Transcript
Into America
Uncounted Millions BONUS: Nikole Hannah-Jones & Michael Harriot
Trymaine Lee: Hey everyone, we’ve got a really special treat for you all. A bonus episode of our series, “Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations,” where we dug into the untold story of Gabriel Coakley, one of the only black people in the U.S. to ever receive reparations for slavery. For this episode, we took the show to a live audience at the famed 92nd Street Y in New York City for conversation and debate with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and creator of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and author and columnist at TheGrio, Michael Harriot.
We talked about the case for reparations today, who should or should not qualify for them, and what it might take for reparations legislation to finally break through. So, without further ado, here’s the show, recorded May 29th, 2024.
(APPLAUSE)
Nikole Hannah-Jones: Hey.
Lee: That’s a welcome right there.
Michael Harriot: Yeah.
Lee: That is a welcome. We can’t see you, but we can feel you. So, thank you very much. You know, as they say, you could be any number of places, but you’re here with us so we really appreciate it, you all. Let’s give it up for the audience one more time.
(APPLAUSE)
So welcome to this special live podcast taping of “Into America Presents, Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations.” If you haven’t listened yet, we tell the improbable story of Gabriel Coakley, a free black man who, around the time of the Civil War, secured his family’s freedom and then went on a mission for everything that was owed to them. It’s truly the greatest reparation story never told. And in the audience tonight, we have several descendants of Gabriel Coakley. Would you all mind standing up? Let’s give it up for them.
(APPLAUSE)
There we go. Now, one of the most amazing takeaways from this family’s story is this rare example of truly what could have been for black America had we been compensated after enslavement, had we been made whole. Things today would look much, much different. Yet the struggle to secure reparations has been long and daunting. So, tonight’s conversation, I’m glad to have Nikole and Michael, two really important voices, not just in black America, but America, to understand where we’ve been, who we are and where we’re going.
But the big takeaways I want to get to tonight are a few key ideas. What could have been, right, this idea that if we made whole, compensated some way, where would black America be? What is owed to black Americans? What forms should these reparations take? And who exactly is owed them? So, Nikole, let’s start with you.
Hannah-Jones: Okay.
Lee: Yeah, listen, we’ve done this a little before, but I sense a little something in you already. You’re ready to go.
Hannah-Jones: I’m ready.
Lee: So I guess my first question to you is, is why are we still having this conversation? But also what is your case for reparations? What, at this point in time, why are they necessary?
Hannah-Jones: Yeah. So, thanks everyone for coming out. Always glad to be in conversation with you all. I’ll answer the second part of that question first. The reason we’re still having this conversation is because black people have never received reparations for the period of slavery and the period of racial apartheid. So we’ve never been made whole.
Black people began fighting for reparations in the 1700s. And there’s never really been a period of time when black folks were not fighting for reparations, whether it be reparations from individual enslavers or whether it be reparations from the government. And why it’s necessary is that, one, we have to think about, you know, we’re often taught that slavery was a racist institution, but slavery was an economic institution.
The entire reason that slavery existed was to exploit the labor of African people to extract wealth from their labor and redistribute that wealth to white people in white institutions. So if you understand that slavery and the period, we call Jim Crow were systems of economic exploitation, then you understand why black Americans have close to zero wealth, why every indicator of well-being were on the bottom of those indicators of well-being.
And the last thing I’ll say is because we thought about slavery and Jim Crow as racist institutions, then when we get the passage of the civil rights legislation, the ‘64, ‘65, and ‘68 Civil Rights Act, then that allowed America to say, well, we’ve done the work, right? You all have the same rights of citizenship as everyone else. We have eliminated racism in the law.
But as Dr. King understood, the real work was the economic work, that once we received the rights we should have already had, it did nothing about our economic circumstances. And so understanding these systems, economic systems, then explains why since Dr. King’s death the racial wealth gap has remained unchanged. We have the same gap that we had in 1968. And while we can control income to a degree, there’s very little we can do to control our wealth.
Wealth is typically passed down. It’s inherited. You don’t accumulate it on your own. And black Americans have never had the opportunity to do that.
Lee: Michael, I’m going to ask you the same question. Yeah, let’s give it up. Let’s give it up.
(APPLAUSE)
Harriot: So everything that Nikole just said, plus, right, for America, right? Like, I think when we talk about reparations, we talk about it in terms of black people getting something. And like, even if that is the case, what we have to understand is that what reparations would be essentially, as an economist, is an economic stimulus for the entire country, right?
So one of the things I used to tell my students is that when you live in a nice neighborhood, right, and you have crime across town, and you condemn the schools across town in the black neighborhoods, and condemn that side of the town to poverty, whose windows do you think they’re going to bust out? Whose houses do you think they’re going to rob? They’re not going to come rob the poor people. And so in a sense, right, we’ve been trying to correct this.
I don’t know if it was a mistake, right, but this crime that America committed piecemeal for years when we know exactly how to fix it. We know what kind of economic stimulus would fix a lot of the poverty in this country, a lot of the economic disparities, the educational disparities. And so, aside from repairing the wrong that was done, right, and correcting what I like to call, right, black people made an economic investment and didn’t get the dividends back, right? But aside from that, it’s not just for black people.
If you don’t want your windows busted out, right, like a society is going to, when a society collapses, it is because of what it did to the people on the bottom of its hierarchy. And if you want to preserve what we call democracy, if we want to preserve what we call this, what, capitalism, right, you have to give people what they deserve and give them the money that America essentially stole that we invested.
Lee: I think it’s important to view this through the lens of not just, as both of you mentioned, a moral dilemma, a values dilemma, which you could argue they are both, but an economic dilemma. And so here’s just to make it stark how this shows up in everyday life. The average white household has more than a million dollars in wealth than the average black household, a gap of roughly 400,000 per person. That translates to a wealth gap in America of $16 trillion.
Education alone won’t fix this. Four years after graduating college, the average black adult has over $50,000 in debt, nearly twice that of white graduates. White college graduates have more than seven times the wealth of black college graduates. White households without college degrees have $150,000 more wealth than black college graduates. We all know it’s worse, but it actually gets worse.
That’s the thing about health and housing. The life expectancy is nearly five years shorter for black people compared to white people, 72.8 years compared to 77.5 years. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate among all racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Black adults are three times as likely to experience food insecurity than white adults, 12% compared to 4%. And that number is higher for black children.
Is there enough money? I know we put a number on there, $16 trillion. Does money solve these sores that have been festering and gnawing at us? Does money do that?
Harriot: Let’s see. That’s the answer, right?
Lee: Let’s give it a try. Give it a try.
Harriot: Right. We can’t un-segregate the neighborhoods. We can’t like re-educate all of the generations of people that had received an unequal education. We can’t, you know, give back to people’s lives who died because of medical discrimination. We can’t, you know, fix people’s hearts who have been condemned to eat because of poverty, right? But we got enough money, right?
A lot of the problems we can’t fix. But again, it stemmed from an economic problem and we know like money will address some of those things. And even if it doesn’t, right, anybody who’s speculating that it won’t, how do you know, because, like we ain’t never did it before. I want to see, right?
Lee: Stop playing. Cut the check. Stop playing and cut the check.
Harriot: And we know what we’re doing hasn’t worked, right? All of the stuff we threw at racism and white supremacy hasn’t worked. So let’s try repairing it.
Lee: Nikole?
Hannah-Jones: Yeah, I mean, obviously money alone cannot resolve many of these things that black people suffer from. For instance, the maternal mortality rate. When you control for income, wealth and education, black women still have that disparity in maternal mortality, infant mortality. So no, this is what I want to say. As I, you know, laid out in my essay, “What is Old,” that money, wealth will not resolve, you know, it won’t stop black people from getting killed by the police.
Black middle-class families actually live in poor neighborhoods than poor white families. Education, none of these things can mitigate a white supremacist country, right? That is foundational. But so much of what makes our lives harder is the lack of wealth, having no social safety net. You know, when you talked about student loans, black people are the most likely to invest in their children’s education, but they have the least money to invest.
So what that means is we’re the most likely to take out loans and we take out more loans. That’s lack of wealth. The inability to purchase a home in a neighborhood that matches your income, that’s lack of wealth. So, you know, like what you said, we should try it because here’s one thing we do know. All of you all would much rather face your life’s problems with wealth than without it.
Unknown: Hell yeah.
Lee: Not just yeah, but hell yeah.
(APPLAUSE)
Hannah-Jones: Right? No, it won’t fix anything. Money will never fix everything. But you would damn sure rather face those issues with some money in the bank, with some financial freedom, with the ability to not have to go in debt, not become homeless, not have to borrow every time you have a financial circumstance and to actually be able to invest in your future.
And, you know, it seems to me we only ask these sorts of questions and I know you’re not doing that. I know you’re asking the questions that other people ask of us when it comes to black folks, right? Like we have to have the perfect circumstance in order to get any sort of repair. I simply say, let’s just look at what happens in the law.
So medical malpractice, for instance. If my loved one goes to the hospital and the doctor does something that they should not have done and my loved one loses their life, there’s nothing you can do to bring my loved one back. But we understand in America that you have to pay for what you did, that you have to put a financial number on which you can’t, right? If you give me $10 million, $100 million, that would never replace what was taken from me. But the way that you have to try to make me whole is by putting a number on it and making that payment.
We understand that in every other circumstance, but when it comes to black folks, we suddenly get struck dumb, right? All the things that we understand in society no longer seem to work for us. So no, it never can cure. If we one day get reparations, that doesn’t mean that white folks can do what they tried to do with Obama, which is say, you know, a black man got elected so racism is over. Now black people can’t complain about racism.
It’s not a cure for racism. It is paying a debt that has been accrued and that is owed. And that’s all it does. All it does is clear your financial debt. It doesn’t alleviate any of the other work we have to do to eradicate the systems of racism that black people suffer from. But we’d rather suffer for them with money than without.
Lee: That’s right. That’s right. So to the hell yeah, right? To the hell yeah.
Unknown: Hell yeah.
Lee: Hell yeah. You say it so beautifully. I don’t know why somebody sounds wrong (ph). Hell yeah. But certainly some economic footing under the feet of black America will go a very long way because a lot of our issues are arising from that marginalization economically. But black America is very diverse. It’s very broad. How do we set a standard or what is your standard for who would qualify under this idea of reparations? What’s the standard? Who qualifies? How would you dole that out? Nikole?
Hannah-Jones: Why you got to start with me?
Lee: Because you’re the boss dog here. I’m going to start with you. Ladies first.
Hannah-Jones: So, okay. So I know we have some disagreement, I think, on this area. I do believe that reparations in the United States should go to people who descend from slavery, from slavery in the United States. Now, according to someone like the economist Sandy Darity, which I tend to agree with, as long as you can trace one ancestor back to the 1870 census, which all of us can do that. You may not be able to trace many of your ancestors, but all of us, most of us, nearly all of us, I don’t want to say as a journalist, 100%, but I say 99% of us can trace the ancestor back to the 1870 census and you will qualify for reparations.
Now, I understand that, you know, we do have a diverse black population in the United States, but I think part of the problem with the way that we’ve talked about repair, about reparations, about things like affirmative action, has been that we treat these as if they are racial programs.
And of course, the Supreme Court has said that we can’t use race even in a way that would benefit people who race has been used against them for 350 years. But I think of these as lineage, right? As programs that are trying to address the conditions of people who were racialized a certain way because their ancestors were enslaved in this country. So that would be my basic criteria. I’ll let you speak and then I’m going to come back.
Lee: Yeah.
Hannah-Jones: Then I’m going to come back. I don’t want to go first on this question, but that would be my basic criteria.
Harriot: So there is this perception that I’m against lineage-based reparations, but I am for any form of reparations. But I think that one, when we talk about reparations in this context of lineage, because we always assume that it is about slavery. One of the interesting things, because I am a Darity stan, but one of the things that I’ve always found interesting is that after slavery, when there were 4 million grown to 40 million black people in America, right, we paid taxes for schools that we couldn’t attend, for colleges that we couldn’t attend.
So, just because of the sheer number of people, right, the post-slavery debt might be as large as slavery, right. But when we talk about lineage, right, that conversation kind of restricts it to slavery, right? It doesn’t include, for instance, all of the people, the tens of thousands of people who descended from people who ran away, people who were descended.
For instance, like what is the difference between a person whose ancestors were enslaved in America and were freed, let’s say, in New York, right, before 1776, and someone who was enslaved in Jamaica? It’s the same white people enslaved them, the same English people, right? One lived in another country, but the white people who enslaved them were English people, right?
And then there’s so many small questions. What about the people in New Orleans territory, the Louisiana territories, right? And so the idea of lineage, right, and tracing it is just a white construct of family, right, that we have to tie these reparations to. But what would be, to me, my preference is to figure out a way, because the other thing that we never talk about is there are as many white people who have lineages tied to slavery as there are.
So you’re going to have to include some kind of racial construct in it to begin with, right? Because white people, there are people who are walking around and look white and acting white, and they have lineages tied to slavery too. So what, I mean, if you’re not going to use race, then what are you going to use, right?
Hannah-Jones: Okay, I got all the answers for this.
Lee: All the answers. Where do we start? Where do we begin?
Hannah-Jones: Okay, so beginning with the lineage. So when I say lineage to slavery, I’m not arguing that reparations are only for the period of slavery. What I’m arguing is that the systems that are built after slavery are also because we descended from slavery, right? Like if you go to the 13th Amendment, the 13th Amendment both abolishes slavery, but it also says that Congress has a duty to abolish what they call the incidents and badges of slavery.
It was understanding that people who had been racialized to justify slavery, that you could end the institution of slavery, but not the conditions that slavery placed upon people whose ancestors had been enslaved or who had been enslaved. Jim Crow is obviously a lineage of slavery, right?
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Racial apartheid, these are all lineages of slavery. So my father being born on a cotton plantation in apartheid Mississippi was not because he was black. It was because his ancestors had been enslaved.
So, yes, I do agree that reparations would not just be for slavery, but what I’m saying is that everything that those of us whose ancestors were enslaved have had to go through was because of slavery. That all of these systems, the black codes, the Jim Crow laws all rise because of that lineage. I agree that it’s a construct, but race in itself is a construct.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: And I actually think that by flattening it to just say reparations are for black people, it’s actually redefining the construct. Because then we’re saying that race is a real thing versus what we’re actually asking for is our ancestors were enslaved, we were placed under certain conditions, and the conditions we live in now are not because we are African, but because our ancestors were enslaved in this country. So I’m not making a racial argument.
When we include every person of African descent, we’re actually making a racial argument. Because we’re saying, if you came from Nigeria 20 years ago, or your ancestors were here 250 years ago, you’re the same. We’re not. Black Americans are actually the only black people who are not allowed to have an ethnicity. You can come here, you can be Nigerian-American, Jamaican-American, but we have to be the catch-all term. I would not.
We were enslaved by the same people, but I would not move to Nigeria and say, I should be part of your reparation’s effort. I would not move to Jamaica, right? And Cobra is fighting for reparations for the Caribbean. I would not move to Jamaica and say, well, the English enslaved my people too, so when you all get your reparations, I deserve that.
I think everyone, and I’m part of a global reparations movement that brings reparations activists from across the diaspora together, and we are all fighting for reparations, and we are supporting each other collectively, but we’re fighting for our individual reparations based on our individual experience and lineage.
Our reparations are to the United States government. Their reparations would be to the English government. And I think it’s okay to do that. It’s okay for us to fight for reparations on behalf of all people, but say that those of us whose ancestors were enslaved in this country are deserving of our own reparations. And if you move here from another country, reparations are not for generalized racism, okay?
They are for the singular atrocity and crime of slavery and racial apartheid in the United States, and the singular atrocity of slavery in the Caribbean, and colonialism and colonialism in Africa. So I think we can be both specific and pan-Africanist.
Lee: Right.
Hannah-Jones: So I’m for lineage-based, but also support all African people who are trying to get reparations. I think we’re stronger that way, but I think we actually weaken our case here when we want to just focus on racial reparations versus reparations for the particular crime. Hold on, I got a couple more points.
Lee: She said all the answers, brother, all of them.
Harriot: Okay.
Hannah-Jones: So about the white people with lineage, I don’t believe in a genetic test for reparations, right? So you couldn’t go take your little ancestry and me and come back with your 10% African ancestry and claim reparations. What Sandy Darity, and I tend to agree with him on many of these things, is that you have to have called yourself Black on your documents, on your official documents for at least 10 years before any reparations movement or plan begins.
So both, you have to trace your lineage, but you had to have identified on official documents as a Black person, right? So you can’t just come out the woodwork and now all of a sudden, you’re Black. And the last point I’ll make is because of the history of racism and our racist immigration laws, the vast majority of Black Americans who live in this country descend from slavery, more than 90%.
Most people who came, who are of African descent and don’t descend from slavery, came here post-1965. There’s a small population. You have folks like a Stokely Carmichael, right? You have Shirley Chisholm. You definitely have people who descend from immigrants. And I think we would have to have some carve out for folks who were here post-slavery, but also had to go through racial apartheid. So maybe there would be a degree of reparation that those folks would receive.
Lee: What would the cutoff be? Is there a cutoff line on the timeline there?
Hannah-Jones: I would go until the period of the Civil Rights Movement because anyone who moves to the United States post-1968 is not moving into a country where it is legal to racially discriminate against us by law. And I think our strongest case for reparations is that the government had an official policy of segregation and discrimination against Black Americans. It can’t just be that society’s racist. It has to be that there was an official policy. So I think we would cut it off about 1968. But even most —
Lee: That’s pretty far. That’s pretty far down the line.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah. But most Black folks, even if you have one branch of your family that’s immigrant, are also going to have typically one branch of your family that descends from American slavery. So either way, I think, you know, your family came from Louisiana. If we’re going back to 1700s or 1800s, this singular unit of family that was not interacting with –-
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: — other Black folks from other parts of the country, intermingling from other parts of the country, somebody in Louisiana in 1800s, before the Louisiana Purchase, obviously also has people in their line from South Carolina, from Georgia, from Alabama.
So I actually don’t think that that’s that big of an issue. I think the larger issue is us making it clear that what lineage means is that we are deserving of reparations because everything that those of us whose ancestors have been enslaved have gone through was because our ancestors were enslaved. And that’s why what I like about the California model is they’re saying, give us a Freedmen’s Bureau, right? Call us Freedmen. Give us our own ethnic identity.
I know I’m talking a lot. This is the last thing I’m going to say. Sorry. But I’ve tended to think about it the way we treat indigenous people, Native Americans, members of sovereign nations, right? They have an entire branch of the government called the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They get certain benefits. They have gotten some reparations, and they are treated differently not because of their race. This is not a racial designation. It’s a designation about being part of a sovereign nation.
I think we can do something similar with people who descend from slavery. Reenact the Freedmen’s Bureau and treat us differently, not because we’re African, but because of our lineage to slavery.
Lee: We’ve got more of this conversation right after this.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Harriot: So I want to be clear that my argument has never been like all black people should get reparations or that it should be race-based, right? But I think what we’re talking about is the cohort of people who would receive reparations would obviously include all people who descended from slavery and the people who, in my imagination, what I would say is like if your family arrived here in 1965, right? Well, you would get a decreased measure based on how many generations, right?
Hannah-Jones: About $10. I mean, 1965 is late.
Harriot: And then you would also —
Lee: Yeah (inaudible).
Harriot: Because if you’re talking about pure lineage, I don’t see a great way to do this without including some aspect of race. Just like Darity says in his book, that you still have to have a racial part of it where you have to have identified as Black for a few generations.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah.
Harriot: And exactly what you said about the Bureau of Indian Affairs, right? So that entire cohort, most of it would be lineage-based —
Hannah-Jones: Yes.
Harriot: Right? And I don’t think anybody argues that like all the black people, if you showed up in America in 2023, you should get reparations, right?
Hannah-Jones: There are people arguing that though. There are people who argue that.
Harriot: Seriously? Serious people?
Hannah-Jones: One of the things, and I have gotten into these debates with people who are my age or younger, who are first or second generation. So all of us are post-Civil Rights Act and who say, well, are you saying, you know, I’m not African-American because I just experienced racism? So they’re literally defining our experience, our culture, our ethnicity, and their reason for why they should receive reparations because they are Black.
Harriot: Well, I think that’s like there is a big natural disaster, right? Some of the people want to get some money because the hail dented their roof, right? But we’re the people whose homes were blown away.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah.
Harriot: Like, we are the reason FEMA came here, right? Not for the dented roof, right?
Hannah-Jones: Correct.
Harriot: Like, you want some money for your dented roofs because our homes were blown away. So we’re talking right now about the peoples whose homes were blown away.
Hannah-Jones: Right.
Harriot: And I always call them like, you know, I’m sure when I write to call them like Black Americans, descendents. There are people who call them American descendants of slaves, but Black Americans is a different group of people than just black people.
Hannah-Jones: That’s right.
Harriot: Right? It’s a different experience. It’s a different culture. I come from a culture, a Geechee Gullah culture that is as old as the European and the Greek culture. That’s older than white culture because white culture wasn’t invented until the 1700s. So the culture that I come from is as old as white people, right?
Hannah-Jones: Right.
Harriot: As old as the concept of white people is as old as the Black American Geechee Gullah culture. And that is a totally different thing, right? And just saying black people is a totally different thing. And I embrace all black people.
Hannah-Jones: Yes.
Harriot: But we all don’t deserve the same economic reparations.
Lee: But it sounds like you’re making space for those with the dented roofs by your generational non-lineage. It seems like you’re widening it.
Harriot: Well, people who came here, for instance, in 1952, they were discriminated against. Like for instance, right? So the Briggs family in South Carolina who Brown versus Board of Education, their money wasn’t just taken from them. It was taken from them and given to white people. Well, some of those people were immigrants that came here in the 1940s, right?
They deserve reparations, right? They might not be descendants of slaves, but they deserve reparations because of the government policy that took their wealth and handed it over to white people to build their generational wealth. And that’s one thing we don’t talk about when we talk about reparations is that it wasn’t just taken from black people, right? It was given to white people.
Like all of those schools, those big, beautiful colleges that they built, they couldn’t have been built if they weren’t taking the money from our labor and our intellectual property and our tax dollars and handing them to the people who built generational affluence because of that.
Hannah-Jones: I mean, listen, this whole like aspect of the conversation is the least of our concerns.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Right. Who will get it? We got to get to the getting it part.
Harriot: Right.
Unknown: Hell yeah.
Hannah-Jones: I do. I feel like so much of the conversation is a distraction of people being like, oh, how would we do it? Who would get it? You all do that to not talk about the real thing, which is how do we convince enough white Americans, which not saying the money’s coming from white Americans, it’s coming from the government, which we all pay into the government, right. But the people, even white Democrats, the majority of white Democrats are not in support of reparations.
They also do not think that we are owed anything. They think reparations are somehow unfair to them. And that’s another reason why I really think you have to make the lineage-based argument. But I think the issues, if we can get to the point of having to figure out who gets it, that would be a blessing.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Because we can’t even get to the point of it being a serious enough conversation about how much money can we pass a bill and can we get this started? And I think that is the political will, that’s the biggest issue that we have to deal with.
Harriot: But in a sense, though, that is the dilemma of black people in America, right.
Hannah-Jones: Always.
Harriot: Like it is our money that we’re talking about being given to us because white people have to agree to give it to us in a sense, right. Like the money that was taken from us, white people are going to have to agree to give it back. Right?
Hannah-Jones: I mean, yes, like we’re 13% of the population. The math is the math, right?
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: So we don’t have to convince a majority of white folks.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: We know that from the Obama coalition, right.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: But you have to convince a plurality of them.
Harriot: It’s not the people with the money, right. But the poor white people don’t realize that they’re going to benefit from living. And again, when you put it in the perspective of an economic stimulus, for instance, when COVID hit, all the white people in America understood like when you talk about who got COVID checks, not very many people, you know, got COVID checks. Millions of people got them, but the majority of people didn’t get them, but they understood that this is what was needed to get our country through an economic crisis. And part of our country has always been in an economic crisis.
Hannah-Jones: Permanent COVID conditions.
Harriot: Right. But they don’t understand that. Like I didn’t get a COVID check, but I benefited from people getting COVID checks. Like I could go to McDonald’s. I could go to a small business because I know that business is open because they got a COVID check, which enriches my community. Those tax dollars help build my school. I don’t have to pay for books and band uniforms because my community has that money. And that’s the cohort we need to convince, because they understand the concept.
They already understand that COVID shows them those checks that Donald Trump handed out before COVID, shows them the checks that George Bush did. Like every generation of white people understand stem economic stimulus, right. Like all they got to do, which is the hard part is, you know, black people getting a part.
Hannah-Jones: Well, so two quick things on that. One, I was just reading the article about the $380 million bridge that we built outside of Gaza to try to get food aid to Gaza that lasted for four days.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: So the idea that we can’t afford it is a lie.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: During the recession, we printed $4 trillion overnight. Didn’t bankrupt the country. In fact, save the economy, right. So we know that the money can be had and that the money will, as you say, go back into the economy, stimulate the economy. The research is clear. Black folks, despite the racist presumptions about us, actually spend our money the same way every other human being spends their money. We invest in businesses; we buy houses and we invest in our children’s education. That’s already been shown in the data.
But the other thing I think is important, and I made this argument in my essay. It doesn’t have to be either or. We have this mentality in this country that if you do something for black folks, that’s taking away something from other people. We can do reparations and also do universal basic income, universal health care, universal child care. We can lift white people and black people out of poverty because this is not an anti-poverty program. Reparations are not an anti-poverty program, okay.
Black folks who went to college with middle income also have close to zero wealth. That is because of plundering. That’s not anything that we can control. So I think we also have to speak about this and say reparations is the right thing to do, but I know all of us on this stage also support strong public financing, anti-poverty programs, universal programs.
We are a wealthy society that has the most inequality of all the Western democracies, right. That is a choice. When Jeff Bezos spends his money to go to the moon and thanks the Amazon worker, right, who’s making a poverty wage for making his dream possible.
Harriot: The audacity.
Hannah-Jones: The audacity. And doesn’t even see how ridiculous you fucking sound by doing that. That tells us that there is enough money for all of us. So we cannot allow the elite to pit poor white people, struggling working class white people against black Americans. We can and should be arguing for both. And I know we all agree with that.
Lee: But let me jump in really quick, because this is a great segue. You mentioned white folks and their feelings and this idea of fairness. But it actually goes deeper than that. I think the heart of this was revealed in some polling by expert Dr. Tatishe Nteta from UMass. So he polled a bunch of folks. He said over 60% of Americans generally oppose reparations. But here’s the dig here.
The main reason he found for the opposition, it’s not about the money. It’s not about Darity’s $16 trillion. It’s not about the question of even how to distribute the money or about who would qualify. It comes down to a fundamental idea. And this is in quotes because this is right from the polling, “of deservedness.”
Hannah-Jones: Yes.
Lee: For those opposed to reparations, the most common reason given was that descendants of enslaved people do not deserve reparations. It’s not even about fairness, about the deservedness. Twenty nine percent of those who opposed said they didn’t deserve it. How do we even rectify any of that in this conversation when white America, a majority of them who oppose this feel that we just don’t simply deserve it?
Harriot: See, this is why you’re such a great host, because this is like literally the stat that I was going to bring up. And that is the hurdle, right. That’s the obstacle, right. The racism in all of this, right. Like we could talk about the economics parts of it. We can talk about the legal parts of it, the historical parts of it. But at a point, you’re going to have to realize that the biggest obstacle to reparations is white people keep white peopling, right.
Like, all of the arguments we’ve made today have been logical, right. And the argument against it is because they niggas, right. Like that’s the argument. And I mean, it sounds blunt, but that is the only argument, right? Right. And that’s the hurdle that we have to overcome because there is no logical argument against it, just as there was no logical argument for just separate but equal.
There was no logical argument for Jim Crow. There was no logical argument for all of the stuff that America did that made us deserve reparations. There was no logical argument for it, and now we’re still facing that hurdle. And the problem is that we keep trying to ignore that the problem is white people that prevents this country from moving forward and not like the inability to pay or like how we’re going to get the money or we’re going to come up with a racial or lineage-based solution. Like the problem is the obstacle to all of this at the end of the day is the people who did the original crime are in charge of repairing it.
(APPLAUSE)
Hannah-Jones: Yeah. I mean, yes. So, I guess the only thing I would add to that is I became a journalist. I’m assuming you all became a journalist because we understand that if you are going to change policy, you have to change narrative first. So, I know it would be impossible to convince the majority of white Americans to do this. We know we don’t have to convince the majority. And if we actually take a lesson from the civil rights movement, you only have to convince a small majority in Congress. Now a super majority because Republicans did what they did, right.
So, like we will never get reparations by popular ballot. We know that. We didn’t get civil rights legislation through popular ballot. Some things had to happen in this country. Basically, the country had to be going up in flames. We had to be embarrassed on the international stage as the greatest democratizing force in the world was beating Black people bloody and killing Black people for trying to exercise the ballot to do what Derrick Bell said, right, to cause interest convergence, right. So we have to find a way because they’re not going to do it just because it’s the moral and right thing to do.
And in fact, many white Americans are convinced that we’ve already received reparations. They bring up welfare, right. They bring up the Great Society programs. They bring up affirmative action, none of which are obviously reparations programs, because I’m like, show me which one of them programs only black people got.
Harriot: Or that white people didn’t get the majority of that.
Hannah-Jones: But as you said, that’s logic. So I feel like my work is let me think of every argument that I know you had and I’m just going to refute it with data. So at some point, I just have to cleave off enough, right. You have to give enough people because I do have to believe I mean, we’re in an impossible predicament. This is what makes us different from all of the Back immigrants who come here from the Caribbean and come here from the continent is we are a 13 percent minority in the country that enslaved our ancestors.
Everything we’ve ever been able to achieve, we have had to guilt, embarrass or force enough white people to decide to join with us to achieve those things. That is demoralizing, but that is what we have to do. So, as storytellers, as journalists, we have to create the narrative that makes it possible to convince enough white Americans that it is in their own best interest to do so.
Now, we have not been able to do it thus far. I don’t know that we ever will, but it’s the fight that we’re engaged in. It’s a worthy fight. But man, I don’t know if it’s going to happen.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: We know that white Americans vote against, right. There’s a reason we have the stingiest social safety net of the Western world, right. We’re the only one of the Western democracies where whether you can go to the doctor or not depends on if your job gives you health care. We’re the only one that has no maternal or paternal health, you know, leave. We’re the most carceral nation. Like all of these things that make us exceptional is because of our history of slavery.
And white Americans have shown that they will oppose social programs for themselves that they need. Look at the lack of expanding Medicaid in the South, right. More poor white people than poor black people. If they think we’re going to benefit from it, they will hurt themselves to keep us from benefiting because, as you said, they think we’re undeserving. So how do we convince them of that? That whiteness is not actually their best interest because they believe that it is. I don’t know, but, you know, we have to try.
Harriot: Yeah, I think that interest convergence is like giving them no other choice, like your stuff going to burn down.
Hannah-Jones: Exactly.
Harriot: Like that’s what the civil rights movement did. That’s what the Civil War was. Again, all of the advances we made was not because white people gave them to us. It was because we forced —
Hannah-Jones: Forced them to, yeah.
Harriot: Not to give them to us. We took them, right. And I think part of exactly what you’re talking about, that narrative in explaining to America what will happen is like not just convincing them to do the right thing, but to convince them that it is going to happen. Are you going to wait until you have no other choice? Are you going to let your stuff catch on fire before you decide to buy or give out fire extinguishers? Right. And I think that is part of the narrative that we have to tell, too.
Hannah-Jones: Yes. I also do think, though, you know, it’s been this summer will be five years since the 1619 Project came out. And one thing that I know is so many folks, they just don’t know. They literally have no idea of what this country has done to black folks. They have no idea of the way that even after slavery, when we put our pennies together and build schools, build churches, build towns, how that wealth was systematically taken away, how our land was stolen. They just don’t know.
Harriot: They do not know.
Hannah-Jones: Right.
Harriot: That’s part of the narrative, too, right.
Hannah-Jones: Yes. So I do have to believe that there’s a certain segment where they’re just opposed because they don’t really understand why. You know, how many times have you heard, well, my ancestors came here from Ireland with nothing. They came here and became white. They had something, right.
Harriot: Yeah.
Hannah-Jones: But they’re saying that because they think the black experience has just been we were kind of discriminated against. Yeah, we were discriminated against a little worse than other people. But they have no idea what Ta-Nehisi calls of the plundering generation after generation after generation. And this is what makes our work so dangerous. It’s not because black folks are reading it, right. It’s because there’s white folks who are like, oh, my God, I never knew this.
Like Bob Iger, the head of Disney read my reparations piece and said, you have convinced me on reparations. The fucking head of Disney, right. Like because never in his life had he had to actually contemplate. They don’t live around us. They don’t learn our history. They have no idea. Like we as black folks don’t have any idea. I learn something new every day.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Of the depth of the depravity of what’s been done every day.
Lee: We all have the same education. We’re all engaging with the same —
Hannah-Jones: Right. Exactly. Even those of us who had a little better education still have no idea. And we’ve been studying this for decades. So we do have to believe that that some education can convince enough folks who are good hearted, who want to be moral, who want to do the right thing, is that most I don’t know.
But I think there’s enough who just don’t know and it’s our job to help them, to give them that narrative so they can feel good about that little pit in your stomach that makes you think it’s unfair. What’s unfair is the conditions that black people have to live in.
Harriot: And that’s what gives me hope, right, like the most frequent e-mail I get is from white people saying, hey, I didn’t even know this stuff was going on. I read your book —
Hannah-Jones: All the time, right.
Harriot: And that’s what gives us hope. And that’s what makes you keep going.
Lee: One thing before we turn to some audience questions, I do want to ask another thing. So we went through the case for reparations. We set a standard and then said it’s white people are white people, and then some niggas some niggas. That’s the bottom line. And hell, my man, hell yeah over here, right. But in terms of Congress, you mentioned Congress and you mentioned some movement there, right.
And so we know H.R. 40, John Conyers introduced that in 1989. It’s been introduced in every Congress since and failed ever since. And H.R. 40 is just to study reparations. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman have introduced new bills that would actually call for paying reparations. But there has been some momentum recently on the state level. You have in California Commission, New York Commission. What’s the best shot for reparation besides convincing a plurality of white folks and getting this Obama coalition together? Is it through the federal government or through the states?
Harriot: I don’t think the debt that it’s owed, I don’t think the states have enough resources to pay. The states now, in the south where those red states, they don’t have enough money to pay their state troopers. right. Like the deep south is broke, right. And they can’t write a check that won’t bounce like the government can. Like we can print money, right.
So the best shot is to appeal to the people who can print money like the federal government is the only person who can do that, right. I think legislation is the only way, right. Like we know the Supreme Court like you can’t come through an executive order. So the best shot is through legislation. How we get that? I don’t know.
Lee: Well.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah. I mean, I think the best shot is at the local and state level if you’re talking about probabilities. I agree, though. So one, I support every movement for reparations, like private corporations, but the courts basically made that almost impossible. City, state, federal, and I think every reparation movement that has a victory and gains momentum just makes it harder to deny us at the federal level.
But I don’t believe piecemeal reparations will not solve the problem. I don’t live in California, right. Most black people don’t live in these states. They have large black populations, but the fact that you may be able to get reparations in Illinois, but the folks who are living in Georgia because they’re under red governance will never have a chance feels very fundamentally unfair to me.
So, I think all of the movements, you know, California was the first state to pass the bill to have a reparations study commission. Their bill is actually moving, which is kind of shocking.
Lee: And creating laws. I mean, there are state legislators in California who are actually like introducing laws to pay reparations.
Hannah-Jones: Yeah. I mean, they’re moving. They had their study commission. They’ve made recommendations. It’s going through the Senate now. Like it’s moving. Illinois was the second state and now New York is the third state to establish a commission. So the fact that states are actually taking it seriously, I mean, you all know 10 years ago, this was a joke. People treated reparations as an illegitimate.
It was a laughingstock. No serious political candidates. News organizations would not cover it as a serious political issue. And we really do have to thank our brother Ta-Nehisi Coates for bringing reparations back to the national stage or bring it to the national stage as a legitimate political issue.
Lee: (inaudible)
(APPLAUSE)
Hannah-Jones: So never in our lifetime, our entire lifetime, has reparations been taken as this much of a serious political issue. We have never seen actual commissions by government established. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. But I think we are we are building a momentum. And if there is ever a period where it seemed the most likely that it could happen is now.
But it has to be federal. So, yes, local state. Let’s do all of that. But there has to be a federal bill. You cannot leave out millions of people who are suffering and who are deserving of this debt to be paid by a state bill. And like Michael said, you’re not going to be able to pay that debt.
Harriot: I just want to add one thing, and I know this is going to sound like pandering, but like the real best chance is projects like the 1619 Project, right? Because like if you teach the truth of history and students of the next generation understand it, then that is the best hope for changing this country, right. So that’s part of the reason why they lined up in opposition to just educating people about these kinds of issues, right.
It’s not just like an ideological difference, right. It is a threat to the order of the way this country has been run.
Lee: True that.
(APPLAUSE)
Lee: When we come back, some big questions from the audience.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Lee: So we have some good questions from the audience, and I love some news and information you could actually use. And so you kind of touched on this one a few minutes ago. But how do you answer the objection to reparations, quote, “I’d known slaves that happened years ago? If we could nutshell it for people who might be encountering folks who are going to throw it in their face when they bring up the idea of reparations.”
Harriot: Oh, I can answer that easy, right. My children are grown. I live in a town where my taxes and dollars go to the schools. Why do I got to pay for schools that my children don’t attend? Why do I got to pay for roads that I never drive down? Why do I got to pay for any kind of government service that I don’t use? That’s how a society works, right.
Like we accept that in every other part of a segment of society is that when black people are going to get some, right. But the reality is like most of the stuff the government pays for, you’re never going to use. You’re never going to get a bomb delivered to your house because you pay your taxes on time or a bulldozer or a load of gravel. That’s how society works.
Hannah-Jones: So I have a facetious answer and a serious answer. I’m going to start with the facetious answer. Whenever I get that, I always say one thing. Your ass did not sign the Declaration of Independence, but you claim that shit, right?
Harriot: Right.
(APPLAUSE)
Hannah-Jones: You want to pick and choose what part of America history you claim and which part you want to distance yourself from. I just think that’s ridiculous, right. You weren’t a signer, your ancestors, you’re not here all the time. My ancestors didn’t even come to after 1865. And yet you claim everything that came before that as your lineage and your legacy, you take pride in it. Well, you can’t just inherit the good things of a country. You also inherit its ills and its debt. And that is your obligation, whether your family came here in 1776 or your family got here yesterday.
But the other thing is when people say that, it makes it clear to me that they think that reparations is about an individual white person paying an individual black person. Reparations are not paid by white Americans. I know some of you all think you’re the only ones who pay taxes and fund our government. But reparations are paid by the collective. It is paid by the federal government. The federal government as an entity is the same federal government that in the 1700s and the 1800s codified slavery, nationalized slavery and protected slavery.
That is who pays the debt, not individuals. I don’t care if you own slaves or not. And frankly, you didn’t have to own slaves to profit from them. And we know this, right? Wall Street, the textile industry, the farmer in Iowa who was growing wheat and corn and sending it down to the southern plantation, the Irish laborer who’s an immigrant who worked in the textile mills.
Where do you think the cotton came from? You fed your family off the back of slavery, too. So we don’t need to get into parsing that. This was a national sin. It is a national debt.
Harriot: And I just want to add that statistically, as a percentage of income, the average black American pays more federal taxes than the average white American. So in a sense, black people would be paying more for reparations —
Hannah-Jones: Yeah, we’re paying our own reparations.
Harriot: — than the white people who didn’t own slaves.
Lee: So here’s another good question. Where reparations worked historically, how and why?
Hannah-Jones: I mean, we know our own country has paid reparations, right? Our country paid reparations to the Japanese for internment. Certain indigenous tribes have received reparations. And while this isn’t necessarily reparations, I mean, I also wrote about this. We actually pay Holocaust survivors. Which I’m fine with, because that’s the thing. Like, when folks think like, I don’t have a problem. Pay everybody.
You know, help people. If people need help, I think a good country helps people. So I don’t have any problem with the fact that we pay Holocaust survivors. But you do have to notice the irony that we didn’t commit that crime and that sin, but we won’t pay for black Americans.
Harriot: Right. Pensions for people who were veterans.
Hannah-Jones: That’s right.
Harriot: Right. People whose family members died in wars. That is reparations. The GI Bill is in a sense, a reparations project, right? Like, we understand how this stuff works.
Hannah-Jones: That’s right. Lawsuits.
Harriot: Like, they don’t call it —
Lee: We were also denied the GI Bill.
Hannah-Jones: You all seen those asbestos, right?
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Commercials, right? Call 1-800-TOP-DOG-LAW.
Lee: You watch a lot of late-night TV, I see.
Harriot: And although we rarely pay attention to, like, when you see anybody go to jail, right, when they’re sentenced to prison, they say, you know, three years in jail, we don’t pay attention to the $5,000 fine. That’s reparations to the victims. Like, they go to the victims of the crime. Now, we pay attention to the jail part, but not the reparations part.
Lee: This one is a comment, not a question, but it puts to mind the thoughts that a lot of black folks had after Obama was elected. There was great fear and concern that he would be assassinated because, you know, they knew white America could not stand this black man in office. And we see there was indeed a backlash. We will get reparations. And this is from Rhonda Hansen. We will get reparations. What I unfortunately anticipate is white supremacists will burn, bomb, or put underwater our success, their tradition of sabotage.
Harriot: Well, can you think of a period where that hasn’t happened anyway, right? Like, that ain’t the problem. Like, we ain’t scared of that, right? Yeah, we know they’re going to be mad, right? Like, I think we are accustomed to that, right? Like, they’re mad about Joe Biden because he worked for a black dude, right? So, that is not the concern. There’s definitely going to be backlash, but there’s always backlash. That’s cyclical, right?
Whenever black people make any progress, there is a subsequent backlash. And so I don’t think that would happen with reparations would be different from any other part in American history.
Hannah-Jones: I mean, we can’t have fear about these things, right? Like, what they’re going to do is what they’re going to do. But what we deserve is what we deserve. And the truth is, everything that we could face, we’re facing now, we’re just facing it with no wealth, right? More police murders last year than the year before the year before, and actually since they’ve been measuring, right? Close to zero wealth. Black children remain the most segregated children in the nation. Black people remain the most segregated people in the nation.
Double the unemployment rate of white Americans, no matter what the economy looks like. Die faster, die earlier. Everything that they could do, we’re already suffering from, but we’re suffering from with no money. So I just think we cannot be concerned about what they’re going to do in the fight for liberation. We have to fight for what we’re owed and what is just.
Unknown: Hell yeah.
Hannah-Jones: That one was a little different. He changed it up.
Lee: Got a little bass in there. So, this is an interesting one. And this is our final question from the audience. Fast forward 100 years, who today will deserve reparations in 100 years? Black people?
Harriot: Well, I don’t know.
Hannah-Jones: There won’t even be a United States in 100 years, unfortunately.
Harriot: And if it exists, white people, if they exist, will be the minority. Everybody will be some shade of beige or brown, right?
Hannah-Jones: You don’t believe that. You don’t believe that.
Harriot: But I don’t know.
Lee: Do you believe it? Do you believe that?
Harriot: In America?
Lee: Yeah.
Harriot: I think white people will be a minority. It won’t be —
Hannah-Jones: White people will be the largest racial group in a plurality, right?
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Because when we say white people be a minority, it is pretending as if all people of color are one group.
Harriot: Yeah.
Hannah-Jones: We’re turning minority from being a numerical, you know, from being about a numerical 50%, 51% to being about like a current permanent status. And the problem is because whiteness is a construct, it’s malleable.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: So whiteness can just expand.
Harriot: Right. That’s the problem is that —
Hannah-Jones: We’re saying always have done.
Harriot: I mean, you can write new rules for white people down on paper like they’ll just make Hispanics white. They’ll just make, you know, they’ll make new —
Hannah-Jones: I mean, many already are, right.
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: Hispanic is a made-up category like Cubans, Argentinians and a majority of Hispanics already self-identify as white. So whiteness just expands. That’s what happened when whiteness expanded to include Catholics, when whiteness expanded to include Italians and Greeks and Polish and Irish.
Well, one, the answer is the same people who deserve reparations today will be the people who deserve reparations a hundred years from now if we don’t receive it. But everything that we’re seeing in our society, right, January 6th, this polarization, all of a sudden, the patriotic political party saying they don’t believe in democracy because they think democracy is going to be determined by people who are not white, right. All of that is about a demographic fear.
And we know how dangerous folks get when they fear that they are losing demographic supremacy. All we have to do is look in the American South, where in many places white people were the minority —
Harriot: Right.
Hannah-Jones: — but they still ruled.
Harriot: That’s right. And if what the question was asking is like, will there ever be a point where white people deserve reparations? Yeah.
Lee: I think what the question is getting and someone actually said this to me over the weekend is like, if left to America’s own devices, would someone just have to be segregated? Would someone just have to be superior? That’s what it sounds like. It sounds like it’s getting to the point of, well, in a hundred years, there’d be someone else because our default position, no matter as humans, would be to segregate.
Harriot: We don’t have to theorize on that, right. Like we know like when it happened, like black people didn’t do it. Literally, whenever black people got power, they said, hey, a thumb for everybody, right. Like the American education system that we know today was created by black people in South Carolina in 1868.
Hannah-Jones: In the South.
Harriot: Right. Well, yeah, throughout the South, right. And it wasn’t like for them. They said, this is the way society should work, right. Like the South Carolina Land Commission, right. Like they said, hey, these people were traders. Let’s spread the wealth, take the land from the traders and use it to enrich the citizens. So I don’t know if there’s any evidence that like someone needs to be supreme. Like ain’t no supremacy except white supremacy.
Unknown: Right.
Lee: Right. This question, I said last one, but we got another good one. Near and dear to my heart as the father of a Girl Scout who recently got a gold award. So this is from two Girl Scouts. Yeah, big shout out to Nola.
(APPLAUSE)
Giving books to the shelter. We’re working on our Girl Scout gold award. We are asking our friends to ask their families to talk about their lineages. We do workshops on how to do their family tree. So we’ve talked about reparations. Now what? What are the next steps? Show us what we need to do, please. Nia and Maya. Thank you, Nia and Maya for the great question.
(APPLAUSE)
Lee: So what’s next? They’re already starting a conversation. They’re doing family trees and workshops. What more could these girls do to push the cause?
Harriot: I think, again, you know, it sounds simple, but the more you understand about the debt, about yourself, about your family, about the history, then it becomes clearer, right. Like the idea of reparations is not something like Nikole or me or Sandy Darity or organization came up with, or that’s been perpetuated throughout Black history, right. It’s like every generation, when they start learning, they say, wait, where our money at, right?
Like independently and separately. It’s not connected. All of these dots are not necessarily connected. When you learn the history, where you start is like learning about your history, about your family’s history, and then telling other people, right. Because once, you know, there’s the next question is self-evident, right. Like you say, these people don’t have their money.
Hannah-Jones: I don’t really have an answer. Because, you know, I don’t have an answer. One thing that that I always say is I became a journalist, so it’s my job to expose the problems and you all got to fix this shit.
Lee: Girl Scouts, word to the wise.
Hannah-Jones: You know, if people in my generation were going to resolve it, it would be resolved. So I just hope, you know, young folks, like you said, get your lesson, study up, sharpen your arguments, understand why it’s necessary, be able to articulate that. And then you guys will come up with your own strategy for organizing and moving it forward and hopefully, you know, we can support you and advise you. But I think the answers are always with young people. Social movements are led by young people. They always have been and they should continue to be.
Harriot: That’s right.
Hannah-Jones: That’s right.
Lee: Well, so first of all, I just want to thank Michael, Nikole, all of you in the audience.
(APPLAUSE)
But I also want to just thank the Coakley-Flatow family again. We wouldn’t be here without you. They opened their doors for us for about six or seven months. We were all in your business, talking to you every single week. But we thank you for allowing us to tell the magnificent story of your family and what is owed to us. So thank you again.
(APPLAUSE)
Lee: And that’s it, you all. We’ll see you all next time.
(APPLAUSE)
(MUSIC)
Thank you for tuning in to this special bonus episode of “Into America.” If you love this show, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now. Thanks again to the 92nd Street Y for hosting us. Special thanks to Ellie Fox, Sean Fogarty, and Christopher Black.
This episode of “Into America” was produced by Max Jacobs. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez. Bob Mallory is the sound engineer. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And I’m Trymaine Lee. Thanks again for joining us on “Uncounted Millions.”