By Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, founder of the National Black Cultural Information Trust
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For centuries, African Americans have called for reparations to rectify the harms done to enslaved Africans and their descendants. The National African American Reparations Commission and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America have asserted that the vestiges of chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism continue to injure Black communities. Chattel slavery and Jim Crow were deplorable crimes against humanity, and current-day systemic racism is their legacy. FX’s Atlanta vividly explores these ongoing harms through an episode titled “The Big Payback” written by Francesca Sloane.
Through the narrative of an alternate reality, the episode addresses core issues of the current reparations movement by following the life of a middle-aged white male named Marshall. Marshall’s life is suddenly turned upside down by a groundbreaking lawsuit and clause. In the episode, a Black man sued a descendant of his family’s former enslaver connecting “human capital and profit” to current company financials. The successful lawsuit opened the gateway for more African Americans to sue descendants of enslavers. African Americans across America begin to file lawsuits. With seemingly no current connection to slavery, white Americans are suddenly confronted with rectifying America’s shameful history of enslavement.
Marshall is then confronted with pressure to pay a Black woman named Sheniqua for the enslavement of her ancestors by his ancestors. He repeats, “I didn’t f*cking do anything.”
On the surface, this can seem outrageous. How can someone be held responsible for the crimes of their ancestors? How is the fair? The episode then digs deeper into the issue of fairness by connecting the past to today’s realities. Due to chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges, African Americans have endured transgenerational epigenetic harms, post-traumatic stress, unequal access to healthcare, education, and often denied access to upward mobility.
I recently testified before the AB: 3121 California Reparations Task Force concerning the community of eligibility for reparations in the State of California. There was an intense debate over the period for which eligibility should begin and end. Although disagreements over eligibility requirements and forms of payment continue, all Task Force members, experts, and witnesses agreed that African Americans are owed and America must pay.
Though often minimized in America’s collective memory, past harms contribute to current injuries. The unfairness of charging current-day white Americans with the crimes of enslavers was presented in a fictional format. However, the fictional depiction was cleverly juxtaposed with the real-life injustice and undue burdens that African Americans continue to endure derived from the enslavement and systemic dehumanization of our ancestors. Meanwhile, America continues to benefit from the forced and unpaid labor of enslaved Africans, and white Americans specifically benefit from intergenerational wealth transfers (often through land and homeownership) that were denied to many African American families.
“The Big Payback” explores personal restitution payments from enslaver descendants to descendants of enslaved Africans through lump sums and taxes from paychecks, playfully referred to as “apolo-cheese.” There is a real reparations tax underway at Georgetown University, where a portion of student tuition fees are used to fund the education of descendants of enslaved Africans that were sold by the school (by Maryland Jesuits). The fees to support the fund are $27.20 per student per semester. Georgetown students endorsed this measure. The city of Evanston, Illinois, is funding its own reparations program from recreational marijuana sales taxes.
The “Big Payback” episode also acknowledges that though cash payments are essential to many people for reparative justice, African Americans have ranging views on what reparations mean personally and for our communities. For example, the episode references a Black family that did not require money for reparations but instead, weekly public acknowledgment. The National African American Reparations Commission has a 10-point plan for reparations that includes funds for entrepreneurial development, health, wellness, housing, education, and more.
The episode crystallized when another white-male character named Earnest explained to Marshall, “We were treating slavery as if it were a mystery buried in the past, something to investigate if we chose to. And now that history has a monetary value. Confession is not absolution…to them, slavery is not past. I mean, it’s not a mystery. It is not a historical curiosity. It is a cruel unavoidable ghost that haunts in a way we can’t see.”
Though Atlanta’s depiction of reparative justice is fictional, the imaginary is not far from reality, especially in how this episode addresses the lingering harms of chattel slavery and how it affects Black Amer