New Jersey Residents Push for Reparations

Arun Venugopal: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on the WYNC. Welcome back, everyone. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom. If you haven't been paying close attention, the debate over whether Black Americans are owed reparations is no longer confined to intellectual spaces but has slowly been gaining momentum with actual lawmakers in actual municipalities and states across the country. It was about nine years ago that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his seminal piece in The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations.

Since then, and especially since the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, we're seeing elected officials make their own case in cities like Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois, and in the State of California. Now the reparations debate is about to take off in New Jersey with a series of public hearings starting tomorrow evening, that's Tuesday. In this case, it's being led by private citizens rather than public officials. Today we're going to hear why regular people in the Garden State are taking up the cause of reparations instead of their elected representatives, and we're going to hear what they hope to accomplish.

Joining us now is Ryan P. Haygood. He is the President and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which has convened the New Jersey Reparations Council. Hi, Ryan. Thanks for joining us.

Ryan P. Haygood: Arun, it's wonderful to be here with you today.

Arun Venugopal: Listeners in New Jersey, we want to hear from you too, especially Black listeners. If you grew up in New Jersey, did you learn much about the state's history of slavery or was that concealed from you? Do you think reparations are owed? Call us at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text us at that number if you can't get through on the phone. Of course, you can tweet us @BrianLehrer. All right, Ryan, tell us, what's the case for reparations in New Jersey?

Ryan P. Haygood: Sure. First, I want to thank you and your team for having this conversation. I think this is an important time to do so, particularly in the State of New Jersey. My colleague, Lori Beecham, likes to say a bit about how New Jersey enjoys a veneer of progressivism. In a sense, I think that's certainly part of our identity.

What is not appreciated about New Jersey is that it is a state where slavery took root very, very deeply, including, Arun, going back to our founding as a colony. New Jersey as a colony incentivized slavery, gave each English-settling family 150 acres of land, and it gave those same white settlers during the colonial period an additional 150 acres of land for each enslaved Black person that they brought with them. Our modern-day racial wealth gap, which I'll say more about, Arun, it was conceived of, it was birthed in slavery when we were a colony.

Now people will ask, well, Ryan, that was several hundred years ago. To Arun's question, why does reparations, why is that a relevant conversation to have in 2023? The reason is because we all- I like to think of it, the image is that we all live on a foundation, and the foundation has deep, deep cracks. Those really are the cracks of structural racism that were formed during slavery in colonial times in New Jersey.

Now, we didn't create those cracks. We inherited those from previous generations, but we all live with the vestiges of, we live in view of those cracks. I think this moment requires people of conscience to do the difficult, the fundamental, the foundational work of filling in those cracks by building a new foundation.

Arun Venugopal: Now, in addition to what you've already laid out when it comes to the history of New Jersey, it was the last northern state to abolish slavery, correct?

Ryan P. Haygood: It was. This is not scientific, but I think a scientific poll would show this; if you polled the average New Jersey and you asked, "Hey, Arun, hey, Ryan, did slavery happen in New Jersey?" I think that the average New Jersey and who doesn't know the answers that would actually be offended by that. I've done this myself. Very often, people think of New Jersey as a beacon for democracy going back to its founding and that slavery was largely a Southern phenomenon.

You'll hear people say we're not filling blank southern state. We're not Mississippi, we're not Texas, we're not Louisiana, we're not South Carolina. In fact, slavery took root as deeply in New Jersey as it did in some of the deep southern states. In fact, we were considered the slave state of the North. Two-thirds of enslaved Africans were held in New Jersey. To your point, we were the last northern state to end slavery. We rejected the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th and 14th, 15th Amendments, and we were one of the early northern states to restrict voting to white men only. We have a really troubled past with the institution of slavery.

The reality is that slavery and its vestiges don't just live in our past. If you look at the Black experience by the numbers in New Jersey, you'll find that Black people in our state confront some of the worst racial disparities reflected in racial inequality in the country. Two quick ones I share for the listeners.

One arises from the area of the racial wealth gap. In New Jersey, the median net wealth, my colleague Dr. Laura Sullivan lists this up for us, the median net wealth for white families in New Jersey is $322,000, among the highest net worth of any family in the country. $322,000 for white families is median net wealth, but Arun, for Black families is $17,700. That's a more than $300,000 racial wealth gap. That matters because it was designed that way during slavery in New Jersey and we continue to live with the vestiges of the institution.

Secondly, really quickly, arising there the criminal justice system. In New Jersey, which enjoys a veneer of progressivism, our state has the worst Black-to-white adult and youth incarceration disparity rates. For youth, it's 18:1. For adults, it's 12:1. Put differently, in New Jersey, a Black child is 18 times more likely to be imprisoned than a white child, though all research shows that Black and white people, young people, adults, commit offenses at about the same rate. Those racial disparities don't reflect actual participation in crime. What they reflect is a vastly different response to Black young people, Black adults, when they do things in the criminal justice system.

Arun Venugopal: We've got some callers. Let's take one of them. This is Eugene calling from TNAC. Hi, Eugene.

Eugene: Hi, good morning, still. I just want to say a few things. Yes, I grew up in Teton, New Jersey. The framing of teaching of history, and I was also a history teacher for quite a few years, is, oh, slavery was in the South, the South was bad, and you come up to the North, freedom, and Harriet Tubman helped breathe and Underground Railroad.

New Jersey was the last state, the last northern state, 1866 in January, to abolish slavery and then did all kinds of other ways of like still ensuring that Black people were enslaved even after that date. This notion of Juneteenth as the last day is a lie. There's 12 different states that still had- including Oregon, who still had people enslaved through the 1860s. That's number one.

Number two, I didn't really learn that much about Black history until one particular class by the football coach at Kenack High School that he would have after school. It was the anti-class. He was like, "Okay, you're not going to learn this during the day, but after school, if you come--" He broke down the history of slavery.

He broke not even that as much as like I've learned now, but he broke down a lot of the other racial issues in this country including Blackface, notions of voter rights ways in which most times the history curriculum doesn't teach about exactly how horrific. For example, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that was over a year. It wasn't like, "Oh." This is over a year. Again, these incidents in history are seen as flashpoints when they really were arduous and enduring so much violence [crosstalk]--

Arun Venugopal: Eugene, if I could just break in, as a New Jerseyan, your thoughts on reparations being owed, are you in support of this effort?

Eugene: What I said to the screener is the fact that it is even framed as a debate is disingenuous and adds to the disenfranchisement, marginalization of Black people's pain. When enslavement was happening, the argument was how many more slaves do we pack on this boat? How many more slaves do we pack onto this plantation? How many more babies should this Black woman birth in order to have us breed more slaves? To sit there and turn around and be like, "Oh, now it's a debate," in what way?

In what way are we debating? How much money did Black people add to the economy of the American civilization or experiment, so-called, in democracy? How much money did enslavement add to the financial welfare of New Jersey? Maybe that's a debate, but to sit there and say that it is a debate, it is a debate to me.

Arun Venugopal: Got it. Thank you, Eugene. Thank you so much a lot of passion from Eugene. A lot of anger also. Ryan, is this the spirit of the effort you're seeing around you in terms of getting reparations ultimately onto the legislative agenda in New Jersey?

Ryan P. Haygood: Absolutely. I love Eugene's energy. I love her righteous indignation. She's right. I think part of what we seek to do with this push through the New Jersey Reparations Council is to tell the story accurately, consistently with the truth about who New Jersey was at its founding, and how we continue to be profoundly shaped by that founding. Slavery wasn't this isolated institution that came to an end at a date certain, and then equality set in. We continue to see a number of things that followed slavery.

New Jersey didn't have sharecropping. We called it cottaging, synonymous with sharecropping, so that enslaved people who worked previously as enslaved people on land now worked under a system of sharecropping. Then that gave way to restrictive covenants, and then that gave way to limited application of the G.I. Bill, which created, as you know, a whole middle class that excluded Black people. That then gave way to redlining practices that created whole cities like the one I live in in Newark.

There's a straight line today from slavery to the modern-day reality that Black people confront in New Jersey, racial disparities in every direction. The reason that Eugene's point is important around the understanding of the history is because it profoundly shapes our identity. If you separate the history from the modern day racial inequality, the racial wealth gap, the deep segregation that Black kids face in classrooms and in neighborhoods, the high rate of environmental justice challenges and more, if you separate the history from the modern day lived experience of Black folks in New Jersey, then what you're left with is the belief that those racial disparities are the fault of Black people in the state.

Part of what we're getting at with the Reparations Council is that no, no, the racial disparities that we see in New Jersey were designed in slavery. We're calling on people of good faith, of good conscience to help us to redesign a New Jersey, a new New Jersey that connects Black people to the very best thing.

I'll say this really quickly because I love the energy of Eugene and I think part of our challenge-- we saw this in George Floyd. We were in this moment where there was this triple pandemic of COVID-19. That was the leading cause of death of Black people in 2020, New Jersey, COVID-19. Then we saw the police brutality pandemic, and then we saw broader structural racism pandemic. Part of what emerged from that was this conversation that often began with a strategy to try to reduce the harm to Black people. How do we stop police violence? How do we introduce a harm reduction strategy?

I think in that framing, Arun, what we miss is beyond harm reduction, how do we build a New Jersey where Black people, where they flourish, where they thrive, where they win? How do we advance an affirmative vision for connecting Black people to systems that connect them to the very best things? You can't have that conversation, you can't realize it without discussing reparations; repairing harm from the enduring harm of slavery, and building a system that makes Black people whole.

Arun Venugopal: Let's take some more calls. This is Mike calling from Newark. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Yes. Hello.

Arun Venugopal: Yes. Hi. You're on the air, Mike.

Mike: Oh, okay. Well, my only point is, again, I'm just speaking as a Black person as well here in New Jersey, I'm just against giving people a check. Hopefully, that's not the idea of this. One thing we can do to help ameliorate some of the problems out there for minorities, [unintelligible 00:13:31] slavery, specifically Blacks, maybe college education, paying for portion of that that although I know, right now, community college is free for everyone. I think the main thing is people need to get away with the idea of, "Hey, I'm getting $500,000 or I'm getting a $1,000," anything like that. How can we help people succeed? Most of that in succeeding is through education, so maybe paying for a portion of their college or assisting them with college. That's it.

Arun Venugopal: Great. Thank you so much for that call, Mike. Any thoughts on that? Obviously, it's cash payments that get the headlines when it comes to reparations debate. What's the dollar figure in California they talked about? This has gotten headlines all across the board, $1.2 million estimated payouts. It sounds like it can really shut down conversation. Here we have a caller who is saying that really it shouldn't be about money. It should be more about opportunity, education. Your thoughts?

Ryan P. Haygood: Sure. I love that Mike's call arises from my home city of Newark. I keep with me an ad that seeks to return for the sum of $20, an enslaved man who is called Will. Arun, he ran away from slavery in Newark, New Jersey, in 1802. He was, the ad describes, 49 years old, and it lists some of his other characteristics. I'm struck by that because, Arun, today I turn 49. I look at Will, and I think about what the conditions must have been like as an enslaved person in the City of Newark, New Jersey, and what caused him to leave, and I wonder how he managed to stay away given that his enslavers sought to return him for the sum of a $20-reward.

To Mike's question, I don't think it's a zero-sum game. One of the challenges is very often we have a conversation about reparations, it is reduced to a check-writing exercise. What we think about in terms of reparations is a broad building of a system of practices and policies that seek to fill in those gaps in the foundation that I described, but you also need deep investments to support those practices and policies.

Part of the New Jersey Reparations Council's work will be to think about how do we imagine the most forward-thinking policies that can help to address the vestiges of discrimination rooted in slavery, but also what kind of investments do we need to make both in communities and in individuals. You absolutely need investments, cash payments to communities and individuals to close that racial wealth gap. A $300,000 racial wealth gap can't be closed by providing free college to a set number of descendants of enslaved Black people. That's got to be part of the strategy to be sure, but I think we should not resist financial investments.

Look, we just came through one of the most difficult periods in American history, COVID-19, international health pandemic. In three weeks, a Congress that couldn't agree on much, agreed appropriately that America needed about $3 trillion in three weeks. It made that investment rightly recognizing the need. The challenge for us is not limited resources. It has been limited political will, which is why I love the work of the New Jersey Reparations Council because to your point, Arun, at the top of our conversation, it's fueled by people.

I think every movement, particularly for racial justice, has been led by people who organize themselves to make conversations that politicians deem unsafe, that they don't have the political courage to advance, that they find unpalatable. It requires people of courage to make those conversations safe, and that's part of the work of the New Jersey Reparations Council.

Arun Venugopal: Clearly, this work is making conspicuous the fact that the state legislature is not moving forward in this process. What happened to the bill that was supposed to advance reparations in the legislature?

Ryan P. Haygood: Sure. Love the question. There was a sequence of events leading up to a bill that was introduced for New Jersey to create its own reparations council. We brought Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, to speak to a sold-out audience in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center about this conversation. Shortly after that, we stood with almost every Black elected official in New Jersey to introduce a bill. At that time, Arun, New Jersey would have been the first state in the country to introduce this kind of bill and get it passed.

I'll summarize it this way. We had a meeting with the leadership of the assembly. His name is Craig Coughlin. We urged him to support the bill, given the moment that we were in, the need to have, finally, a robust conversation about what reparations can look like, first addressing accurately New Jersey's role in slavery and secondly, building a visionary document about how we might finally address the enduring harm of slavery.

Speaker Craig Coughlin said back to us, "Listen, you all. If you would just call it something else, you could call it the Racial Equity Task Force, you could even call it, Ryan, the Black Lives Matter Task Force, but the word 'reparations', it unsettles people and makes them uncomfortable."

His resistance to naming this effort what we want it to be, gave birth to our campaign called Say The Word: REPARATIONS. We very much are focusing on that word. We said back to him, "Listen, we're asking you for a task force, the least we can do . That is our concession. We have a good sense of what we need right now, but we're asking you to name the task force what it should be." His resistance to it gave rise to this effort right here.

We're still pushing for New Jersey to take responsibility through its own legislative creative task force, but in the meantime, we will advance this work through the New Jersey Reparations Council.

Arun Venugopal: Let's take another call. This is Parker calling from Westfield, New Jersey. Hi, Parker.

Parker: Yes. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to say I totally agree with the guest speaker today with regards to the different ways for reparations. Money is definitely the key because that is how you build wealth, that is how everybody else has built wealth, but as soon as it comes to Black folks, people get their back up and say, "Well, let's slow down on that." Reparations, by any other name, is still reparations. Let's not have this thin skin where this one word upsets you. We need to be grown up about this and have a real conversation.

For all of my ancestors that came before me, those towns that were drowned by other than Black people, we can look at just the past history of everything that has been afflicted upon African Americans just because of the color of their skin. If Black people feel they don't want reparations, just get out of the way.

I just wanted to just finish by saying that for any person who is not Black or African American, I'd like to know what have we done to you as a people where you just hop on that white bandwagon and say, "I'm just going to hate Black people because white people said?"

Arun Venugopal: Thank you for your call, Parker. Ryan, any thoughts to what Parker just said?

Ryan P. Haygood: I do. I think that this picks up on a point that Parker made. One of the challenges I've seen, and I experienced this right in the middle of the George Floyd moment, like you, I was on so many Zooms with people talking about the right response and those conversations, almost each of them, began with the presupposed harm to Black people. The remedy for the harm was, how do we reduce or stop the harm? Arun, those conversations were entirely about harm reduction.

In my mind, I started thinking, "Why is it that the goal for the Black experience, by and large, is just to stop or reduce harm?" Once you've done that, you've actually not achieved a whole lot except saying, "We just stopped harming people." What if we, in this most painful moment, pulled back, helicoptered up, and thought about, "Yes, obviously, part of the Black experience should not include harm or a harm reduction strategy, but how might Black people finally win, and what would an affirmative vision for winning look like?"

I think part of the way that race functions in this country is that it makes us Black people and supportive allies, it limits our imagination around creating the idea of what winning looks like. We reduce winning to reducing harm. I think what reparations requires us to do is to think very broadly, very imaginatively to push ourselves into very uncomfortable spaces, to think about how we build a New Jersey where Black people thrive, where they're connected to systems that help us win.

That's going to be an ambitious set of things. That's why the New Jersey Reparations Council has more than 40 leading voices in a number of disciplines, national leaders, state-level leaders who were thinking about, one, the history of slavery in New Jersey, but as importantly part two, what are some of the most ambitious, out-of-the-box progressive-minded policies and practices and what kinds of investments do we need to make in those to finally repair the enduring harm?

Arun Venugopal: One of the people in your organization, Jean-Pierre Brutus who serves as senior counsel, told me the coalition advancing this cause in New Jersey is actually quite diverse. Does that sound right to you?

Ryan P. Haygood: Absolutely. Jean-Pierre is helping us convene the New Jersey Reparations Council, doing a wonderful job. Look, this work, the racial justice work, the fight for liberation and freedom for Black people has always been a multiracial fight. I think a lot about how Selma, Alabama, was a flashpoint for transforming democracy in America. Yes, it was led by Black people, but it was also supported by a multi-faith, multiracial group of people who also put themselves in harm's way.

Arun, part of the reason why I love reparations and the conversation and the word is that it makes people uncomfortable. It pushes us to uncomfortable positions. I don't think you can be a person of conscience in this moment and be comfortable. I very often think that comfort is the enemy of progress. This country, in the last couple of years, you'll remember for a while, it resisted the undeniable truth of Black lives mattering and then George Floyd gets murdered, COVID sets in, and then you start seeing people paint that truth on streets and the yard signs and streets renamed for Black Lives Matter.

The next push ahead of the curve is now around reparations. That requires us to be bold, courageous, truth-tellers who push into uncomfortable positions. The work by itself, by its very definition, requires all of us doing it to be uncomfortable. If we're not, I don't think we're pushing hard enough.

Arun Venugopal: I want to play a clip from a couple other people who are involved in this cause and who will be speaking tomorrow at the public session. This is Beverly Mills and Elaine Buck. Most of you're going to hear Beverly's voice. They're co-founders of the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum in Skillman, New Jersey, and they're also co-authors of If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey. This is what Beverly said.

Beverly Mills: Myself and Elaine included went to one of the best school systems in the state. I graduated in 1968. I'm dating myself, and Elaine when you graduated in- I don't know, was it 72?

Elaine Buck: Yes.

Beverly: Something like that.

Elaine: I think [unintelligible 00:25:50].

Beverly: Never once did we learn about slavery in New Jersey. It's taken us in our senior years, and we are seniors, to learn how prolific slavery was, not only in New Jersey but right here where we've been living all of these years, Mercer County, Somerset County, Hunterdon County. Primarily, we've looked at Central New Jersey, although Bergen County, the northern part of New Jersey, extremely, extremely dependent upon institution of slavery.

Arun Venugopal: That's Beverly Mills talking about the history of slavery, a very specific way in the State of New Jersey. She'll also be speaking at tomorrow's session. What do you expect to happen at this? It's the first of nine sessions from the History of Slavery in New Jersey Committee, correct, Ryan?

Ryan P. Haygood: That's right. Arun, yes. Love the question. The New Jersey Reparations Council is comprised of nine committees. Tomorrow night, the History of Slavery in New Jersey committee will host a public hearing at 6:30. People can tune in by going to youtube.com @dosocialjustice. The first part of it will include report-outs from the leading historians on this issue. You mentioned Elaine Buck and Beverly Mill, Arun. We also have Leslie Alexander and Marisa Fuentes. The council is convened by co-chairs Khalil Muhammad and Taja-Nia Henderson.

We'll hold nine public hearings both so that folks in those committees can report out on some of their early learnings, but as importantly, to hear public testimony, public input from people in the State of New Jersey, both around their understanding the way they've been impacted by the institution of slavery and its enduring impact. This public hearing is critical to hearing from people across New Jersey about their experience with the essence of slavery from racial discrimination to inform our final product, which will be a written document that will be produced in two Juneteenths, in 2025.

Arun, it's our hope that this document will be a blueprint that lays out accurately both what the history of slavery in New Jersey has been and how it's endured, and as importantly, how we can address that enduring history through policies, practices, and investments.

Arun Venugopal: Ryan, when you look at the reparations landscape across the country, are there any particular examples that you turn to either as pause examples or as cautionary tales in terms of how you're proceeding in New Jersey?

Ryan P. Haygood: Yes. I have loved that this issue has become a live issue in the country. Our bill was introduced in 2019. California introduced its bill in 2020. It passed, and their council has already concluded their work under some terrific leadership there. Our team has been really inspired by the way that this conversation has taken root at the state level, as you mentioned, at the top of the conversation in cities. We're encouraging more of it. In New Jersey, we've been going from city to city, encouraging cities and towns to pass resolutions in support of the state-level legislation even as we convene our own council.

I think there's a federal responsibility. The late John Conyers introduced a reparations task force bill more than 35 years ago. It has languished in Congress. There's a federal responsibility to be sure, but as we know, by virtue of the Selma example, when racial justice movements have been sparked, they've always been sparked from the ground up in our communities, and that's really animating our advocacy in New Jersey. We're inspired to see it happen across the country.

I think the energy of this conversation has been fueling our work in Jersey and we've been providing technical assistance to a number of other cities and states, municipalities looking to do similar work as we're doing in New Jersey.

Arun Venugopal: I'm guessing you've heard from people say White New Jerseyans who are sympathetic understanding of the harms, the historic injustice the way in which those inequities are perpetuated to this day, but who are worried about the bill.

Ryan P. Haygood: Sure.

Arun Venugopal: What do you say to someone who's in that situation is worried that they're going to have to put something that they couldn't have imagined, say five years ago, and they're heading into retirement, perhaps?

Ryan P. Haygood: I love that question. That question somewhat presupposes that what reparations is, is about coming for something that they own. I think that arises from a deficit perspective. New Jersey, for example, is one of the wealthiest states in the country. Our challenge in New Jersey is not around resources. There are plenty of resources to begin to make Black people in the state whole. What we think about in terms of the reparations conversation is how do we capitalize on the existing resources we have, and then marshal additional resources to make this conversation around reparations real in our state.

Arun Venugopal: We've been speaking to Ryan P. Haygood on the issue of reparations in New Jersey. Ryan, thanks so much for joining us today.

Ryan P. Haygood: Thanks for having me. It's been wonderful to be here.

 

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