The Ethical Rainmaker

Reparations and Truth Telling w Dr David Ragland

Episode Summary

“In this moment, people are committing to be reparationist and committing to reparations as a spiritual practice. At the same time, this is one of the most vibrant moments for the discussion of reparations, and I've never seen the proliferation of more reparations organizations, and that's wonderful.” In this episode, Michelle speaks with Dr. David Ragland, Director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign, about what reparations really is, police violence, inequity, complicity how to create cultures of truth telling. We go deep. Join us!

Episode Notes

Dr. David Ragland is an inspirational figure and activist in the new reparations and reconciliation movements…and there is so much GOLD in this episode and so many references...it will take longer than I have capacity for to document it all for this episode. That’s the beauty we get when talking with professional educators. Here are major themes:

Dr. David Ragland...

Check out these SIX articles he’s written for YES! Magazine:

These are the five areas outlined by the UN for reparation:

  1. Compensation
  2. Restitution
  3. Satisfaction
  4. Guarantees of Non-Repeat
  5. Healing

Need to know:

HR 40: HR 40 is proposed legislation - the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. The legislation, which was first introduced nearly 30 years ago, establishes a commission to examine slavery and discrimination in the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies. It refers to the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, to freed slaves, by General Sherman, in 1865. In the US there has never been significant truth and reconciliation actions taken for enslavement or for native american genocide, as there have been in other countries like South Africa has, for apartheid.

The newly elected Congresswoman Corey Bush (Missouri) and Dr. Ragland co-founded the Truth Telling Project with her after meeting during the Ferguson protests.

Resmaa Menakem is mentioned and of course we love his body of work including his book “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies” which Fleur Larsen mentioned in Season 1. You can check out his interview with Krista Tippet too.

Dr. Ragland talks about our mutual friendEdgar Villanueva and the Decolonizing Wealth Project as well as Liberated Capital, a reparations giving circle...

Reparations is the repair of moral and material harm.

The Truth Telling Project: A truth process or healing, created as a response to police violence.

In this episode we say the names of these remembered folx who have been murdered by police and those whose names are not said, will not be forgotten. I’ve tried to link to pieces that share a bit about who they were...

And this is my favorite quote, because we, societally, never talk about what was stolen...and often we refer to it as bringing “civilization” right? 
DR: "I'm kidnapping you Kuta Kente. Now, your name is Toby. Your religion is Christianity. And you can't play drum no more. You can't cook the food you ate no more. Your kids are going to be slaves, and their kids are going to be slaves.”

MM: “And they will learn nothing of your culture previously because it will be outlawed for you to practice it.”

NOTE: So we’re learning that this podcast is becoming part of university curriculum across the US and Canada! If you happen to be studying this episode, and want to add more links related to this episode...email us! hello@theethicalrainmaker.com because if you are doing the research anyway… ;)

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The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Kasmira Hall, and Isaac Kaplan-Woolner, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. Michelle Shireen Muri is the executive producer and this pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy

Episode Transcription

Truth Telling and Reparations with Dr. David Ragland

Michelle Shireen Muri: 

This is Michelle Shireen Muri. I'm your host and fellow traveler on The Ethical Rainmaker podcast, exploring topics we don't often visit in nonprofits and philanthropy, including the places we can step into our power or step out of the way. 

In this work of community-centric fundraising and nonprofits, we must strive to deal with the burdens of our past, our racism, greed, and especially enslavement - with injustices rooted in wealth creation through oppression, war, and other extractive practices and economies. Most of these injustices are firmly rooted in protecting the supremacy of white people - aka white supremacy. 

And, we each must work towards healing or we will never be able to do our work honestly and cleanly, to create a truly better future. So to deal with all this, we're going to talk about reparations and reconciliation with my guest today, Dr. David Ragland.

Dr. Ragland is a writer, scholar, activist, and educator. He is one of the co-founders of the Truth Telling Project and is currently the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign. He recently published a series on reparations in YES! Magazine, and currently, he teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California in community, liberation, death, and ecopsychology. David's work has been rooted in his home community near Ferguson, Missouri. He weaves his personal experience of growing up in segregated St. Louis with the history of that city and nearby Ferguson, explaining how Ferguson became the new center of American racism and Black resistance.

In the early days of the Ferguson Uprising, David co-founded the Truth Telling Project so that marginalized voices could be heard and move society to lay a groundwork for healing, reconciliation, and social transformation. Recently, Georgetown University's Advocacy Lab included Dr. Ragland's research as part of the most important research on advocacy in the last 40 years. David was recently inducted into the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College. He served as the Senior Bayard Rustin Fellow at the Fellowship for Reconciliation and as a board member for the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Dr. Ragland, it is such an honor to have you here with us today. Thank you so much for being here on The Ethical Rainmaker.

David Ragland:

Thank you for having me.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

I'm wondering if you'll just give our listeners a little bit of background on what is the Truth Telling Project.

David Ragland:

Sure. So the Truth Telling Project essentially is a truth process or hearing that we created to respond to police violence, particularly for people initially in Ferguson and the surrounding community who experienced police violence through the protest in Ferguson, and then through people across the country who had experienced police violence. We were interested in a... not in the traditional way the truth and reconciliation process has worked, but in some of the other aspects of what happens, and that's healing. We wanted folk to be able to tell their stories. In so many communities around the world, as you know, telling your truth can be a death sentence.

David Ragland:

Can lead to further harm, can lead to reprisals, and it's a fundamental human right to be able to tell your truth about abuse, about corruption, so on and so forth. So we created a process for which folks who had experienced police violence could tell their stories, and we worked with the Greensboro Truth Commission to establish a process. We worked with folks who worked in South Africa and all over the world working on truth commissions. And we had testimony in this sacred, ceremonial framework where the entire community showed up for days and days to listen to testimony and to hear each other's story, to affirm each other. We turned that into an online learning platform called It's Time to Listen that people can still access now, and we're now revamping and adding new stories to.

 

David Ragland:

Some of those stories are in the Library of Congress. When Tamir Rice's brother came to Ferguson and told his story, StoryCorps was there and listened to his story along with Mike Brown's sisters. Those stories also are in the Library of Congress as well as others. We wanted to create a testimony for the point in time when justice will be served so people can see the depth of humanity that people are losing when they lose a family member... Sometimes the only narrative you see is the narrative of the officials’.

David Ragland:

We're dealing with this right now.We just got the result of the Chauvin trial. Although he was found guilty on all charges, we don't know what's going to happen next, and that's the thing...

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right. We don't know what his sentencing is.

David Ragland:

Yeah, yeah. Also, what reprisals? What are going to be the responses from police officers and law enforcement? Whenever there's the seeming... like whenever there is the sense of justice… But at the same time, as the results were being released, a Black girl, Makiya Bryant, was being murdered. By the same police that she called for her protection.

David Ragland:

So we think it's really important to tell the truth, right? We think that it's really important for stories to be heard, and we think community processes and community should lead that. It shouldn't be some overarching government who has an interest in maintaining the order leading that process.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

So in this deep work of repair and reconciliation, how is it that you first became involved?

David Ragland:

I mean, well, August 9th... Yeah. I tell this story a lot, but it's my mom's birthday. It's also my nephew's birthday. I was a faculty member of Bucknell at the time, and I... Actually, I don't tell this part, but I was like... Ever since I went away to college, I was one of those people who I just was like, "All right. I'm gone." You know what I mean? Like I'm doing my own thing in the world, and if... For various reasons, I didn't necessarily want to come home. I was talking to my mom the day before, and I was like, "Should I come home?" She's like, "Yeah. If you're asking me, come home."

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah, for her birthday.

David Ragland:

So right then... to send you something, but I booked a ticket the night before and came home to St. Louis.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Wow.

David Ragland:

That morning, Mike Brown was killed, I had just landed when he had gotten killed, and I didn't know. I didn't learn about it until later in the day. I think someone told me about it, and I was numb because it was just part of the fabric. It was a part of life. It was like a part of the expectation. I have been stopped many times by police. Thank goodness I'm alive. I don't even know how because I'm not the nicest person when I encounter authority. I'm not cursing them out, but I'm not... I've always had a distrust of authority.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

I mean, some people may even call it like... When somebody says they're authority, you're like, "Okay. Eff you." You know?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah.

David Ragland:

I think I really got involved the night that Mike Brown was killed. I wasn't at a protest. It was after my family had a dinner, and we talked about it in my family.

I remember the chef of my favorite Ethiopian restaurant in St. Louis who's a good friend of mine came to my parent's house and made a meal. But later that night, I was hanging out with a friend, and I was telling him about a course that I was teaching at Bucknell. It was called Education for Peace and Justice. And that I just took a group of students to DC to observe a protest at the Israeli Embassy because that was the summer that... or one of the summers or one of the times when Israeli made a major incursion into Gaza. It was horrific destruction, and it was some pretense that Israel used.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

My friend turned and looked at me and said, "We got our own Gaza right here," and something just snapped at me. After that, every day, I was going to the protest, and I was initially going to... I was going to mourn and talk to people. Then, I started thinking, "maybe I'll write something." This was over a couple of days, right, because...

Like I had originally bought a ticket for two weeks, and the ticket just kept getting longer and longer, and then because Kajieme Powell... a week later because Kajieme Powell was killed across the street from our parents' house. When he was killed, there was a standoff between the police and people in my community, and I was standing outside in front of my parents' house, wondering what was going to happen, like imagining things are going to get as crazy as they would get in Ferguson because we were less than a mile away from Ferguson because people try to act like Ferguson is not St. Louis, but it is. People in my neighborhood shop. That's the grocery shopping in Ferguson.

When Mike Brown was killed, my mom was driving down West Florissant, like trying to get through, but traffic because of... and a friend, a colleague called. He asked me, "What are you doing?" I was like, "Well, you know, I'm going to protest." He's like, "No, no. What are you doing?" In that moment too, that was a second moment, and so it was then that I really got on the phone and connected with some activists. I went to high school with Cori Bush, and I saw her in the protest. She, myself, and other folks started the Truth Telling Project.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

The recently elected Cori Bush.

David Ragland):

Yes, Congresswoman Cori Bush. Yeah.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right.

David Ragland:

So we started this thing because we were also interested in a truth process and the importance of a truth process in Ferguson at that particular moment to address ongoing, continuous racist police violence. That was just the tip of the iceberg and supported by American capitalism and so much more.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Wow. So that was really your entry into... when your friend said, "What are you really doing? What are you actually doing?" That was it. You were headed in a direction, but that sounds like a turning point.

David Ragland:

I've always been an activist. I've always been going to the protest, and fist up in the air, and disrupting since George Bush stole the election. That's been me, but Ferguson was in my backyard. It was me.I'm George Floyd. I'm Michael Brown. I'm Sandra Bland. That's family.

Michelle Shireen Muri:  

We’re talking with Dr. David Raglund of The Truth Telling Project, right now on The Ethical Rainmaker. Find links to Dr. Raglund’s work in the show notes at www.theeticalrainmaker.com

Michelle Shireen Muri:

So you have been doing this reconciliation work, and I'm wondering what you might share with us about how we might employ these practices of truth telling and reconciliation in the nonprofit world at large or even as we generally move through life and work.

David Ragland:

I mean, the truth is I don't think it's reconciliation work. I think to reconcile, we have to really be careful about language even though its meaning is profound.

David Ragland:

To many people, it feels like its basic definition, which is to bring things together that were originally... to bring something that's opposed, to gather that was originally in some kind of relationship.

David Ragland:

If you ask me, an oppressive relationship is not a relationship. It's a dynamic. Yeah. I mean, sure. It's dialectic, right? Master, slave. It is violence. So I think a relationship is something where people are in conversation and that there are people trying to work on power dynamics, and people are trying to work things out, and people who have power are giving it up. Albeit some people might say, "Well, that’s a just relationship," but I think that we have to redefine even the basic words, but I do think my work if people... I would say if people want to get into truth telling, and I think... So I think it is training one's self to hear the stories and the truth shared from folk who we don't normally believe to a knowledge that is the truth, right? We live in a society dominated by men and White folk, and the truth has been shaped from that direction.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right.

David Ragland:

What does it look like to hear the truth that actually has made this world work? All of the inventions, all of the labor, all of everything that has been capitalized on and stolen. Like, to be about truth telling is to support human rights and human dignity. It is to support indigenous rights. It is to support the rights of migrants. It is to support the rights of Black folk, and women, and queer folk, and trans folks, and to hear their stories, and to listen to and support the needs of sex workers. That's what truth telling is, is to support activist work. It is to be willing to upend a world that's built on mis-truth. It is to say this system is effed up and not respect it. It is to show no respect to a system that does not respect human life. That's the work of truth telling.

TOPIC: REPARATIONS

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Thank you. You told me in our pre-interview, our conversation beforehand that you're particularly interested and focused on reparations. I'm wondering if you might define reparations for us and tell us a little bit more about your passion around reparations and what that really means.

David Ragland:

Sure. Reparations is the repair of moral and material harm. The United Nations has created five areas of reparations. Compensation, right, to pay back base as a payment, right, for that harm, for the duress, the trauma, unpaid labor, right? Stolen labor. Kidnapping. All of that, right? Then, there's restitution to return what was stolen, and that can be land. For indigenous people, the return of land. That could also be sovereignty. For Black folk, we can think about the millions and millions of acres, right, that White communities and places like Tulsa, Greenwood, East St. Louis, on and on, like the whole Red Summer. Elaine, Arkansas stole from Black folk. The entire Great Negro Migration was really escape from southern terrorism and really running Black people off land.

David Ragland:

Then, there is healing, which is a mental, physical, material healing and spiritual healing that is a result or needed because of intergenerational trauma and violence perpetrated particularly against Black folk. I'm even talking about the entire epistemological disposition, or shifting, or forcing a whole new world view on a person, like, "I'm kidnapping you. Kuta Kinte. Now, your name is Toby. Your religion is Christianity.And you can't play drum no more. You can't cook the food you ate no more. Your kids are going to be slaves, and their kids are going to be slaves.”

Michelle Shireen Muri :

And they will learn nothing of your culture previously because it will be outlawed for you to practice it.

David Ragland:

Yeah.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

It will be not allowed. It would be disallowed for you to pass down anything that you remember from your ancestors so that in a couple of generations, your children and grandchildren, great grandchildren know nothing of their origin or their home of origin.

David Ragland:

When we give you Christianity, we'll give you a bastardized version. The Anglican Slave Bible of 1808 that's propagated in the Caribbean and also in some Southern states had what? 14 chapters because they eliminated every mention of freedom, liberation, emancipation, right, from the Bible.

David Ragland:

And even like the whole papal bull with the doctrine of discovery. It was spiritual theft at the highest order. And then there's satisfaction, which is about culture shifting, and education, and monument building, right, to try to shift this, and that's happening in Elaine, Arkansas. They had a truth process, and they're doing a reparations process. Then, there's guarantees of non-repeat. How do you transform and shift laws and culture so this shit don't happen no more?

So these dimensions. Compensation, restitution, satisfaction, guarantees of non-repeat and healing. These five areas. N'COBRA, the National Coalition for Black for Reparations in America, and NAARC, the National African-American Reparations Commission, they all recognize these five areas as full reparations. NAARC describes it a little bit differently, but it corresponds with their 10 principles. And these five areas, for me, speak to this march that some abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, were engaged in. I believe it is part of this spiritual work of ending slavery... where slavery was not just the law saying, "You're free now," but it is like not recreating slavery in the penal system or not recreating forms of slavery and capitalism or debt peonage, right, and all of these other ways that the slavery and the institutions that are created continued.

David Ragland:

So abolition is also about ending the systems of slavery in our minds, in our hearts. When you see Beckys and Bretts call the cops or harass Black folk, or Asian folk, or any non-White folk in their community for walking around, right, that is their inner slave patrol, and that is the way that the Slave Fugitive Act essentially made its home in people's hearts and minds that Black folks should be observed and controlled by any means necessary. So when we talk about abolition in this most, we're not just talking about abolishing the police, but we're talking about abolishing the police in our heads and in our hearts.

So I think that reparations is a new... Well, my friend, Woullard Lett of N'COBRA, says reparations is the new abolition. So he encourages people. Now, we encourage people to be a reparationist.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Interesting. I haven't heard that yet.

David Ragland:

Yeah, people have been... That term is about 20, 30 years old now, reparationist.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Reparationist. Got it. Again, we were talking earlier about how things are changing in this moment. Can you speak a little bit to what's been changing in the conversation now about reparations? Especially for those of us who are new reparationists.

David Ragland:

Sure. I mean, in this particular moment, let me just speak to the amazing work of our congress folk who have been able to get H.R. 40 out of committee. It hasn't quite yet passed the House. We need more co-sponsors before it can pass, but it's huge for it to be out of committee.

Michelle Shireen Muri: 

HR 40 is proposed legislation - the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. The legislation, which was first introduced nearly 30 years ago, establishes a commission to examine slavery and discrimination in the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies. It refers to the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, to freed slaves, by General Sherman, in 1865. In the US there has never been significant truth and reconciliation actions taken for enslavement or for native american genocide, as there have been in other countries like South Africa has, for apartheid. 

David Ragland:

Let me just say that this is the most vibrant moment for reparations in our time, and I remember first following reparations when Randall Robinson published his book, The Debt. That was right around the time when he sued... He and others, Charles Ogletree, sue corporations for their... Insurance companies and I believe banks for insuring slave holders or holding accounts, slavery rights, stuff like that. In this moment, universities, colleges, seminaries are dedicating money to reparations and doing studies. In this moment, national congregations are creating reparations policy. In this moment, people are turning back over land to indigenous folks.

David Ragland:

In this moment, White folk, White body persons as Resmaa Manekem would say are doing wealth transfers in the parity of spirit. In this moment, people are committing to be reparationist and committing to reparations as a spiritual practice. At the same time, this is one of the most vibrant moments for the discussion of reparations, and I've never seen the proliferation of more reparations organizations, and that's wonderful.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Wow. Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that. I was about to ask what good work you are seeing in the nonprofit spaces or it could be really anywhere around reconciliation and reparation. I know you're also involved personally in some projects around things like land sovereignty and intentional community.

David Ragland:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, so the good work that I'm seeing is that philanthropies are really looking at the roots of philanthropy as rooted in human rights abuses and colonization, and looking at that history to try to reevaluate ways in which philanthropy doesn't get at the issues that they're supposed to get.

David Ragland:

Some are using reparative justice frameworks as ways to think about providing support, and the work in truth telling has been supported by organizations like Life Comes From It that has been really supportive in this way. But also Edgar Villanueva has liberation fund, like a reparations new fund that he just announced, right?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right. Right, the Liberated Capital Fund as part of the Decolonizing Wealth Project. That's right.

David Ragland:

Yeah.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Shout out to Edgar who will be on a future season soon.

David Ragland:

That's dopeness. Yeah. So that work is happening, right? That, and I'm the director of the Grassroots Reparations Campaign, which is a number of organizations Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, N'COBRA, lots of different organizations all love to movement for human integrity, right?

David Ragland:

They're part of it. Psychoanalysis for social responsibility. So lots of groups came to be a part of our reparations work. When I was the Senior Bayard at Fellow, at Fellowship of Reconciliation, which is one of the oldest interfaith organizations in the country, it's actually the organization that the ACLU came out of.

David Ragland:

So when I was the Rustin Bayard at Fellow, I helped to launch the Grassroots Reparations Campaign, and that campaign was targeted at faith-based organizations to look at faith-based organizations' role in chattel slavery in the world in which slavery created.

David Ragland:

In that effort, we created Reparations Sunday. Well, we didn't create it. N'COBRA created it. So we put two dates on a calendar and called them Reparations Sunday.

David Ragland:

Every year, there are two Sundays in which faith-based groups around the country have services around reparations and work to support Black-led grassroots organizations near them. If you go to grassrootsreparations.org, you can see those dates, and part of the mission of that work was to create a culture of reparations. And the reason why we want to create a culture is because we saw the way in which civil rights legislation like floundered, passed, was fought, backlash. For example, if you look at the Fair Housing Rights Act, that act has basically been used to sponsor decades of gentrification, even on the Obama administration, where Black folk and Black communities are less likely to get a loan than White folks with worse credits and less cash on hand.

David Ragland:

That's according to the Center for Investigative Journalism. So what do we do? How do we create a culture? The culture is so that people can own this history not just as something that people who are different than you did. If you are White in this country, you benefited from slavery. You benefit from the world that slavery created, and police violence, and all of it. So you owe not as a blame thing, but as a part of a culture.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right.

David Ragland:

It’s a part of inheritance, which has good and bad. So as a spiritual practice, we ask people to connect with your ancestors and help heal... let it wash all over you. Feel  the grief of the way they got into schools, and got GI bills, and got land grants, and Black folk who labored and enslaved didn't get it.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right.

David Ragland:

Or got red-lined, or got beat up by police trying to get decent housing and decent schools.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Or when after reconstruction, Black folks' organizations set up public schooling in America as we knew it. But right after reconstruction, that money was removed from Black public schools, right? It's separate, but equal.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Let the grief of benefiting from harm wash over you and let it change, and see how we can actually make this country stand for values that it says it stands for.

David Ragland:

Like reparations for Black folk, indigenous folk in this country could actually mean accountability of America in the world.

David Ragland:

You know that other countries are looking at us like a puppet, but not a republic, which is a very derogatory term in itself because this country always has been more marketing than content. What would it be like if we were actually accountable? 

David Ragland:

But that can be hard for the psyche of White folk because White folk... Most White folks in this country now are descendants from people who immigrated from somewhere escaping something.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Some kind of distress.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Some kind of economic injustice.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

But then, came to the United States and were given a salve  of whiteness.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Rather than actual acknowledgement as a human being, America said, "Come over here. At least you're not a nigger. You get some work if you help us keep them oppressed."

David Ragland:

And people suffering from distress accepted that so they could survive and put food on the table for their family.

David Ragland:

So how do we address that history and heal from it, and be part of repair that could be good for White folk too?

Michelle Shireen Muri: 

We’re talking about harm and reparations right now on The Ethical Rainmaker with my guest Dr. David Raglund. You can subscribe to this show and join our patreon at The Ethical Rainmaker dot Com. 

Michelle Shireen Muri:

And you know one of the things that you talked to me about when we were sharing with each other is we also could stop. Like you were saying earlier, we could stop some of the practices that continue to damage people all over the world. We could be a good actor and the rest of the world, right? You told me a fact I didn't know which is that every country in Central America but one has been...

David Ragland:

But two.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

But two, oh, sorry, has been occupied by the United States?

David Ragland:

Invaded by.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Invaded by the United States. Thank you, and then I was sharing my personal story, which is that my family had to leave Iran in the middle of the night during the revolution in 1978 because of US involvement. But all of that, all of that is about oil. It's about oil and religion, but oil, and in Central America, again, more resources. All of that is in service to the United States.

David Ragland:

The Balfour Treaty, and not just the United States, but Great Britain...

The Balfour Treaty was really the same like, "Let's put Jewish people in Iran." Did you ask the Iranians?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

It is just European, and Germany, and imperialism all over the world.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah, that's right.

David Ragland:

There's so much.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

There's so much. There's so much there.

David Ragland:

There's so much.

David Ragland:

I mean, I think we're at this moment, and I think COVID showed us this, right, where... You know those maps that they showed where there was less pollution, right, because of COVID and we see animals that we hadn't seen before making a comeback?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah, yeah. Those are some of my favorite moments from the pandemic is hearing reports of things that we've never seen before come back, or species that we thought had been extinct returning, or air clearing up, or fish returning to certain places. Really amazing. Really amazing.

David Ragland:

The planet was trying to tell us something. Not only we are on the verge of something bad, but if we give it a break, if we slow down our extraction, what the possibilities are. You know? But it's not just extraction of the planet. It's people. You know? Well, we are of the planet.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah, that's right.

David Ragland:

This is our home. We're not from anywhere else.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

We are certainly, by the way, not from Mars. So all these colonization conversations. Mars is like…

David Ragland:

I'm opposed. Let us know venture capital dollars or impact dollars should go to this kind of efforts because if we can't get it right on this planet, we're going to destroy everything. We're at a critical moment. And we have some choices to make.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yes, we do.

David Ragland:

Do we stand up for accountability, or do we say, "Oh, January 6 wasn't that bad?"

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah.

David Ragland:

Do we tell the truth about history? Right? Do we hold people accountable? Do we demand that people change? Right? Do we demand and say like, "Look, the basic piece about citizenship is that you have to respect people in that they're persons and their belonging?"

Michelle Shireen Muri:

As we wrap up, It's certainly been an inspiration to hear from you, and hear about the work you're involved in, and hear from your perspective. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you'd love to talk about? I know that we...

David Ragland:

The final principle of reparations to me is it impact investment.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

All right. Say more.

David Ragland:

And the philanthropic issue. So guarantees of non-repeat. That's something I have a difficult time talking about, and remember, I mentioned these five areas that the UN laid out as repair.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right. Right.

David Ragland:

The guarantees of non-repeat is the fifth one, and you can look it up online. Just search "guarantees of non-repetition," or you can look at the YES! Magazine article series that I wrote on reparations. That's the one area that I didn't write on. I actually drafted a version, and they kept asking me for it. I never gave it because... You know how you just weren't there yet?

David Ragland:

I think maybe talking about it helps me too, but obviously, like they described, guarantees of non-repetition is how do we not get back in a situation that got us here? How do we transform the systems? I think that that's a decolonial project. Meaning, how do we shift our system so that it honors people's dignity, and that the system and that the persons who help support and maintain the system shift their allegiances and support financially and otherwise to corporations, subcontractors, politicians who invest in bad economics, who don't support indigenous rights, who don't support women's rights, who don't support Black folks right, who don't support clean sourcing, who don't support… For me, guarantees of non-repeat is about unraveling ourselves from the complicity of slavery in the world that it created, or I will say from the complicity of slavery colonization in the world that they created. And that means, what's in your wallet? what's in your investment portfolio? Are we divesting in Lockheed Martin?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Are we divesting in war?

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Right.

David Ragland:

Because they have interlocking hierarchies or interlocking injustices that we experience here and everywhere else. Are we divesting in Nestle who are stealing water in Detroit and helping create a commodities market where marginalized communities won't have water? Are we divesting in nuclear power? Are investing in Black land sovereignty? Indigenous land sovereignty. People who are trying to steward the land in ways that multiple generations would be able to survive.

.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

That's right.

David Ragland:

And so guarantees of non-repeat is about not repeating and building a just future so that we're not complicit because money is just not transactional. It's spiritual. It's cultural.It's something that gives us security and safety. It's connected to who we are, how we're seen in the world. If we spend it on injustice and don't think twice, there'll be a time when we face our creator or whatever your cosmology is, and it may not be heaven and hell. I don't know. But when the moment for accounting comes, do we say, "Well, I didn't know I was complicit," or, "I was just a little complicit," or, "They told me not to worry about what I was invested in?"

David Ragland:

I really believe that in this moment in time, so much justice can be done with the wealth that was used to cause so much suffering. But either way, we're going to get free.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Yeah, that's right. Dr. David Ragland, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today on The Ethical Rainmaker. It is such an honor to hear about your work and such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much. For all of our listeners, there will be links to everything that Dr. Ragland cited in the show notes when the episode releases. So thank you again so much for all of the work that you're doing in the world.

David Ragland:

Thank you for having me.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Oh, absolutely. Just my pleasure completely.

David Ragland:

You keep doing this work too.

Michelle Shireen Muri:

Thank you. Thank you so much. 

Michelle Shireen Muri: 

And that’s it for The Ethical Rainmaker. I’m your host Michelle Shireen Muri. You can find show notes and transcripts of this and every episode, at THE ETHICAL RAINMAKER.COM

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The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Kasmira Hall, and Isaac Kaplan-Woolner, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. I am your executive producer and this pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy, my fundraising consulting collective, which you can find at freedom-conspiracy.com. 

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