Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 57
Giving Our Legends Their Flowers: A Conversation with Dr. Mary Frances Berry
Happy Tuesday!
We’re back after a little two-week hiatus and hope you are spending the last days of 2021 reflecting on everything that has happened this year while also finding moments to rest and relax.
Since our last edition, we’ve lost the great minds of bell hooks and Desmond Tutu. The morning bell hooks passed away, I talked to Virginia Vigliar, an editor for The Tilt, about an upcoming piece that I hope to write that details the distinction between anti-racist and pro-Black. I told Virginia that it was bell hooks and her thoughts about loving Blackness that inspired me to write the piece.
In Black Looks, hooks wrote that “loving Blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and this creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim Black life.”
To hooks, the act of loving Black people, and all that we encompass, was an act of organizing. Could we then disrupt our current culture built on “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal” values through this act of loving Blackness? What does loving Blackness look like? Feel like? All things I hope to explore in the piece.
A few hours after I finished the call with Virginia, the news broke that she had passed. I can only hope to capture the essence of her thoughts about love and Blackness in the piece and I’ll be forever grateful for the knowledge she imparted to me.
It was also a painful reminder that we have to give our legends their flowers while they are still here.
So, today’s Hot Takes section is an interview that I have been sitting on for a few months with someone who can only be described as a living legend.
Dr. Mary Frances Berry’s name should sit alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Stokely Carmichael. She is a scholar, author, and activist, with one of the most storied careers of any American I’ve ever come across.
She is the author of 13 books, the first Black woman to serve as a University provost, the first Black woman to head a major research university, successfully sued President Reagan to retain her seat on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and was a prominent force in the anti-apartheid movement.
Currently, she is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, a position she’s held since 1987.
She very graciously took some time out of her day to speak with me — her second interview with someone named Trevor (she was featured on the Daily Show back in January 2020), and as you can see in the interview with Trevor Noah, she is as intelligent as she is funny.
We talked about reparations, but so much more than that. We discussed sports, literature, history, and her relationships with some iconic civil rights figures. She asked me about my opinion on various subjects and gave me some feedback and advice about my ideas. I can only imagine how great of a professor she is and how many students were made better after passing through her classroom.
This one interview can not do justice to her incredible career and I hope to someday sit down with her longer. Head to the Hot Takes section for the full interview, and please join me in giving Dr. Mary Frances Berry the flowers she so incredibly deserves.
Here’s some reparations-related news from the past two weeks that you may want to check out:
This NBC News article puts the movement for reparations for Black Americans in the context of the global struggle for reparations.
This Washington Post piece breaks down why Christmas time was often the best time for enslaved people to escape.
Unsurprisingly, the FBI infiltrated protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, according to an investigation by the New York Times.
Tulsa looks to start a public-engagement period to discuss reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre according to Tulsa World.
This WIRED story is super interesting. It covers a new term coined by researchers earlier this year called “algorithmic reparation,” which the authors describe as “combining intersectionality and reparative practices with the goal of recognizing and rectifying structural inequality.”
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
NBC: Calls for reparations are as old as emancipation. Will global powers finally listen?
Washington Post: Why Christmas was the best time of year to escape slavery
New York Times: The F.B.I. Deployed Surveillance Teams Inside Portland Protests
Wired: A Move for 'Algorithmic Reparation' Calls for Racial Justice in A.I.
USA Today: How a rabbi and an evangelical pastor are fighting white supremacy together
Harvard Political Review: A Debt Owed: The Case for Reparations in the Wake of COVID-19
NPR: Home prices are up. For Black families, is selling Grandma's house the right choice?
Newsweek: The Obsession With the Black/White Wealth Gap Protects the Elites (T.W.: falsehoods, misperceptions)
Black Wall Street Times: STUDY: FORGIVING STUDENT LOAN DEBT WOULD INCREASE BLACK WEALTH
Forbes: Are Major Financiers Missing A Racial Justice Movement For A Moment Of Goodwill?
Politico: Top DeSantis official embraced critical race theory in dissertation
USA Today: White supremacist threat remains, but experts see hope in combatting online extremism
Newsweek: Timber Company Gives 125 Acres Back to Tribe for Free, Citing George Floyd Protests
Politico: 70 Years Ago Black Activists Accused the U.S. of Genocide. They Should Have Been Taken Seriously.
ABC News: Racial reckoning turns focus to roadside historical markers
USA Today: Black teens, youth more likely to be killed after incarceration, study finds
USA Today: Where's Antifa been this year? Anti-fascist groups stepped away from street protests, not activism
Regional News
The Hill: FBI infiltrated racial justice protests in Portland: report
L.A. Times: Santa Monica’s message to people evicted long ago for the 10 Freeway: Come home
NBC: ACLU accuses school of failing to protect Black student
Post News Group: Rev. Amos Brown Brings Wisdom, Guidance to Cal’s Reparations Task Force
YES! Magazine: California Forms a State-Level Reparations Task Force
Star Tribune: St. Paul's Bush Foundation awarding $100 million to narrow racial wealth gaps
Fox 9: MLK NOW 2022 aims to bring people together to find solutions to close racial wealth gap
Des Moines Register: Teachers say critical race theory laws are cutting short classroom conversations
CBS 2: March To Deliver NYC Racial Justice Commission’s Ballot Proposals To City Clerk’s Office
International News
The New Republic: The Case for Reparations for Afghanistan
Rudaw: Iraq completes fifty-two billion dollar reparations to Kuwait
Bloomberg: Gambia Commission Recommends Ex-dictator Jammeh Face Trial
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: I’m excited and honored to speak with you. I want to kick it off by you telling me a bit about growing up in Tennessee, an overview of your career, and some of the accomplishments you’re most proud of.
Dr. Berry: Well, I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, which is much changed now; it doesn’t even look like it did when I was a kid. I was poor, but you know, a lot of us were poor when we were kids and managed to survive all of that, and there have been things written about that so that I won’t go into the details, but it was hard.
I met excellent teachers, and in every school I went to there was at least one teacher who could see through my facade of poverty and say to me ‘you’re brilliant,’ or as my high school teacher, who became my best friend for the rest of my life, would say ‘you’re a diamond in the rough,’ so I’m going to see to it that your light shines.
I loved to read, and I loved history because she (Mrs. Hawkins) was a history teacher. She told me not to major in History because I’d starve to death, and instead to become a scientist and major in chemistry, so that’s what I did.
I went to Howard, and after doing all of the math and science courses, though, I decided to major in philosophy. It was an exciting time because among my little group of philosophy majors were people like Stokely Carmichael and Courtland Cox, many of the people who went to the South and founded SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).
Then, I went to the University of Michigan, where I decided to major in History because I thought if I studied it now, Mrs. Hawkins would never know. I got my Ph.D. and then decided to study the history of the law in the United States and our legal system and earned my law degree. I’ve taught at various universities over the years, most recently the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.
I have written many books, the first of which was called Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America, which did very well, and I published it first in 1971 and has been reissued since then. Recently, it started to sell very well again because Black resistance is in vogue.
I’ve also been in politics. For the Carter administration, I ran federal education programs and was chancellor at the University of Colorado before that and the first Black woman to head a major research university. Then, I was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, where I became a thorn in the side of various malefactors and then chaired the Commission for quite a while.
I also was one of the founders of the Free South Africa Movement, which developed all of the protests in this country to help end apartheid and get the sanctions bill passed in Congress, with Randall Robinson and Walter Fauntroy, and all other types of people all around the country.
So, I’ve written 13 books, the most recent of which is titled, ‘History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded In Challenging Times,’ which is about how progressive movements have made progress even in tough times. I explain how it happened and how you can do it too.
And, here I am.
Now, I’m working on something and trying to add to the reparations debate in similar ways that you’re doing. I’m working on something around post-abolition experiences of Black youth to see what happened to them up to the 20th century.
Right now, in the reparations debate, one of the things that I think needs to be added is some detail around the lack of human potential that Black people had writ large because they had no opportunity after slavery and in concrete terms.
Trevor: That’s amazing. You touched on a lot. Let’s round back to college and Stokely Carmichael. What’s one thing people might not know about him from your perspective?
Dr. Berry: That he was a philosophy major and so a lot of the stuff he talked about in his speeches, and when they interacted with people, didn’t just come from his visceral reaction to racism or his natural flair for speaking, but from his studying of philosophy and the theory and logic of all of these things. So that is something that I don’t think people would ever know about him.
Trevor: I’m also wondering what you learned in the fight for freedom in South Africa that you’re bringing into the reparations fight here in the United States?
Dr. Berry: What I learned, and it’s in a whole chapter of History Teaches us to Resist, is that you can have a successful Black-led movement that can change policy, and influence other people, but it’s a lot of work. Hard work.
We met for a year and a half every morning in the same house I’m sitting in right now to discuss who was going to get arrested that day, what we were going to do, how we were going to do it, and I was teaching at the same time, so I’d go off and teach and then come back to plan.
One of the things that I learned that I think we should all remember is that in South Africa, the majority of the population was always Black, but that doesn’t trump white supremacy. If outnumbering white people were the solution, then South Africa would have never had apartheid to begin with. So, we have to understand that there is something more to it — you have to think about policy and work with whoever you can work with to try and get change done.
Another thing.
You can’t in any movement, keep doing the same thing over and over again, because the media will get bored with you if you keep doing the same thing. So you have to find ways to emphasize your point and symbolize your struggle. In the Free South Africa Movement, we protested every day, and people got arrested, and we’d either have big numbers of people or celebrities. Michael Jackson, Paul Newman, Senators, House members, people who you might not think would come out, and the press would come to see. Rosa Parks came on the anniversary of her Montgomery boycott all of those years later in 1984, and it was the first time she had gotten arrested for any protest since Montgomery. She spoke, which was unusual because people didn’t usually let her speak.
Trevor: The last part you touched on is what my new job is all about. As the Director of Narrative Change, I’d love to get someone like LeBron James or Jalen Rose to introduce the topic of reparations to their audience and uplift affirmative narratives that change how people think about the issue. So, in a lot of ways, we’re standing on the shoulders of people like you who’ve done this before.
Dr. Berry: Yes, and you should read History Teaches us to Resist because it talks about the disability rights movement that was successful and other movements. We’re talking about product placement in a way — placing your idea into the messaging of the people who are already highly visible are saying or doing.
It’s like a movie where the place is like cigarettes, and they are placing it.
What you are doing is placing the reparations message into this, and the message has to be simple. Of course, you can use complicated messages to promote opposition, which will create conflict and heightened visibility, but that won’t get anything done.
Like what they did with CRT.
But what you want to do is have a simple message so that people come to you.
Trevor: How has the conversation shifted time in academia and in the political space? Are you surprised at where it is today? Can you predict if the U.S. will ever pass a reparations bill?
Dr. Berry: I don’t like to say never, but I don’t think it’ll be in my lifetime. It also depends on Black people whether or not a bill is passed. If Black people are in solidarity about the need for reparations and keep pushing it, the political system will respond. How weak or strong the bill will be is a different question.
If we don’t have solidarity or if we still have as many people saying things like ‘we don’t need reparations,’ then it’s easy not to get them. The other thing is that Black people are seduced, in my opinion, into thinking that voting is the end all be all of our problems. So, as a result, ‘Black Lives Matter lost momentum in this last election, despite George Floyd.
There’s nothing wrong with voting, but to give up the momentum in the struggle, where you are doing direct action, because people tell us that we need to pay attention to voting. Still, we’ve been putting a lot of our attention and energy into voting for years, and we haven’t gotten reparations, police reform, etc., so maybe we should keep putting our energy into the direct action work.
Corretta and I used to talk that Martin was so focused on the voting rights thing and that speech he made where he said, “just give us the vote, and we’ll have justice.” But then, he went to the North and saw all the racism still happening; he realized that you needed to have a social movement to get the change he was talking about it, which is what the Poor Peoples March was supposed to do be.
So, we need to understand that we can vote for people, but we have to demand something from them before we vote for them, not after we vote for them. So, when it comes to reparations, if voting got us reparations, this turnout in the last election would mean that they would be up there talking about reparations right now, but they’re not.
We need to regain the momentum. We need solidarity.
Trevor: Agreed. Thank you so much for taking some time to speak with me.
Dr. Berry: Alright now, take it easy.