a kingdom. You can always buy Peter at the gate anyway. Who believes in heaven anymore? Our heaven is right here, and we can make hell for those folks whenever we want to. So now they say, oh, you can't protest anymore because it's getting dangerous from me, Not because you don't have a right to your voice. You don't have a right to any action that says you can take what belongs
to you. We say survival of the fittest, but we don't want to test the fitness of certain people. You know, we have a morality that says one thing does another. The Native Americans said, we speak with the four tongues. I sometimes say we speak from both orifices, and none of that is beneficial. So I think that America is soon coming to the time when she will be called to redeem herself or to fight for whatever new existence
that she's says she wants to maintain. You know, you will either give in and say that the people of all races, all stresses of life, you have a right to exist and we will live in peace, or we will say no, you will be annihilated, and only as they say that krem day like crime will survive, and we'll see. I think we're fast coming to that place.
Mom, one last thing, Could you sing a little bit of the star spangled banner?
Oh say? Can you see by the doge?
This podcast is produced by Eric Alexander ben Arnon and Whitney Down.
The executive producers are Charlemagne the God and Dolly s. Bishop. The supervising producer is Nicole Childers.
And the lead producer is Devin Mavock Robbins, the producer writer is cersee Castle, and the associate producer is Kevin Fann, with additional research support.
Provided by Nile Blast. Original music by dj dpp.
Oh Gom Step Back, Mahelia, a Star's Board, Hach Reparations. The Big Payback is a production of color Farm Media, iHeartRadio and The Black Effect Podcast Network in association with Best Case Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.