Reparations—concrete compensation to Black Americans for historical and current racial harm—are becoming a topic of discussion in our culture, and even the focus of policy guidelines. But they haven’t been discussed much in pop culture–until recently. In the past, the issue has been relegated to satire, shrouded in misinformation, and left to the most radical voices to broach. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, however, reparations are more commonly discussed on social media platforms like TikTok and even Disney TV shows. But questions still remain about whether such coverage has been effective in convincing the public about the importance of reparations.
Defining reparations is key to fully understanding the topic, and there are several ways to do so. In a 2022 interview with Vox’s Into the Mix podcast, Erika Alexander, director, actor, producer, writer, and creator, explained that “Reparations is making amends by paying money to the persons or persons who have been wronged.” She went on to describe reparations to Black Americans as financial compensation, but also “an apology for slavery.”
Those who make films and television shows have historically failed to engage with the topic of reperations, let alone its full context. However, in the past two decades, the rise of independent creators and new media has helped facilitate a serious and accurate consideration of reparations in pop culture.
Reparations on TV
One of the earliest references to reparations in popular culture came in 2000 on NBC’s The West Wing. Season 1, episode 18, “Six Meetings Before Lunch,” featured White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lymon (played by Bradley Whitford) being tasked with discussing a reparations book blurb with a future candidate for Attorney General Jeff Breckenridge (played by Carl Lumbly). The two characters engaged in a powerful discussion, with Breckenridge recounting the same history that Alexander did in her Vox interview.
However, Whitford’s character rebutted the idea with puns and quips dismissive of Breckenridge’s arguments. The candidate responded with facts and figures on reparations and estimates of financial compensation based on the work done by enslaved people. He even traced his own ancestry from a village in Africa to a particular plantation, saying, “Someone owes me and my friends $1.7 trillion.”
Lymon retorted, “So, you’re looking for back pay.”
Three years later, reparations were once again featured on television, in a 2003 episode of Chappelle’s Show, where stand-up comic Dave Chappelle imagined a future where the United States government gave reparations to Black Americans. Using the format of a satirical news segment, Chappelle played the news anchor as a racist white person with whitened skin and blond hair. Strangely, though, he portrayed the Black recipients of reparations as stereotypical, embodying prevalent and long-held racist tropes about those deserving of restitution.
Chappelle’s approach was consistent with his standard tactic of using shock humor to joke about topics that are often taboo, offensive, or “tacky” to specific cultures and communities. His two most recent comedy specials on Netflix featured jokes that were transphobic, homophobic, and appeared to make fun of sexual assault victims. When Chappelle focused his humor on reparations 21 years ago, he seemed to have the same intent—to shock the masses by speaking of a topic that society at large found unmentionable.
Fast-forward to 2020, when a historic mass racial justice uprising roiled the nation. In the years that followed, it seemed as though every TV show with a predominantly Black cast, covering predominantly Black issues, was tackling reparations. The Netflix show Family Reunion detailed how the family’s ancestors were gifted land that was subsequently taken away from them in its episode “Remember Our 20 Acres and a Deed?”
Disney’s The Proud Family featured a character named Penny giving a lyrical breakdown of reparations during a school debate (which garnered vociferous right-wing backlash).
FX’s Atlanta aired an episode called “The Big Payback” that featured white people being held responsible for paying reparations directly to those their families once claimed ownership over.
The characters in ABC’s Black-ish were featured discussing reparations several times during its run, using episodes like “Juneteenth” to lay the historic groundwork for discussions about reparations. The “Juneteenth” episode aired in 2017, but became popular again in 2020 and later.
Reparations in Film
Meanwhile, independent and even some mainstream filmmakers tackled the topic in other ways. Some were subtle, addressing the issue of restorative justice without saying the word “reparations.” Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) sparked discussions of compensating Black people for experiments done on their bodies during slavery and well into the Jim Crow era. The film featured an eerily silent auction where the protagonist, a photographer named Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya), was sold to a blind art dealer named Jim (played by Stephen Root). There was no compensation for the body.
Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice (2022) broached reparations in a less subtle manner, but still didn’t mention the “R” word in the film. Alice (played by Keke Palmer) is an enslaved woman who flees a 19th century-style plantation in the 1970s and ends up fainting on a highway. A former activist turned truck driver named Frank (played by Common) rescues her and exposes her to the ideas of slavery versus freedom. The film centers on the question of how Alice was to be made whole—and who was responsible?
Jimmie Fails, Joe Talbot, and Rob Riechert’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020) offer less subtle examples of independent films covering the topic by showing the systemic nature of slavery’s influence while exploring reparations. Neither of the films explicitly mention the term reparations, but the concepts explored are part of the conversation. In The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) fight to get back the home that Jimmie’s grandfather built. The loss of the house was clearly because of gentrification, raising questions of what Jimmie is owed, how much he is owed, and who owes it.
While TV coverage reflected racial justice issues in 2020, film coverage of reparations also became more explicit, with projects such as Sixteen Thousand Dollars. Directed by Symone Baptiste, the short fictional film follows a Black man who receives a $16,000 check, along with every other Black person in America. His dilemma centers on what to do with the money as he watches various scenarios playing out before his eyes through his friends and community. Sixteen Thousand Dollars takes an intentional, direct approach to the topic of reparations in film, while also detailing the shortcomings of simply giving everyone a check without fixing the systemic racism.
“There’s plenty of room to continue to expand the discourse,” says Baptiste. “I can’t say enough how much of a tool my film was for essentially radicalizing people in this fight for reparations, and informing people who would have never even approached the subject.”
Is On-Screen Fiction Effective?
Baptiste says that television has been used to imagine what reparations could look like, but is wary of perpetuating the idea that reparations should be distributed based on proving lineage.
“I haven’t watched every single episode of TV that’s covered [reparations], but one, in particular, that I really liked a lot was Watchmen,” she says. “The theory was this very dystopian version of reparations, and I thought that was actually a strong argument against a very lineage-based approach. It was very dystopian, reducing [reparations] so far down that it didn’t change the public perception at all [in the show].”
In Watchmen, the character of President Robert Redford identifies specific atrocities in U.S. history against Black people. He then issues monetary payments called “Redfordations,” which are claimed by white people, quickly undermining the point of reparations for slavery. Baptiste believes that lineage-based reparations in reality could have a similar result.
“I see lineage-based arguments in real life, and it always excludes a portion of the Black community affected by many programs after slavery,” she says. “There have been so many things beyond slavery that have affected Black people. There are more targeted approaches going on like redlining and so on, and the people who were affected, descendants of people who are affected by redlining, or different massacres [are often left out].” It should be noted that California’s state-level reparations task force does take into account post-slavery racial harms against Black people such as redlining, over-policing, and environmental racism.
Baptiste’s point also highlights the strides made in framing the need for reparations on television. Shows such as Them on Amazon Prime, which uses horror to trace the atrocities of redlining and racial covenants in suburban 1950s California, help to form a foundation for reparations.
Jessica Ann Mitchell Aiwuyor, a multicultural communications specialist and the founder of the National Black Cultural Information Trust, echoes Baptiste’s concerns when she speaks of teaching the history of racial harm in YES!’s video portion of its Realizing Reparation series (of which this story is a part). “When you don’t teach the history, then people are operating under a misconception,” says Aiwuyor. “They think that they know the full story and they don’t. So it’s very important to have that background.”
Reparations in Documentary Films
Fictional depictions are bound by the rules of storytelling that may force writers to oversimplify a complex topic. But what about documentaries?
Erika Alexander has explored the idea of reparations through a wellspring of knowledge that she gathered while co-directing the 2023 documentary film The Big Payback, which tracks an Evanston, Illinois, Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmons as she fights for and succeeds in obtaining reparations for the Black residents of her city. Documentary filmmaking is the next media frontier in covering the movement for reparations.
In a Vox interview, Alexander explains that reparations are not a new phenomenon, citing William Sherman, the Union General whose Field Order Number 15 led to what became known as “40 acres and a mule”—the promise he made to formerly enslaved people.
“The idea and a discussion of reparations is an American Molotov cocktail,” Alexander told Vox. “You throw it and everything starts to smoke and burn.”
The consensus among activists is that reparations are overdue, and that the term is less important than the act. Emmett Lewis and Joycelyn Davis, who are featured in the 2022 documentary Descendant, have been fighting for justice for the descendants of those brought over on the Clotilda, the last ship to bring enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. Lewis and Davis are both Clotilda descendants. “There’s no true way that you can give us reparations,” Lewis said in an interview with the African American Film Critics Association. “There’s no true way you can do it. Alright, you can give us a little money. We cool for about 10 years and then everything is back to normal, everything is still torn down. And we still don’t have a community.” He went on to make the case that monetary reparations could be given to a single person, but the community as a whole would still be suffering.
Reparations in New Media
Aiwuyor sees hope in social media’s ability to further the movement on reparations. “The digital space has been an advantage specifically to people of African descent, who have not always been given the microphone, not always been elevated,” she says. “We’ve been able to elevate and push ourselves out into the mainstream.”
The reparations conversation has even made its way on to TikTok, where Black influencers such as Abiola, Sunn m’Cheaux, and Pay Black Americans, as well as some non-Black influencers such as Qasim Rashid, Esq., are seriously discussing the issue. These influencers are using analogies and historical facts to show, as Alexander does in her documentary, that reparations are not a new concept. For example, in one video Abiola likens reparations as “making amends to a friend.”
TikTok user Dr. Andre 3001 has taken a satirical approach, similar to that of Chappelle’s Show two decades earlier, but he uses his platform to satirize white people who owe reparations.Unlike Chappelle’s shock-based comedy, the new media creator has used responsible and accurate storytelling that is not meant to shock or offend, thus inviting a more serious consideration of reparations. In a TikTok video, D Piddy explains how a smiling, blond, white woman whom he calls “Sarah Beth” benefited from her ancestor’s “ownership” of enslaved Africans.
Ultimately, Baptiste emphasizes that narratives on reparations are only effective if accompanied by responsible, guided activism. “It’s good to have more media out there just to really open people’s minds to the concept,” she says. “But I think we also need to do the work of organizing and shepherding people to be able to fully understand what is happening.”
This story was funded by a grant from Decolonizing Wealth Project, as part of the YES! series “Realizing Reparations.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy here.
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Jonita Davis
is a film and culture critic, author, and freelance writer. She has been writing for more than 15 years on topics exploring the intersection of pop culture, identity, education, parenting, and how those relationships affect our lives as parents, women, Black women, nerds, and people of this planet. She is the founder and editor-at-large of The Black Cape, and has authored several books, her latest being We Gon’ Be Black Today: Exploration of Black Nerd Culture (Chicago Review Press, 2024). She is a member of the Hollywood Critics Association, International Film Society Critics, and is a Rotten Tomatoes independent critic. More of her work can be found at jonitadavis.com. |
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