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