AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. And our colleagues at NPR's Code Switch have been looking at a question that is tied to this day, and that is, who in America actually gets compensated when the government wrongs them? Gene Demby is cohost of Code Switch, and he joins us now to talk about this very question. Hi, Gene.
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: Thank you for having me, Ailsa.
CHANG: Oh, thanks for being here. So I just want to start in a place that may feel kind of unexpected as it relates to this term reparations. And that is the antiweaponization fund. That's the fund that the Trump administration announced last month. It never happened.
DEMBY: Right.
CHANG: But can you tell us how that idea connects to what you've been reporting on?
DEMBY: Right. So back in May, the Justice Department announced this nearly $1.8 billion fund that was set aside to compensate people the administration, the White House, says were wronged by the federal government. And it was strongly implied that a lot of that money could go to people pardoned for their roles in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And, Ailsa, the number itself is telling 'cause it's not around $1.8 billion, as Rebecca Nagle, who's a journalist and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, told me.
REBECCA NAGLE: I believe the exact number of the fund is 1.776 billion. To me, I read that number as intentionally being 1776.
CHANG: Ah.
DEMBY: Yeah. So we're just weeks from the country's 250th birthday, and the administration picked this number that points right back to the founding.
CHANG: OK, and so since the idea was announced last month, this fund, it's gotten a lot of heat from both Republicans and Democrats. Tell us the status of this fund right now.
DEMBY: I mean, it's in limbo, and that's the wild part. Like, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told Congress flat out...
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TODD BLANCHE: We are not moving forward with the fund.
DEMBY: But, Ailsa, he refused to put that in writing. The president kept saying he still liked the idea. And he said, quote, "if it was up to me, I'd pay them the kind of money they deserve," end quote. But then a federal judge stepped in and issued an injunction blocking this fund, and she gave the Justice Department a deadline that happens to fall on this Juneteenth to produce a sworn statement, you know, put it in writing promising that this antiweaponization fund is firmly done, scrapped.
CHANG: OK. There's been this whole saga. OK. But can you explain - just step back a little and explain how something like the antiweaponization fund ties into this larger picture of race and identity in America and to reparations.
DEMBY: Yeah, so it's because of the contrast around who gets made whole. So for decades, there's been a bill sitting in Congress, and it wouldn't even pay reparations for slavery. All it would do is study the question at the federal level what's owed after 246 years of slavery, after another century of Jim Crow and the discrimination that followed that. And that bill has been introduced over and over and over for more than 35 years, and it has never once reached the floor for a vote.
We talked with Don Tamaki. He's a lawyer who worked on California's Reparations Task Force. And his family was incarcerated in the Japanese American concentration camps, you know, that were built...
CHANG: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...By the U.S. government during World War II. His family and those like his that were imprisoned waited 46 years before they eventually got a formal apology and got financial redress from the government. But in contrast, he said...
DON TAMAKI: When it comes to Black Americans, Congress doesn't even have the will to study what happened, let alone do anything about it. So I think there's a lesson in the Japanese American redress effort about the ability of America to right its wrongs. But the corollary is that it's what's happened to reparations for Black Americans, which still remains unfulfilled.
DEMBY: And yet, on the flip, we had this proposal to compensate anyone who believes that they were prosecuted for political reasons, including January 6 defendants. And that came together fairly quickly under this administration.
CHANG: I mean, it kind of blows me away, Gene. OK, so one thing that came out of your reporting was that the money that the administration wanted to use actually is there because of what is essentially an existing mechanism for reparations. Is that right?
DEMBY: Yeah, this...
CHANG: That's wild to me.
DEMBY: This blew my mind. Like, I did not know this before going into this reporting, but the money from the antiweaponization fund that it would draw from comes from something called the Judgment Fund, which is basically the government's account for paying out settlements. And the machinery to pay those settlements, it exists in large part because Indigenous people, Native nations, spent more than a century building those tools because they had no way to sue the U.S. government, so they had to create a different legal framework and different legal mechanisms to do that.
CHANG: Wait, so are you saying, Gene, that because most Americans just don't know that history, the Trump administration can essentially borrow tools built by people seeking redress for real harm and then repurpose those tools for their own ends?
DEMBY: Exactly. I talked with a legal scholar, Maggie Blackhawk, who's Fond du Lac Band Ojibwe, and she said there's a word she uses for this pattern. It's called the boomerang.
MAGGIE BLACKHAWK: What they're doing is taking those mechanisms that people who have been harmed by the violence of the United States and turning it towards their own supporters.
CHANG: OK, so then what do you think, Gene? Is the story over in the case of the antiweaponization fund?
DEMBY: No, and that's kind of the point. The fund may be frozen, but the machinery for it is still very much in place.
CHANG: That is Gene Demby, cohost of NPR's Code Switch. Thank you so much, Gene.
DEMBY: Thank you, Ailsa. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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