Howie Hawkins:
Hello, everybody. I’m Howie Hawkins. I was the Green Party and the Socialist Party candidate for president in twenty twenty. And this program, Green Socialist Notes, is about continuing to educate and advocate for the eco-socialist program that my running mate Angela Walker and I ran on in twenty twenty. And today, by popular demand, people have been asking for this discussion of reparations. And we got the best person I think we could get for that. It’s Ron Daniels, who you see on the screen there. And Ron has been at the center of progressive and Black politics for more than the last fifty years. He was one of the organizers of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in nineteen seventy-two, which brought together ten thousand Black activists, three thousand delegates from congressional districts, and another seven thousand people. And out of that, they came up with a national Black political agenda. And then continued as the National Black Political Assembly with Ron as its chair. And then in nineteen eighty, they evolved into the National Black Independent Political Party. And Ron was one of its co-chairs, known as NBIPP. And Ron and most of the NBIPP people went into the nineteen eighty-four presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson. And coming out of that, Ron became the executive director of the National Rainbow Coalition that grew out of that campaign. And I think it was in those years in the mid-eighties when I first met Ron at meetings of various independent progressive political groups that the radical lawyer Arthur Kanoi had been convening since the nineteen seventies and did, you know, as long as he lived. And then in the nineteen eighty-eight campaign, Ron was the southern regional coordinator and deputy campaign manager for Jackson’s campaign. And then as we headed toward nineteen ninety-two, Ron himself ran a presidential campaign under the banner of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow. And, you know, I think the goal was to bring the constituencies and the energy of the Rainbow Coalition into independent political action. And in the course of building that campaign, many Greens met Ron at the National Green Gathering in Elkins, West Virginia, where what was the Green Committees of Correspondence became the Green Party USA. And in ninety-two, I and many Greens supported Ron for president. And after that, Ron was the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, from ninety-four until two thousand four, where he led campaigns against police brutality, voter disenfranchisement, environmental racism, and the post-9/11 attacks on civil liberties. And Ron also taught political science at CUNY’s York College, the City University of New York’s York College in Jamaica, Queens, from two thousand seven to two thousand eighteen. And we were just talking before—Ron is formally retired but as busy as ever. And he’s still going strong as the president of the Institute for the Black World Twenty-First Century and as convener of the National African American Reparations Commission. And we’ll put links to those two organizations in the chat. So, welcome, Ron. Thanks for coming on the podcast. And as I mentioned, viewers of this program have been asking for a discussion of Black reparations. So why don’t we just get right into it? Why don’t you tell us what is the case for Black reparations and what should reparations entail?
Ron Daniels:
Well, first of all, Howie, it’s great to be reunited. We did have some great times together back in the day, and it’s good to see there are principled warriors who are still out there making the case. We have lots of debates and struggles around the direction, but it’s always a direction towards transformation and really creating a better world for what I call the rainbow world, if you will. So it’s really great to be with you. Yeah, I mean, reparations is, as my sister would say—she’s got the best sort of description—it’s on fire. And that’s a good thing. And one of the things that becomes important is to continue to make the case. And the case for reparations really is not a novel case in the sense that reparations are ingrained and enshrined in international law. That is to say, whenever there are people or people who are oppressed and who are deprived and who are exploited by another group of people, they are entitled to restitution. They are entitled to repair, if you will. The word reparations, and it’s very simple, it’s very basic, does mean just that. It means repair. It means healing. And in this instance, it means repair of the group that has been injured, that has been harmed.
In some ways, the case that people are most familiar with is, of course, the Holocaust that occurred in Nazi Germany—the systematic, mechanical, genocidal destruction of six million Jews, and another six million that don’t get talked about for some reason. The total is about twelve million people. And of course, after the war was concluded, you know, people gathered, the world gathered, and in fact imposed reparations, that is to say a system of repair on Germany. And some of those payments are still being made to this very day.
There are other examples that we can point to in Canada. Some of the indigenous people have gotten some level of repair—not as much as many of us believe should be the case—but the Aleuts and the Eskimos and others, these native nations have received some reparations for the dispossession of native land. So again, in a basic sense, reparations are about repair.
There is a kind of process that’s involved. You know, we need people to first and foremost acknowledge. Part of it is the acknowledgment of the injury. Secondly, then there is an apology. And then we get into the difficult part, because very often people are willing to go through the first two steps of acknowledging and providing an apology, though sometimes the apology becomes difficult as well. But then you get into the issue of restitution and compensation. And this is the area where it becomes very, very difficult because, unfortunately, nations and institutions very often don’t want to go to that step. They don’t want to, in fact, do repair or provide compensation or redress in that way.
It’s important to state here that in a basic, fundamental way, the principle of restorative justice applies. And this is why it also becomes difficult—because those who perpetrate the institutions or individuals, families, or whoever, who perpetrate the injury cannot define the definition of repair. So what happens sometimes is people say, “We apologize, we acknowledge, we apologize, and this is what we are going to do for you.” Well, it doesn’t work that way. Those who have been injured, those who have been harmed have to, in fact, define the nature of their repair or to accept that which is being laid out. It is a process of negotiations in some respect.
The other critical issue is kind of who gets reparations. And quite frankly, this has become a source of some division and some debate in the African American community by, I think, well-meaning in some instances, people who come into the reparations movement, which is a good thing. But maybe some others who may be a little bit more malevolent in terms of their origins, their roots, and where they come from. But fundamentally, reparations for African Americans or Black people in this country is indeed for enslavement. And enslavement is, one might argue, the greatest Holocaust in human history in terms of the loss of human life. But beyond that, the destructive extraction of wealth that Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Sir Eric Williams, in his book Capitalism and Slavery, point out really helped to fuel the commercial and industrial revolution of Europe and indeed in the United States of America.
But reparations are also for all of the legacies of enslavement. For example, there’s a book called Black Labor, White Wealth by Dr. Claude Anderson. He points out, traces, for example, the Homestead Act. So we talk about racially exclusionary policies. You know, the West, as I used to be taught in U.S. history, this was kind of the safety valve. When things got tough and rough on the East Coast and the colonies, moving west was kind of like the safety valve. Well, as part of that safety valve, the U.S. government allocated literally millions of acres of land for people who were homesteaders who wanted to begin to get a stake in American society.
Unfortunately, on a class basis, a lot of those resources actually went to big institutions, particularly the railroads, which gobbled up huge amounts of land. And institutions like colleges and universities did likewise. But there are also literally hundreds of thousands of individuals who were able to get a stake through the Homestead Act. Well, Black people were excluded from that.
And we can go on and on in terms of the Federal Housing Administration that quote-unquote built the suburbs really after the Second World War. White families were able to benefit from that and pursue the American dream—the idea of a house and one-car garage or two-car garage, however you want to define it. And in some ways, also in a very egregious way, the GI Bill, you know, where white veterans were able to get a stake by way of education and benefits. And if you look at someone like Medgar Evers, who was the field secretary for the NAACP in the South, he was a veteran, and there were many people like that. He fought in the Second World War, and yet he could not get the GI Bill.
But it goes even deeper than that. We go to assess things as urban renewal, which we call the Negro removal program of the twentieth century, redlining, and with systematically—you had situations where there was disinvestment in Black neighborhoods for the purposes of taking those neighborhoods up and devaluing them in a very predatory way. And now in the modern era, gentrification.
And I guess finally, and there are many, many, many other areas, certainly the whole area of the war on drugs. And the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, probably one of the greatest books written on this matter, establishes how this racially exclusionary policy really was very destructive and has been destructive to Black communities. So the sum of it is, it becomes very important to establish that reparations is indeed for enslavement, but it is also for all of its legacies.
And in that regard, someone may or may not have been an actual descendant of an enslaved family or person to have been victimized by racially exclusionary policies. And I cite, for example, Abner Louima, who was sodomized and brutalized by the U.S. police, and Amadou Diallo. And you can go on and on and on. So in that regard, those who have migrated to this country and how they got here and whatever, it also becomes a source of difficulty in terms of tracing.
But we really don’t need to get into all of that at one level because, you know, at least people like myself are progressive Pan-Africanists. And so therefore, we’re looking at how we include and how we incorporate all of the Black family into the prospects of repair. So we’re not about to deny the sons and daughters of Shirley Chisholm and Malcolm X and Harry Belafonte reparations on the basis of some nativist definition of they should not get it because they are not so-called American descendants of slavery.
Howie Hawkins:
Talk about H.R. 40, which is entitled The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, which is about how we decide what reparations should be and then implement it.
Ron Daniels:
Yeah, let me, before I do that, Howie, let me just quickly drop a couple of other things quickly, because what we’ve done in N’COBRA, and I’m glad you put it into the chat. One of the things that we did—and NARC is an assembly, it is a collaborative assembly of advocates, reparations advocates, scholars, organizers, faith leaders, labor leaders, civil rights, human rights leaders—who we really pulled together to be an authoritative voice to provide guidance in a very positive way, not in a narrow, restrictive, sectarian way, but to provide guidance. And so we developed a ten-point program, and that ten-point program is reflective of how we see reparations unfolding.
And the reason why I say that is because one of the questions that I should address is the question in what forms, because there’s a big debate about cash payments and “give me my check” and whatever. And, you know, Martin Luther King talked about that. He said, “We’re on our way to Washington to get our check.” But some said he was doing that more symbolically than substantively. However, we do not rule out what we call individual payments to individuals around harms that have been created. For example, if you look at Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is an abomination, really. You’ve got maybe three survivors left, over a hundred years old—some are a hundred and seven, a hundred and ten years old—who have never, ever received compensation. They are entitled to compensation because they were directly injured and they can demonstrate things.
The broader point, however, that I also make—not broader in any comparative sense, but to sort of look at how reparations can look—is how do you repair and how do you rebuild Greenwood, the Greenwood district, which is Black Wall Street? How does that get done? And we therefore, when you look at our ten-point program, we talk about collective or community benefits, because community benefits mean the ability to rebuild institutions, hospitals, economic development projects, land, educational projects. And therefore, they accrue to the totality of the community so that the people benefit, but it’s not necessarily because they receive, quote-unquote, a check.
So we’re not averse to people receiving a direct benefit, but we think that in the broader scheme of things, developmental reparations are far more productive in terms of rebuilding and really dealing with the damages in the African-American community. Let me just say, parenthetically, that we work very closely with the CARICOM Reparations Commission. In fact, we inspired each other. We sort of modeled our ten-point program and adapted it to the U.S. situation.
And in CARICOM, they don’t deal with individual payments at all. They’re clear. They’re talking about developmental payments, developmental assistance.
Howie Hawkins:
And tell people what CARICOM is.
Ron Daniels:
CARICOM is sort of equivalent to the European Union. In other words, the Caribbean nations, all fifteen of them, have come together to create a united front, if you will. So that’s called CARICOM. The Caribbean Community of Nations is called CARICOM. So all fifteen of them in twenty-fourteen, I think it was, took the courageous decision, even though they are still dependent and still in some ways victimized by neocolonialism, they took the courageous decision to say, “We demand reparations for Native genocide,” which I really respected because what they were saying is, “Reparations, we recognize who were the original people in these islands.” I mean, it might have been shared in some ways because there’s some argument about Africans coming in before Columbus and all that. But the point is they have been decimated. So they’re demanding reparations for Native genocide and African enslavement. And then they developed a ten-point program around that, built commissions around that. And so we work very carefully and closely together.
But their position is they want, as Professor Sir Hilary Beckles said, they want these European former colonizers to clean up the mess. And cleaning up the mess means, you know, systems of healthcare, education, economic development. That is how they see reparations, the form in which reparations would take.
Now, as we turn to H.R. 40, H.R. 40 is one of the—and we look at where reparations are now or where they are in this country, and we had a meeting yesterday, and I pointed to the fact that H.R. 40 is first and foremost, has a history that I need to talk about very briefly. Because essentially H.R. 40 began—and you and I were just talking about one of the great social progressive legislators of our time, Congressman John Conyers—who maybe didn’t even know a lot about reparations necessarily, but he was very responsive to his constituency.
And there was a strong Pan-Africanist, Black nationalist, revolutionary group of people in Detroit who were pressing for reparations—reparations to build the Black nation. It was a very, very, very, very strident demand. And they were asking John Conyers to be a part of it. And eventually, John Conyers agreed to do so. And he did so in part because he also saw what happened with the Japanese.
Because the Congress of the United States passed something called the Civil Liberties Act of nineteen eighty-eight, which granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been interned during World War II. So the Japanese reparations movement was able to win, right? So Conyers introduced H.R. 40 in nineteen eighty-nine to study the case for Black reparations, modeled after that Japanese movement.
So, what the revolutionary nationalists had to do, however, was to make a decision—and you’ve been in these debates and discussions about strategy and tactics. There was one group of people saying, “Study? We don’t need to study no damn reparations. We know what reparations is about. Why would we have a bill that only studies reparations?” Well, ultimately, they made a wise tactical decision that they would advance and ask Congress to introduce a bill that would study enslavement and to decide whether reparations were warranted.
The reason why that was important is because, frankly, even inside the African-American community, there were people, you know, who, it’s not that they didn’t necessarily believe in it—they didn’t believe it was possible. I mean, this is never going to happen in the United States of America. So, that tactical decision meant that it could be used as an educational tool, to take that to African-American organizations, cities, municipalities, colleges, universities, and even white allies and organizations, to have them sign on to this whole proposition that we’ll just study it, right?
And so, Congressman Conyers, without fail, from 1989 until he passed the torch to Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, introduced H.R. 40, which is, of course, symbolic and reflective of Forty Acres and a Mule, the reparations that, in fact, were promised by Sherman in his field order, and, in fact, passed through the Congress of the United States but was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson. A lot of people don’t know that history and don’t know, in fact, that what Congress did do was pay the slave masters—they gave them compensation, both in that broader sense, but also in Washington, D.C.
But anyway, so H.R. 40 was used as an organizing tool up until about 2015-2016. And we, in NARC, along with N’COBRA and the Movement for Black Lives, went to Congressman Conyers and said, “Enough is enough. We think we’ve moved beyond the study phase. Let’s now talk about a remedy bill.” And Congressman Conyers agreed to shift from a study to a remedy bill. And that bill then became the bill to study and develop reparations proposals for African Americans. In other words, no longer a study bill.
Well, that bill—the previous bill—really never had more than about fifty or so sponsors. It’s not a small number, but it never had a huge number of sponsors. Well, we were able to, because of a number of different circumstances that took place, we were able to work hard and organize, not only with African Americans, but then all of a sudden into the picture enters the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress, any number of organizations that were allied organizations, joining the fray. And with N’COBRA helping to lead the way in terms of its legislative commission, and working with Human Rights Watch—another organization that played a very instrumental role—we were able to get that number up to about 187, actually. It may have even been higher than that. So, from less than fifty to over 187 or more, and one vote shy of actual passage in the House of Representatives, with those votes on the side who said, “I’m not going to be a co-sponsor, but if it hits the floor, I’ll vote for it.”
And then, in the Senate, Cory Booker stepped up. Cory Booker stepped up and introduced S. 40. And the bill there got about twenty-five—no, almost forty, really, about forty sponsors in the Senate. So, that was tremendous progress that was made in terms of the tremendous organizing that was taking place.
And I have to say that Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, God rest her soul, in the ancestor realm, she was an indefatigable, visionary, incredible champion. I mean, she worked and worked and worked unlike anyone else we had ever worked with to push this bill forward. So, H.R. 40, if people understand the dynamics of these antiquated institutions, we could have gotten it passed through the House of Representatives. And, by the way, there were some historic things that had never happened before. There was the Juneteenth hearing that took place, there was a markup—all of that. I mean, these are all victories.
But it would have been a moral victory. Great, we got it passed through the House of Representatives, but it could not pass the Senate because of the cloture rule and the inability to break through Sinema and Manchin and whatever. So the only route is an executive order.
And so now, what we’re pressing for with the Biden administration, before he moves on, whatever the outcome of the election is, is to enact H.R. 40 by executive order, which means that it won’t be symbolic in that there is a budget—I forget the exact amount of the budget, the number of commissioners has been enumerated. It could actually be up and moving in order to move reparations forward.
So that’s what H.R. 40 is. That’s the status of H.R. 40. And it is at a level that, you know, to be perfectly honest, I’ve worked on reparations all of my adult life. If you recall, part of my platform was around reparations. I didn’t just talk about reparations in the Black community and not talk about it when I was in the white community. I talked about reparations across the board. Wherever I went, I talked about reparations. I found some receptivity with organizations like the Greens and the Peace and Freedom Party and others, you know, who were amenable to it, were not sort of seduced by the idea that if we do this, we’re going to frighten away the workers and other people on a class basis and whatnot. So, it was a very interesting campaign in that regard.
So, anyway, H.R. 40 is at the precipice of being enacted. And let me just say, also, California—you know, Pat had introduced the commission, and that was introduced and passed with bipartisan support. Evanston, Illinois is the place that is actually dispensing reparations. I’m honored and delighted that it was NARC that actually certified Evanston with the courageous leadership of Robin Rue Simmons as a flexible, replicable model that can be introduced around the country. There are now more than one hundred cities that are engaged in some form of reparatory justice initiative.
And, of course, New York State—I’m on the New York State Commission. Governor Hochul signed a bill there. We’re going to be working through that. New Jersey may be next, Maryland. So it is really, really, really moving forward in a very, very, very dramatic way.
Howie Hawkins:
Say more about the relationship between these initiatives—local, state—going after corporations for reparations and getting a federal program of reparations.
Ron Daniels:
Well, let me also say that the other thing that’s happening is that there are some really strong efforts being made with corporations, but particularly with colleges and universities. A lot is going on with colleges and universities.
Because, and by the way, a lot of people may not see the more profound and even radical implications for reparations. That’s why it’s also important not just to reduce it to a check. Because, quite frankly, what the push, as we see it in terms of the kind of programmatic pieces that we’re talking about, is how do we prevent the replication of the kind of system and the kind of absence of values, or however you want to put it, that allowed for the dispossession of Native people and the enslavement of Africans in the first place and the perpetuation of these kinds of policies. So, in that regard, all of this is quite good.
What’s happening at the state level is very positive because what it’s doing is it’s fleshing out… I mean, who would have thought that you’d look at California and see the degree to which there was not enslavement in California, which is ironic that people kind of had the ADOS people there fighting for a lineage in a state where really, I mean, you were limiting that which was possible. But certainly, the redlining and other forms, the taking of property—there are other kinds of forms that you saw developing there.
Looking at a state like New York to find out that there was more enslavement in the North than… I mean, it’s mind-blowing how many enslaved people helped build Wall Street. And you’ll find other states similar—New Jersey. So this is all an educational process, which Black people are learning from, but also white people are learning from, and Latinos and Asians are learning from.
So, there’s no contradiction between local reparations, state reparations, and federal reparations. In fact, what’s happening is that to the degree that we have cities that are putting structures in place and states that are putting structures in place, it’s providing limited reparations. The real deal is it is only the federal government that has the resources in the trillions of dollars that will be required to ultimately provide reparations—the kind of repair that we’re talking about.
So, the successful negotiation around H.R. 40 will mean that states can benefit because resources can therefore be allocated to states, and they can be allocated to cities. And an infrastructure will already be in place in order to deal with how to allocate these resources.
That’s how—some people are saying, “Evanston is not reparations because it’s too small.” It has nothing to do with the size of it. You know, we wish it was more, but it is reparations.
Some people say, “Well, reduced state reparations will detract from the national.” No. On the contrary, the state and local stuff is helping to build the pressure for the national reparations. So, it’s all synergistically entwined in a very positive and constructive way.
Howie Hawkins:
You mentioned Sherman’s Order and N’COBRA, which people should know what that stands for. Can you say a little bit more about the history of reparations, going back to right after the Civil War, and then the modern movement, maybe since James Forman’s Black Manifesto, and then N’COBRA and then the National African American Reparations Commission?
Ron Daniels:
Yeah, and that’s why when we were talking yesterday with some folk, I invoked the notion of Ujima—collective work and responsibility. Because the reparations movement, like lots of movements for social change across the history of this country, has its ebbs and its flows. But almost always, that ebb and flow has been forward. But there are lulls, there are periods in which it’s almost like you don’t think much is happening, but we have moved forward.
So, even before Sherman issued his field order, there are instances—at least one instance, which I can’t cite the particulars of it—but there was an instance in New England where a formerly enslaved person actually sued their slave master and demanded reparations. And what that suggests is that this notion was a part of the consciousness of the enslaved Africans, knowing that they were due compensation for the brutal and ruthless extraction of their labor.
Sherman issued his field order because he correctly understood, really, quite frankly, how are you going to emancipate people and they don’t have a stake in the society? He was also interested in snatching the land away from the former Confederates as a way of punishing them and penalizing them for maintaining this peculiar institution.
Now, ultimately, as we said before, even though in the so-called radical Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1876, it was passed—but President Andrew Johnson vetoed it. And so, therefore, it was never implemented. And that’s one of the great ironies, really, and tragedies of the Reconstruction era—that Black people exercised more political power at that time than any other time until the present, but we did not have what was called social power. We had no undergirding in terms of an economic and social floor in order to move forward.
Then you had Callie House, who was a courageous African woman who organized literally thousands of people in a reparations initiative to demand benefits. And it’s interesting because she was eventually—her initiative was derailed on the same basis that Marcus Garvey’s movement was derailed—being accused of misrepresentation in terms of mail fraud and those kinds of things.
But the name Callie House is always a name that we call out as someone who was way ahead of the game in terms of projecting the necessity for reparations. And then Marcus Garvey’s movement, while not necessarily explicitly mentioning reparations, certainly gave people a sense of the importance of nation-building and the resources required to do so and the obligation of the United States government to do repair.
In the most recent period, it was my mentor, who kind of is a celebrated heroine or hero—she-ro, if you will—Queen Mother Audley Moore. I mean, she was my direct mentor. I won’t go through the whole story and whatnot, but I’m glad she… well, I will say this—she said that her job was to operate on constipated minds. Because, from her perspective, how could any Black person not be for reparations or not even know about it? You can be smart, you can be intelligent and all that, go up for your PhD and master’s and all that. And so, I was one of those persons, and she operated on my mind. And I thank God for her. And I literally studied under her.
And she was that person who just relentlessly kept coming at Black people, saying, “You must get your reparations. You must get your reparations. You must get your reparations.”
But systemically, in terms of organizing, it was N’COBRA, which was formed in the sixties, which more than any other organization—and you referenced, and sometimes we forget James Forman and his demands on Riverside Church, and there were other kinds of efforts of that kind that should not be forgotten—but in terms of a systemic organizing effort, it was really a united front.
N’COBRA is the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. So, it was a coalition effort. I was not a founder of N’COBRA, but I was a lifetime member. And we used to always, all the different organizations, come together collectively to fight for reparations.
So, it is our legacy organizations that pushed it ahead for years and years and years and years. It was in the forefront. But organizations come, they sometimes have internal contradictions. That was not the case necessarily within N’COBRA, but its leadership—some of the leaders passed away. And quite frankly, to be honest about it, the election of President Obama was a negative when it came down to reparations. Because somebody said, well, I think somebody said, “President Obama was our reparation.” And then people were reluctant to raise certain questions while Obama was president and whatever.
But just to give you a quick glance, there were people like Bill Owens, for example, a Massachusetts legislator who called for the state of Massachusetts to step forward. That created a stir. Randall Robinson—his book The Debt played an incredibly powerful role. And I can remember going, man, to book signings around the country. Hundreds of people would be gathered to hear Randall Robinson make the case for reparations.
And then, almost in the same vein, there comes this young, brilliant guy—and I am so proud of this young man. I just saw him again. I told Maryanne, we watched him on Velshi on MSNBC, Ta-Nehisi Coates. And his piece The Case for Reparations in The Atlantic—incredible charge, reaching people that many of us had never reached before. A whole new generation of people looking at what reparations meant.
And by the way, that was not about enslavement—it was in Chicago. It was about redlining and gerrymandering—well, redlining specifically, if you will.
So, all of these pieces gave a charge to the movement. And then Black Lives Matter emerging, coming not only out of the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, but then more particularly in Ferguson, with the Movement for Black Lives gaining some traction. And then, of course, the public lynching of George Floyd.
I don’t think there was anything more dramatic—more, you know, sort of—it was like a catharsis that hit this country. I mean, people just—people, I mean, signs were in white neighborhoods damn near everywhere—”Black Lives Matter”—that gave another boost to this entire movement.
Not only reparations, equity considerations, all kinds of pieces. COVID also contributed because once again, it highlighted the disparities in terms of Black people and how we were affected in a disproportionate kind of way. So, it has been a very robust movement.
And I must say that in the last presidential campaign—it must have been the presidential campaign of 2020—organizations like the National Action Network with Reverend Al Sharpton and Urban League with Marc Morial and others stepped up. And they were pressuring candidates to say, “Do you support reparations? Do you support H.R. 40?” We had never seen that before.
And by the way, these are more traditional frontline organizations, which means you’re moving from the fringes—and when I say “fringe,” I don’t mean it in a pejorative negative way, because that’s where often some of the real ideologically sound positions are coming and percolating, among people who are thinking through these questions in that way.
But they challenged the candidates, and almost every one of the Democratic candidates said, “Yes, we support reparations.” In fact, we had to stop them from trying to tell us what reparations would look like. We just said, “Just support H.R. 40.”
All of that is a kind of cumulative effect.
And as I said before, in 2014—even before that, when CARICOM took that courageous decision, because it was at a point when the movement was kind of low, and CARICOM took that decision, despite the fact that you had more conservative prime ministers, moderate—you had a few liberal progressive prime ministers—they all concluded: We have got to fight for reparations because our nations, our countries, have been ravaged, and there’s no way of really catching up or making the repair unless we are able to receive compensation for the damage that had been done.
So that’s kind of a thumbnail sketch. I’m sure I’m missing something, because there have been a lot of influences, a lot of scholarship, a lot of books being written. The Debt Ain’t Never Been Told—I mean, just lots of scholars. That’s why in 2016, 2017, when we went to Congress, we said, “Man, we already knew it, but there was so much scholarship that it now just definitively laid out the whole question of what was going on and how capitalism really benefited from and exploited labor and how this nation was built on the shoulders and on the wealth of enslaved Africans.”
Howie Hawkins:
Before we take questions from the chat, Ron, you may want to say more about the question of individual versus community reparations. I kind of want to put that in context for the Greens and what is up for debate. The Steinware campaigns simply calling for cash reparations, which is what you’re hearing from ADOS, the American Descendants of Slaves, which limits who’s eligible—not everybody in the Black community who have suffered discrimination, the legacy of slavery, but just those that can identify ancestors. And only Americans. What about people from the Caribbean that had enslaved ancestors, came here, and got discriminated against?
So, that’s one debate. People may remember Bruce Dixon, who was a Green in Georgia. He wrote four articles about this group ADOS in Black Agenda Report. And we’ll put those in the chat—people can refer to them. He thought that was a very problematic way of approaching reparations. So, that’s one thing.
Another thing is when I think of individual cash payments versus community repair, compare it to the demand for climate reparations. Nobody’s going around saying, “Give these people in the Global South that have been damaged by climate a check.” They’re saying, “We need to restore farms and forests, the land-based livelihood of people.” And that requires community collective projects. And that’s what the climate justice movement says when it demands reparations. I think that helps us think about the issue of Black reparations in this country.
I never heard from Al Sharpton and those folks when I was running in 2020, but we did call for reparations. And we kind of combined, you know, when King called for the promissory note in the I Have a Dream speech—what they were proposing there at the March on Washington, and then in the Freedom Budget to Congress a couple years later, and then the Poor People’s Campaign—was an Economic Bill of Rights. And it would cover everybody, but disproportionately benefit Black people. But we also said race-conscious injuries require race-conscious remedies, and that’s why you need reparations in addition to an Economic Bill of Rights.
Ron Daniels:
Yeah, well, let me just make that point there. That’s an important point. Race-conscious injuries require race-conscious remedies, right?
But that’s the essence, really, of the definition of reparations. And the reason why I say that is it distinguishes it from what I call equity policy, which is important. Equity policy says, “We see these disparities, we know that they’re racially based, and we are determined that now, henceforth, and forevermore, they will not take place.”
Now, that doesn’t mean that that’s what happens, but that’s the lens—that’s moving forward.
Equity policy does not deal with that which has already been done. It doesn’t deal with the past damages that have been done.
And the second thing is ordinary public policy. We need things right now. There’s a huge need for jobs and economic development, housing—all of that is needed now. But that’s for everybody and should be for everybody. In fact, we are, you know, we pay it—we’re fighting for the kind of economic democracy, the kind of economy that will be for everybody.
So it’s important to make that distinction between equity and ordinary public policy as well.
But the point that you’re teasing out is correct on so many levels. People always grab it and understand it when I’m talking about the whole lineage position. When I talk about, as I said earlier, “Oh, you’re telling me that the sons and daughters of Shirley Chisholm and Malcolm X and Harry Belafonte and, you know, I mean, you go on and on and on, should not be entitled to reparations when they have been victimized by the legacies of enslavement?” Oh, that’s—and then they kind of grab it.
And let’s be honest about it. Maybe our community is like any other community. It’s not only the question that we’re diverse—we have contradictions in our community.
We’ve had some contradictions around homophobia that we’re working through. Certainly, when the AIDS epidemic broke out, it took a lot to deal with this, and it still has not been completely dealt with in terms of our community.
And then you have—you know, we have some—you know, we’re seduced sometimes by the whole Black jobs kind of argument: “They’re coming to take our jobs,” you know, piece. And in the Black community, that means those Nigerians are coming, those Caribbeans, Jamaicans are coming, and we’re competing, and they’re taking… I mean, all of that narrative.
We are working through some of those issues in our community. We have those contradictions. But when it relates to reparations, we cannot be seduced by those arguments.
And by the way, there are forces on the right who play into those forces, who, in fact, fund those, that they fund and fuel this contradiction because they also want to tamp down, however one sees it, Black participation in the political process, in terms of voting and whatever. So, if you don’t go down this way, you should not vote and this kind of stuff.
So, all of those things are at play. But that’s why we in NARC advocate what we call comprehensive reparations. Because comprehensive reparations is not only for enslavement—it is for enslavement, but it’s for all the legacies.
And the issue becomes, at another level, why in the hell would we leave anything on the table? I mean, why would… I mean, come on. I mean, given all the wealth—personally, they can never, ever pay enough—but why would we restrict it to just… okay, well, this… and let me—another argument has to be made.
The argument is, “Oh yeah, but we’ve got to see what passes legal muster. I mean, it’ll never pass… the jurisprudence is now…” And they’re right. The jurisprudence is now anti-racial remedy—it’s been ruled unconstitutional. But that’s not how you make your case. You make your case anyway, right?
And then you forge the arguments that will overcome both in terms of the inside political strategies but also the movements that are developed.
1896, Plessy v. Ferguson is the law of the land. 1954, separate but equal is ruled unconstitutional. That’s not because there’s some rigid Platonic level of jurisprudence—it’s because things change, social movements developed, and whatever.
And by the way, one of the things I’ve been saying, Howie—and I’m trying to, when I can free myself up out of all the work I’m doing to get back to it—I’ve been pushing people to read Arthur Kinoy, man. Arthur Kinoy is one of the most radical but brilliant constitutional lawyers this country’s ever produced. He did a piece called The Constitutional Right of Negro Freedom.
I’m going to say it again—The Constitutional Right of Negro Freedom. And what he argued in there clearly is that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the Reconstruction legislation, were designed—were specifically targeted to and dedicated to the full eradication and emancipation of all the badges and incidents of enslavement for African people, Black people.
So, what’s happening is there’s been an effort to turn it on its head. But what’s happening is this young Ketanji Jackson Brown has been picking up on that and raising it again. And that’s what I loved about CCR—I mean, we would figure out these creative legal theories and push them, right?
And who knows, as elections change—and a lot of us debate about this whole thing. I have a theory about what we need to do in the federal government—as elections change, there’s no reason why the jurisprudence will not also change. But you’ve got to make the case.
We cannot say to ourselves, “Well, we shouldn’t push for maximum reparations because racial reparations won’t pass.” Well, we’re saying no—racial reparations is based on harm. Harm is the basis. Injury is the basis.
But let’s not be fooled. These people, I mean, they will interpret injury and harm as racial. It’s not like they can’t see that.
But we’re having that debate, but I’m saying to our lawyers and whatever that you push the envelope. You push that which you know to be right in terms of the remedy. You don’t say, “Well, we won’t do this because it will not pass muster given the current state of jurisprudence in this country.”
Howie Hawkins:
Yeah, I want to second—people should Google Arthur Kinoy—K-I-N-O-Y, Kinoy. Look up that article. Arthur was a lawyer, civil rights lawyer, helped SNCC and a lot of the—Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—and a lot of the other groups in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.
And then, as far as independent politics, which the Greens are interested in, he wrote a paper in Liberation Magazine about 1972, 1973 called Toward a Mass Party of the People, which generated these discussions where Ron and I eventually met. And, you know, he’s passed on now, but it’s somebody worth going back to. I agree.
So why don’t we—we’ve got a few questions in the chat.
Z Mani (Viewer Question):
I would think reparations could not be a fixed sum since the damage from slavery is not in the past, but ongoing. And even slavery itself is continuing now in prison labor and in other forms.
Howie Hawkins:
So, more comment than a question—do you have a comment?
Ron Daniels:
I would agree with that. I mean, I think that’s the position I’m taking. And by the way, the other thing I would say is that, in a general sense—because we characterized it early in a way that I wanted to break out of, just in the sense of saying, you know—the point is, if everybody received, every Black person in this country received a check, it doesn’t really deal with the rebuilding of our communities.
That’s the point that we have to make, right?
And, in fact, one of the things that we talk about in the Ten-Point Program is, even though Native people have not received the level of repair that they should—and we should always remember that—that’s why I appreciated so much what CARICOM did in putting Native genocide first—reminding people of that.
And in many of our ceremonies and programs, we open up with that acknowledgment, that we’re all here by the dispossession, the brutal dispossession, of Native people.
But over many, many years—and this is one of the most tragic stories in American history—eventually Natives, many Indigenous people, got some—what I call quasi-independence or quasi-sovereignty—over land, right?
And so they have tracts of land in which they have 80%, 90% control. They can create hospitals, institutions—some people have turned to gaming as one way of dealing with it, whatever—but they have that right.
And we’re saying this—there is a tremendous amount of public land in the United States of America. And one of the demands that we talk about in the Ten-Point Program is land. Land being turned over to African Americans, and through an institutional mechanism that can then begin to talk about building different institutions that serve Black people.
And by the way, in our history and work that we’ve done, we’ve never really discriminated against others who want to participate in the benefits of institutions. I was looking at a historically Black college and university the other day, and I think it was Tennessee State University. And I’ve watched as people have gone through these different institutions. And as I look out, I see European faces out there. I see Latino faces out there. So, these institutions, because they are historically Black colleges and universities, do not discriminate. And they cannot discriminate. But they have never, ever discriminated, really.
I guess the basis, however, is—and this is the fight we have around gentrification—is, you know, people have a right to come wherever they want to go. But I don’t… I’m not going into a Native American community and ask them to change their culture to accommodate me. You know what I mean?
If I’m going into a Native American community, I want to fit in and be a part of that community and contribute to that community.
So, that’s some of the undergirding kind of contradictions and controversies. But, at the end of the day, the question of collective, or what we call community benefits, is of a developmental nature.
And I agree with the characterization coming from Z Manny.
Andujar Payne (Viewer Question):
Any development projects will go to the Anglo-colonizer class who would get paid to build this infrastructure.
Ron Daniels:
Well, I mean, that’s a part of… I mean, no, we wouldn’t do that. No, no, no, no. We’re not… we have thought about these issues for years and years and years. So, we’re not going to get—we’re not going to create a structure where there are benefits, and then we say, “We got rid of…” We have an abundance of engineers. We have an abundance of everything we need in the Black community to redevelop the Black community.
In fact, I often say that Marcus Garvey, for whatever reason—he was the greatest mass organizer that we’ve had—had some contradictions, but his fundamental basis was developmental. That it was not a whole thing about “All going back to Africa,” and that kind of stuff. He was trying to build a Black nation. He did not have, however, the infrastructure of skills in order to do that.
That’s not true now. We have everything we need in any field you can name. There are Black people who can be engaged, not only in this country, but the Caribbean and Africa, to come to do the work that needs to be done.
In fact, we have to resist our people going outside, out of a sense of internalized oppression, feeling that the white man’s ice is always colder. We still have to deal with that issue internally. But the skills are there.
So, that’s the least of our concerns, is the Anglo colonizers coming in to redevelop and therefore siphon off the benefits that come into our community, and ultimately going right back to the infrastructure that is oppressing us in the first place.
Howie Hawkins:
You could also say that individual cash payments are going into racial capitalism with all the exploitation, discrimination, and fraud that have been robbing Black people. So, without broader institutional change, you’re not getting the change we need.
So, is there another question?
Z Mani (Viewer Question):
I can’t understand an organization like this endorsing a corporate candidate whose party is inherently hostile to what they’re asking, and who would roll back such reforms even if forced to provide them.
Ron Daniels:
I’m not sure what organization he’s referring to, so I don’t know. I think I get the general gist of the question.
And so, if we look at—I mean, Dr. Maulana Karenga has a statement, and, you know, that I think is apropos. People can agree or disagree. He said, “We are realistic, but as for reality, we have come to change it.”
And so, when I talk about how we have advanced the struggle, it’s not some mythical struggle, absent realities in the real world and real-world battles and struggles and choices and decisions that you have to make.
Now, people can disagree with each other about how those decisions are made or what decisions are made. But the decision is, in order to get reparations in the United States of America, we have been fighting for and going through the existing political institutions. And that means there are existing political parties that have advanced these causes.
And then, political parties, who, unfortunately, are dominant in a way that… when I campaigned, and others, we want to break up, frankly—meaning the idea of all these requirements, and we were talking about this the other day. The fact that you—the rolls are purged every four years, all of this nonsense. People try to make voting in this country very, very difficult.
So, yeah, we have moved through and have worked through the Republican Party to where it has been amenable—and it’s largely not been amenable—we’ve been working through the Democratic Party to advance reparations. But we’ve been advancing it through those persons who represent the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party. That’s the Dhelms of the world, that’s the Shirley Chisholms of the world, where they’re around, that’s the Sheila Jackson Lees and Barbara Lees and so forth, have been advancing this cause.
I don’t have any apologies for that.
And once the commission is established, we also understand that it’s not over. It would be a horrible mistake to then say, “Oh, well…” No, no, no, no, no. We have to continue to be organizing to fight for the kind of proposals that come out of this commission that will be genuinely reparative.
And, indeed, ultimately are not the kind of proposals that will be repetitive in terms of—they will make gains. We will make gains towards the ultimate objective of building a new society—a new kind of society.
And in that regard, that was exactly what I campaigned on in 1992. I campaigned on what I called A New Covenant for a New Society. And I dealt with all of the historical grievances and repair that had to be done—not only for Black people, I cited what happened in terms of the dispossession, the way this country stole land and took land away from people of Latino descent, or from Mexicans, indeed.
I talked about even the exploitation of Chinese labor and Asian labor.
And, indeed, raised the fundamental question of working-class people in this society. In fact, one of the great tragedies of American society has been, and continues to be to this day, the degree to which racism has been used, and continues to be used, as a wedge for divide and exploit.
I wrote a piece just the other day. Underneath, really, this Make America Great Again movement, quite frankly, and a lot of the kind of stuff that is going on, is racism. It’s white supremacy. It’s just that now, the Orange Man—AKA Agent Orange—has made it okay to come out openly, and openly tell his folks to “Stand down and stand by,” because we’re prepared to go to war if necessary.
So, that’s my view. And we can debate it—people may have a different perspective—but, you know, I stand on what I stand on and whatever.
So, it will be Biden we are pushing to sign the executive order—I don’t know who else would do it.
Howie Hawkins:
Yeah, I just want to say, as a Green, to some of the Greens who, at this point, they’re so mad at the Democratic Party for suppressing ballot access and supporting this mass murder in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, that… you know, it was said at one of the Stein rallies, their goal in Michigan is to defeat Harris.
And I think that doesn’t recognize that Trump is representing a virulent, violent racism. And the consequences of him are going to be much worse than Harris.
Now, I voted for Stein, but I also—for example, I put this in the chat in the past—my response to AOC and her rant against Jill Stein was, well, first of all, she was wrong. She campaigned for Greens in 2017. So it’s not like we weren’t running local candidates, which was one of her points.
The other thing I said is, you know, on the progressive spectrum, whether in this election you’re voting for Stein or for Harris, the people who are making that decision are not your worst enemies. And you shouldn’t save your, you know, biggest salvos for your closest allies.
Because, as Ron was pointing out on the reparations question, if we’re going to push that forward, we’ve got to work with the progressive Democrats.
And so, you know, my point at the end of that AOC thing was, you know, the door is open as far as I’m concerned, from the Greens, to working with AOC on whatever, you know, these progressive policies we’re advocating.
So, I don’t think we should be burning bridges to the progressives. We should be saying, “In this election, okay, we disagree on the tactic of a vote this time, but we agree on things like reparations, jobs for all, Medicare for all, and the other things.”
Ron Daniels:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let me just say that, you know, I mean, as you know, one of the reasons I ran as an independent candidate was to create what I call a “third force.”
I mean, when I went to CCR, you know, that kind of shifted because I had to devote my energy to, you know, to this institution, which at that particular point was in crisis, in many respects.
But it was really my reputation coming out of the Jackson campaign where I really did work hard to rainbow the Rainbow. I mean, I was not playing—it was not some pie-in-the-sky idea. I was trying to figure out how to create a system where all the parties could equitably be included and whatever.
But there are certain things that I often say is—I mean, there are systemic changes, and the Jackson campaign advocated some of these that have come into place—but we do need—and some people are now saying they don’t like it and whatever—but we do need what we used to call instant runoff voting, or we need what’s called ranked voting, because it does create a scenario where people don’t have to make this choice.
So, I never have really, you know, sort of said, “Well, so and so shouldn’t have run,” or whatever. I have a conviction about what I think is important.
But on the other hand, we have a problem structurally in the system that does not allow people to vote for who they really want to vote for, and then say, “Okay, well, if I don’t get that, I can go here.”
So, it doesn’t allow you to be what I call a pragmatic progressive, in that sense. I’m a pragmatic progressive, by the way, and I don’t use that as a dirty word. I think other people are more ideological, and that’s fine. And I like that, because in the ideological sense, I always want something at my feet that is clarifying what we should be working for.
The question always is, in the middle of a contradiction, how do you move forward? How do you make the steps that you need to take?
And I can say, in this particular situation, I don’t think things will ever quite be the same.
I must say, the people who came forward and are still out there on the front lines, they’re helping to, frankly, liberate American politics from APAC.
Because APAC has had almost like this death grip on American policy, in terms of what you could say and what you couldn’t—who you could support, who you couldn’t support.
It’s terrible.
And it’s no question about it—it’s an abomination, what’s happening.
I get sick when I see it happening, over and over and over and over again.
And so, we’ve got to stay together and keep pushing and keep pushing to fundamentally transform U.S. policy. Because, at the end of the day… I hear all these debates about… I mean, if the Palestinians don’t have a homeland, if they don’t have an address—and we fought for this in the Jackson campaign. I mean, I see Jim Zogby and people like… these are people we still stand… Reverend Jesse Jackson opened the door in a way—I mean, he put them on the front lines, not apologetically, not hiding—straight up.
And we need to keep the coalitions together.
And the other thing is, you know, but we’ve got people who are attacking all Jews, as if all Jews are responsible. They’re not.
There are many, many Jews who are coming out, who disagree with what’s happening in Gaza.
There are Jews inside of Israel who disagree.
And we need to ally with the more progressive forces in that regard, to fight for change.
And we’ve had more and more Jewish organizations in this country coming to the forefront than ever before, saying, “We do not agree.”
I mean, it’s to the point—and that’s the other thing, by the way. Ta-Nehisi Coates, man, that brother just came out, and he just, you know… I mean, he came out, and they’re taking him on now, because he’s just saying, “No, this is Jim Crow,” right?
And Jimmy Carter, for whatever people want to think of Jimmy Carter, you’ve got to remember, it was Jimmy Carter—who just turned 100 years old, and now he gets a break because he doesn’t take the same heat that some of us would take—but he took some heat because he said, “What’s happening in Israel is apartheid.”
It’s just like South Africa. People should not forget that—it was Jimmy Carter who said that, openly. And that’s what is happening in Israel, and it cannot stand—it will not stand.
People don’t remember—Howie, you may remember, and certainly in the Black Liberation Movement—there’s a movie called The Battle of Algiers.
The Battle of Algiers—it’s about the French and their struggle to suppress the liberation movement, the neocolonial movement, in Algiers.
And at one point, they thought they had completely liquidated it—that they had completely destroyed it. But at the end of the day, the tactics really created more anti-colonial folk. And it may have taken a period of time, but then you saw the rise and emergence of that anti-colonial forces that ultimately defeated the French.
So, there is no way in hell you can suppress and really bomb your way out of, kill your way out of, a scenario where the Palestinians are not going to have a homeland.
It must be.
And if it does not become, there will never be peace in the Middle East. And there will never be peace in the whole world. We’re all interconnected in this proposition. We cannot escape it.
Howie Hawkins:
So, Ron, I want to thank you for coming on. We’ve gone over our hour, but I think it was worth it.
Somebody mentioned in the chat that we should have Muriel Tillinghast on as a guest. I think that’s a great idea. I consider her one of my mentors—I’m kind of the younger generation that just behind the SNCC generation, and she was one of the people.
And I’ve been in touch with her regularly, so I’ll have to reach out to Muriel.
Ron Daniels:
There’s a whole rich story there, too. I lost track of Muriel. She is a wonderful, brilliant sister.
Howie Hawkins:
She supervised Jesse Jackson and Stokely Carmichael in the Mississippi Freedom Summer—that’s her legacy.
Her daughter passed recently, unexpectedly. I’ve been in touch with her. Anyway…
Ron Daniels:
Wow.
Howie Hawkins:
Yeah, I will get Muriel on here in the future.
Next week, we’re going to have Nadal Batari, who was on in, I think, March. If you remember, he is a Palestinian who grew up in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, participated in the Syrian uprising until he had to get the hell out of Dodge. He’s been working on human rights his whole adult life. So, we’re going to talk about what’s going on in the Middle East next week.
And then, after that, I’ll be in Georgia for their election in Ukraine, and I’ll be bringing people there to amplify their voices here. And then I’m going to be meeting with Greens and lefties in some Western European countries.
By the time I get back here in December, hopefully I have a little money left. Anyway, and I’ll be in good shape.
And then we’ll have Muriel on.
So, you know, stay tuned in the future.
And, oh, I wanted to mention that Ron mentioned Jimmy Carter and Mustafa Barghouti, who is the head of the Palestine National Initiative, one of the major figures in Palestinian politics, had a column about Jimmy Carter, his 100th birthday, and how he recognized how Israel had become an apartheid system.
And it was in Al Jazeera—Al Jazeera English, I think it was October 6th. That’s worth reading. So, if you get a chance, take a look at that.
So, thanks again, Ron. And maybe we should have you back because there’s a lot to talk about and catch up on.
Ron Daniels:
Yeah, well, I’m delighted to be with you. I guess the one thing—the final thing I will say is I’m still a proponent of the third force and independent politics.
And for that reason, I have great faith in Maurice Mitchell, the national director for the Working Families Party. I think they have some hope and promise.
As you recall, back in the day, we had about three or four different initiatives who were trying to create that independent path. And so now, the Working Families Party has brought its fusion proposition and its way of operating onto the scene.
So, anyway, I have a lot of love for Maurice Mitchell, as a young organizer and activist, and the Working Families Party.
Howie Hawkins:
Well, I won’t tell you about my experiences with them in New York State.
Ron Daniels:
I know, I know. There’s a future discussion. Right.
Howie Hawkins:
Do we continue?
Ron Daniels:
Yes.
Howie Hawkins:
Thanks again, Ron. And everybody, have a good week, and we’ll see you next week.
Ron Daniels:
Thank you. Be well.