- [Announcer] Flatland is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation and RSM.

- Hi, I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore, and welcome to "Flatland in Focus."

For this episode, we'll be talking about what reparations are and what they could look like here in Kansas City.

(upbeat music) The idea of paying reparations to Black Americans for the harms caused by slavery in the US has been a hotly debated topic even before the practice had even ended.

It's a complicated issue and one that brings with it many tough questions that advocates have been working to address for many years.

The city of Kansas City has recently joined that conversation by appointing a reparations commission to begin studying the harms caused not just by slavery, but by the history of racial discrimination up until the present and how the city has participated in that discrimination.

Kansas City is one of 11 communities across the nation that have decided to commit to this effort.

We wanted to start our program tonight by sharing a portion of the Independent Lens film, "The Big Payback," which follows Evanston, Illinois as it becomes the first city in the country to approve a reparations initiative.

- [Announcer] The City of Evanston now has pledged to pay out $10 million over the next 10 years.

- [Narrator] This is the first attempt at a publicly funded reparations program in US history.

- [Announcer] So now it's up to Evanston to decide how and to whom the money will be distributed.

(upbeat music) - It's been nonstop, more calls and emails in the last few days than I probably had in the last couple years really.

- Yeah, you'll be hearing from me shortly on the few emails and texts, and then I'll see you at 5:30.

- Okay, thank you.

- Awesome, no problem.

- Learning that local government is most responsive, and we're more nimble, and we can make impact quicker than federal government and thinking this is a local matter, and I pushed it relentlessly.

I was very, very stern in wanting it to happen in this calendar year, being the 400th year of Black resilience, that was important to me.

So I was not willing to compromise on any other format to get to this victory.

Time is of the essence, so with that said, let's just do the work at this point.

Solutions only hashtags.

- Yeah, we do.

- Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you all for being here.

We are here today because we have a lot of work to do.

We've done something really historic, and we have an opportunity to actually make tremendous impact in our community and be looked to as a model of what's possible in localities across the nation.

Via Evanston's budget, there is a reparation fund line item.

That's really exciting.

(audience applauding) - The question is what makes reparations reparations?

Certainly the whole issue of enslavement is what people tend to think about, but it is also for Jim Crow policies and racially exclusionary policies, policies that provided benefits for white people that we didn't get that in fact helped to develop white communities to the underdevelopment of Black communities.

- I want us to forever remember that there is no amount of money that they can pay us for what our people have endured.

The notion that comes out of our committee, ancestral wisdom about justice, not charity, and that's the distinction we're looking for in terms of public policy and what we're talking about when we talk about reparatory justice.

- When you use the term reparations in this context, a whole slew of categories, redlining, apartheid which was Jim Crow, segregation, slavery.

These were what were considered crimes against humanity, and how do you return the dignity back to a people whose dignity was eroded as a result of the crimes that were committed?

(upbeat music) - [Man] Well, we're going to go down to Fleetwood Jordan, and we're going to fill out an application for the housing restoration program for the first phase in reparations for Blacks in Evanston, and hopefully get some compensation for my mom.

(dramatic music) - Carmen can help you right over here.

- Hi.

- Hi.

- Do you have any documentation with you?

- Yeah, she got the closing and got the trustee.

- Do you have your driver's license with you?

(dramatic music) - I do.

- Or your state ID.

Okay, I'll take these things.

- I have a obituary.

- Okay.

- That has my mother's name listed in it.

So dad was here in 1947.

His Evanston senior year in high school.

- Okay.

- Yearbook, and there is.

- Nice.

- So it shows that he was a graduate of Foster School and Evanston Township High School.

- And you all are all set.

Good luck.

- Well, thank you much.

You're a scholar and a saint.

- No problem.

(people applauding) - Submitting, submitting.

(people applauding) - Good job.

- Okay.

- Excellent.

- Wonderful, good job.

- Thank you.

- Congratulations.

(dramatic music) - We are ready to receive about 50 leaders that have been working on local reparation initiatives in their communities.

Hey, Tina, has anyone showed up?

Oh, wow, great.

- The value of Evanston and the work of Robin Rue Simmons is one of those turning points because there is this pent up yearning for a concrete example that it can be done.

(dramatic music) Symbolically Evanston woke up the world.

So everyone, municipalities, University, I mean, is looking to Evanston, and the hope is that what we'll end up doing is creating a national network of groups.

- This conference will and should go down in history as the Evanston Conference.

It is a distinct honor to be representing the CARICOM Reparations Commission at this historical event.

- I bring you greetings from New Orleans, Louisiana.

- I am with World One Development in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of Black Wall Street.

- I'm from Los Angeles.

- Amherst, Massachusetts.

- I'm from Philadelphia.

- Omaha, Nebraska.

- [Robin] When I started this work, I simply was trying to repair some of the injury that had been done in my own community.

- The city of Tulsa.

- [Robin] I had no idea how big this whole local reparations movement would get.

- I'm Mayor Michael B. Hancock of Denver, Colorado.

- From Atlanta, Georgia.

- I'm a founding member of the Kansas City chapter of the National Black United Front.

- In 2020, we talked about reparations, but we didn't know how to go about doing it.

But one day I was looking at TV, and I saw this bad sister outta Evanston, Illinois.

She inspired me.

I said, if they can do it in Evanston, Illinois, why can't we do it in Detroit?

We're 85% Black.

- For me, this is the most important thing that we as a people should be focusing on in this moment.

Like this is our shot to address all the disparities in one, you know, one container.

- [Robin] This country says that it values liberty and justice for all and equity and inclusion and freedom.

- So San Francisco has a population of over 850,000.

- [Robin] That's not been the reality of Black America.

- [San Francisco Representative] Less than 6% of the population is African American.

- Recognizing the legal challenges that we know are coming up, we still need to be about the task of beginning to create a new narrative and a new legal framework.

- [Robin] I realize that now I'm a part of a movement, a national movement, one that has great momentum to finally grapple with the injury inflicted by slavery and the deep-seated racism that we endure today.

- Okay, we're back in the studio for the discussion portion of today's program, and I'd like to welcome to the table Mickey Dean, Founder of KC Reparations Coalition, Ester Holzendorf, Executive Director of Consolidated Social Services, Ajia Morris, CEO of the Greenline Initiative, and Professor Jason Glenn from the Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine at University of Kansas Medical Center.

As with many issues on this show, this topic is huge, and we can only cover so much of it on tonight's program.

However, we've done our best to provide many ways to learn more at flatlandshow.org.

You can watch the town hall event hosted by Nick Haines in American Public Square, as well as read our lead report on the topic from Mary Sanchez.

We are also hosting a Flatland follow up on Instagram, which invites our audience to join the conversation and ask questions of our guests directly.

And so with that I wanna jump right into this subject, and I'll throw out a question for everybody.

What are reparations and what aren't they?

Ajia.

- Let's just say repayment for past injustices, and there are different types of reparations.

It can be based on lineage or it could be based on harm directly done to you.

- Okay, fair enough.

What say you, Professor Glenn?

- I would just broaden that a little bit and talk about the existing current systemic racism, the politics of the undeserving poor that continue to plague our nation and are the underpinnings of every political decision that we make.

And so when we talk about reparations, it's not just about things that have happened in the past.

They're about legacies that continue to impact and oppress Black communities to this day.

- Well, the root word is repair.

And so basically when we talk about reparations, we're talking about repairing the damage that's been done to a people.

In our case, we're talking about Black people.

For all of the suffering that we've done, and as everybody has said, not only just for this child of slavery, but also for all of the vestiges of slavery.

Also, it includes guarantees of cessation.

That means that whatever policies that have been in place that have caused the oppression of Black people, all of that has to be ceased.

So we're talking about policy change as well as compensation.

What's not reparations basically is normal public policy.

Going by normal policy, it could take over 200 years for the wealth gap between Black and white to equalize, and most of us don't have 200 years, so normal policy will not get us there.

There has to be some massive intervention, and the only intervention that we know of that can do that is reparations.

- Okay, so let's talk about then what the difference is, now that we understand what reparations are and are not.

What's the difference between lineage and harm based reparations?

Cause I think those are two different things.

- I think a lot of people, when they think of lineage based reparations, they're thinking that there was a past harm 200 years ago that ended 200 years ago.

They're not thinking of systemic racism and the ways that it has continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation.

And you have to take that in.

This is what Mr. Dean was talking about a second ago when he was talking about the continued policies that have reverberated from that history.

So that history is still with us.

We are still living it.

- It's almost as if what Professor Glenn is saying Ajia, is that there are still roots, vestiges of the harm that was caused that are still very much alive and well today.

But I'm not sure a lot of people actually see it that way.

Do you find that to be true?

- Yes, absolutely.

For instance, I focus on home ownership in my professional career.

What I do with the Greenline Initiative is turn renters into homeowners using as unbiased a system as possible because for instance, credit scores are inherently racist.

It uses historical data, which is racist and artificial information, which has racial biases as well.

And so we use more realistic underwriting terms to make sure that our community is able to afford a home because home ownership is one of the single largest ways to create generational wealth.

- Has the understanding from the public gotten better or worse?

Is it more, are people more receptive now because there's some data that suggests that maybe only 28% of folk feel like it is justified, and they are, most people are opposed to like a cash payment.

- I think reparations is something that some people are never gonna agree with, and I think we just have to face that.

- [Rashaan] In general or for Black folk?

- I think probably in general.

The residual effects of what happened to a people still exist because I have to tell my grandsons how to act and how not to act.

If they're driving a car and they get pulled over by the police, keep your hands out where they can be seen and all of that.

Okay?

We're the only people that have to do the stuff that we have to do just to survive.

- The issue with the lineage versus harm based, the reason that's important is because all of these conditions, and this is being played out in California right now, they're gonna have to determine eligibility, and this comes up when the issue becomes who's eligible for reparations.

And so that's why, and unfortunately, there's, it's a real divisive element in our reparations movement right now.

And people who say that it only be those who can trace their lineage back to slavery.

Others who say like, I think what I've been hearing today is that the damages from slavery didn't end after the Emancipation Proclamation.

So that's why that's an important question.

It's not just a theoretical question, but that's something that we're gonna have to face in Kansas City when we start talking about eligibility.

The other thing I want to go back to is the changes that we see today with regard to reparations.

I'm a member of the National Black United Front.

We were founded in 1980, and one of our principles of unity was support for Black reparations.

So, and I can tell you that when we would talk about reparations to people just 10 years ago, you know, people would sort of give you the side eye.

They would say, yeah, maybe so, but it'll never happen, you know, and what we're seeing now, particularly with what happened in Evanston, where they actually have a somewhat successful reparations program, we see a lot of the theological groups like Georgetown for example, they recognize that it was founded using slave labor, and so now they're trying to look for descendants of those people to pay reparations.

There's some other, I think the Presbyterians are doing something similar.

So what we're seeing, we're seeing cracks in the wall.

And I think now people really believe that this is something that can happen.

It's still a tough struggle.

- Well, it raises a question for me, Jason Glenn, about when we talk about these vestiges and changing of attitudes over time, it would be impossible.

Ajia mentioned housing, of course, and of course there's a tremendous very bad legacy around that, but there's also another very difficult legacy, and it revolves around healthcare.

You are at a university that's got a major hospital system, and I'm sure you studied this a lot in your work.

What are you seeing or how is this issue impacting your work?

- Let me answer that and come around.

- [Rashaan] Sure.

- You know, when we talk about policies that are still active today, property tax based school funding for K through 12, that's one of the ways that public schools are kept fundamentally unequal, right?

When we talk about policing and criminal justice policies, for instance, the war on drugs, which was a policy directly designed to massively incarcerate Black people, right?

When we talk about redlining, Ajia mentioned greenlining.

This is trying to repair, right, the legacies of redlining.

A federal policy designed not to enable Black people to get mortgages for owning homes and to keep Black people out of certain neighborhoods, right?

That legacy of redlining, also the legacy of racial covenants in mortgages, which was pioneered by Kansas City's own JC Nichols, right, in the creation of the country club district.

All of these things, it even comes down to why we don't have universal healthcare in the United States.

When we look at all affluent countries across the world, they have universal healthcare because they have a politics of solidarity.

And we don't have it here because we have this politics of the undeserving poor, which is code for how do we punish lazy Black people and make sure they don't get something that they don't deserve.

- [Rashaan] Okay, so we're.

- Those are the issues that continue today.

- But we're seeing this in housing, healthcare, then Ester, also in education.

- Education is something that we hold near and dear to our hearts, okay?

I'm from the era when we went to segregated schools.

I'm from Oklahoma.

There was no school in Oklahoma that I could go to to become a nurse.

That's how I ended up in Kansas City.

My grandparents raised me, but when my grandparents got old and needed me, I wasn't in Oklahoma, I was in Kansas City cause I got married, started a family, I lived here.

It broke up family.

Trying to get a decent education to get a decent job to live a decent life, I had to leave my family, leave my home.

So education to me, it should be affordable, it should be easily accessible.

Why did I have to pass by three or four schools to go to the Toussaint L'Ouverture School in McAllister, Oklahoma?

Cause that's the only school we could go to.

- Our goal is not to editorialize on this show.

We want to hear from you the experts and get real first person accounts from individuals who have lived experience.

But it does make me think, if I were a viewer watching this show, and perhaps I am a non-black person, I don't have the context or the lived experience that any of you have.

If you can imagine for a moment, Mickey, what would you say to me if I ask, what does that have to do with me?

I didn't own slaves.

My grand pappy, my grand pappy's grand Pappy didn't own slaves.

I'm a nice guy.

I showed up at the Black Lives Matter march.

Why am I paying for this?

- I think they really have to understand that for 400 years in this country, white people have had advantages that black people have not had.

It started all the way going back to, you can go back to the Homestead Act, which was in 1862, where 160 acres were given to white families as they wanted to move native people off the land.

Black people didn't get that.

You can go back to the New Deal.

Most of the New Deal policies, for example, the GI Bill, I think that was what really gave a lot of white families the opportunity to create wealth because they were able to get loans to buy homes.

They were able to get loans to go to college.

I think 2% of Black veterans got that.

The Social Security Act was deliberately designed to not cover agricultural workers and domestic, which was 80% of the labor force of Black people in the South.

So I think what white people understand is that maybe they didn't own slaves, and of course we're not slaves.

But what, the reason that the situation exists today is because of, as everybody's been saying, those vestiges of slavery.

As long as you have one large segment of society that's oppressed, it negatively affects the whole of society.

White people don't understand that by raising up the status of black people, it helps the entire country.

- Do you think that most people understand that there's a difference between personal profit and accrued benefit?

In other words, maybe you didn't personally profit from this thing, but you are the beneficiaries.

That's what I hear all of you all collectively saying, especially you Mickey, that there's a crude benefit that has come to you.

Do you think most people understand that?

And if they don't, how do we get them?

How do you and your work get them to understand that?

- Like it's a concept that you can understand.

Most people do not, and a vast majority of them choose not to because that would be to recognize their privilege.

This boils down to white, the white privilege.

You have the New Deal and everything that Mickey listed that benefited white families.

Reparations would repair the Black community and get them on par.

Racial equity is the way, as Mickey said, to uplift the entire community.

So you can educate until you're blue in the face, I found.

But some people would, are going to remain willfully ignorant.

For those that you can change, I do believe it's worth the efforts because our allies are the ones with the resources.

Our allies are in the majority and making the policies.

Our allies will be the ones that vote on the suggestions that we make on the reparations committee from the reparations commission.

And so by strengthening the people, the network that you have outside of your immediate group that's fighting for reparations.

Reparations now by the way, you need to get your allies, your sponsors, and your champions.

And I think that we are doing that and can further, can cast a wider net if we further educate on the difference between.

- How can we get basic everyday Americans to understand the idea, right, that they are inheritors of this privilege, right?

- [Rashaan] Yes.

- We live in stolen, in a stolen house built with stolen enslaved labor.

It is the displacement and genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people that made the conditions that make the United States possible.

And without that, none of us are here, and we have never grappled with that as a nation.

What we've done is continued to enact policies that push that issue under the rug.

Mass incarceration is one of those policies.

It is a direct outgrowth of slavery.

What we started doing directly after the Emancipation Proclamation was we had these slave convict lease system laws, ways to criminalize Black people to put them in prison.

- Slavery by another name.

- Slavery by another name, right?

And this, just go ahead and read the 13th Amendment, that slavery was not outlawed in the United States.

The terms were only changed where you were legally enslaveable, if you were duly convicted as a crime.

And we used that clause to enslave thousands upon thousands of black people directly after the Emancipation Proclamation.

And it grew into millions upon millions of Black people.

And that continues to this day.

There are some states, particularly southern states, have always had, at least 50% of their population has been Black people.

And that's always been the case.

- The question that I have for you, Mickey, is what could reparations on a city-wide level actually look like in Kansas City?

- Well, I think the major benefit, and one of the outcomes that we'll be looking for is is what we're doing closing the wealth gap?

This is a tremendous wealth gap between Black and white in Kansas City.

That wealth gap really causes a lot of the other problems that we have.

You know, the crime in the community, the lack of proper education.

So one of the things that I'll be looking for is to see whether the proposals that come forward from the commission play a role in closing that wealth gap.

So that's one of the main things.

- And I think it just comes down to people taking a look at the situation, how it came to be the way it is, and just admit to the wrongdoing, just admit it was wrong.

I think that's the starting point, for the United States of American, for Kansas City.

Just admit it was wrong.

- Jason Glenn, what do you say?

- If and when the American Empire comes to an end, the cause of death written on the death certificate will be systemic racism.

Systemic racism is getting in the way of us solving all the major challenges before us, whether we're talking about climate change, whether we're talking about housing, whether we're talking about healthcare.

If we don't tackle this as a nation, it's all over.

- Ajia, you've heard from your co-panelists, and I know you're not here speaking for the commission, and you don't have to, but just personally, either for yourself or for the Greenline Initiative, what do you feel would be the collective good or what might that look like in Kansas City?

- For me, well, first I'd like to recognize and acknowledge I'm sitting at this table with three, four greats including yourself.

- [Rashaan] Well, thank you.

- And I just feel incredibly honored and privileged for that.

But for me, what it would look like for me personally, not as a reparations commissioner, everyone, but what that looks like for me is uplifting those who have the least.

At the very least, the policies, the requests should work towards closing the racial wealth gap, as Mickey said, but empowering those who have the least because you get the greatest gain from it.

- Well, that's where we wrap up today's conversation for this episode of "Flatland in Focus."

So you've been listening to Mickey Dean, founder of KC Reparations Coalition, Ester Holzendorf, Executive Director of Consolidated Social Services, Ajia Morris, CEO of the Greenline Initiative, and Jason Glenn, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

You can find so much more on this topic about reparations at our website, flatlandshow.org, and on our Instagram for the Flatland Follow Up airing directly after the show.

This has been "Flatland in Focus."

I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore, and as always, thank you for the pleasure of your time.

- [Announcer] Flatland is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation and RSM.

(upbeat music)