A Conversation with Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam

Part 3:  Prospects for Reparations in the Trump Era

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam speaking in Juneau, Alaska in 2022 during a process in which the PC (U.S.A.) offered an apology and reparations for the racist closure of Memorial Presbyterian Church in 1963. Photo courtesy of PC(U.S.A.) communications.

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam is the Ministry Director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).  Rev. Pat Jackson (Interwoven Congregations executive director) and Roxane Rucker (former Interwoven Board member) conducted a series of personal, indepth interviews across 2023 and 2025. This is Part 2 in the three part series.

Rev. Pat Jackson (he/him):  The climate in the United States has changed significantly since we first began this dialogue in 2023.  The second Trump administration has been in office a few months and is aggressively rolling back initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion.  Is there any point in talking about reparations in this context?  

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam (he/him):  Reparations are more possible now than reparations would have been had Donald Trump's opponent won the election. That is not to say, however, that current leadership is going to make the work of repair any easier than it was under any previous president or hoped contender for whom “race,” “justice,” and “diversity” has proven to be more political marketing than moral commitment.

Pat:  Wow!  It surprises me to hear you say that.

Jermaine:  And this is not because Donald Trump is a friend of reparations, because he is not.  But I say that because Donald Trump's opponent was opposed to Afro-American reparations, as was Joe Biden, as was Barack Obama, as were both Bushes, and on down the line.  

I'm reminded of Henry McNeal Turner who was an activist, political leader, and among the first African Americans to call for reparations for the economic deprivations produced through generational chattel slavery. He called for reparations out of his anger and frustration over African Americans being subjected to lynching with impunity.  Some researchers have cited Henry McNeal Turner as an example of how many African Americans call for reparations only when there is a pervasive atmosphere of political despair. That means we live in a moment in time—a moment which is certainly characterized by the unmitigated (but not unprecedented) disaster of current national leadership, when there is no reason to continue to pretend that there is a better situation under which reparations would become more possible. The time is now.

When I think about the “impossibility,” so to speak, of reparations, I think of Gil Scott-Heron who wrote a catchy song called “Whitey on the Moon.”  In this song, Gil Scott Heron is very clear that at the same time as you have generations of people living in squalor, with rats and roaches biting people and their children as they sleep in public housing, you have White men who can figure out how to engineer a journey from Earth to the moon and back.  And the question that the composer intends to raise is:  If we can figure out how to do something as difficult as space travel, then it is very clear that we can resolve the economic, social, and political legacies of racial slavery, Indian removal, land thefts, and Jim Crow in historical time.  

And now today, people should pay attention to the ways in which current reductions in force and other arbitrary austerity measures relate to funding tax cuts for the wealthy and at least one of Elon Musk's wildest dreams which is a human colony on Mars. Key individuals hope to enrich themselves and also make the government an instrument of their own sci-fi dreams while the average individual and family struggles to pay for rent, bread, eggs, milk, and insulin. The contrast between tax cuts for billionaires and those working to soon count themselves among their growing number and the more than 60 percent of U.S. Americans living pay-check-to paycheck should not simply make people angry enough to pursue economic democracy in earnest until it is finally achieved.  It should remind people that Indigenous Americans and Afro-Americans are simultaneously burdened and distracted by historic harms and are also targets of the current class war. The upswing, however, is that should all U.S. Americans join the call for reparations now, doing so will lift the morale and increase the number of hands on deck that are fully available to help the rest of the nation turn the tables on the larger economic war that is always being waged simultaneously against citizenry who have historically been relied upon to misidentify their real comrades.

Pat:    Do you still see House Resolution 40 as a vehicle to move reparations forward?

Jermaine:  I'm encouraged by the fact that Congresswoman Ayanna Presley is now championing H.R. 40.  I think the hard work that we must do together is to persuade one another to look our history square in the face and realize that these reparations are necessary and possible.  If reparations are done in the appropriate way -- both in the sense of what is owed to the people calling for reparations, and in the sense of preparing the public to understand how this is good for all of us -- if we can do both of those things, then reparations will do a great work to actually bind this country together. 

There's plenty of labor to organize in the ministry of repair and people should find the part of that work that is most appropriate for the skill set that they have. Some may do the work of persuasion, others do the work of number crunching and economics.  Not everybody's job is to yell on the street corner with a bullhorn about the need for reparations. But it is without a doubt somebody's job, too.

Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam speaking at the Matthew 25 National Summit in 2024. Photo courtesy of PC (U.S.A.) Communications.

Pat:   What do you think is the potential role of congregations in the movement for reparations?

Jermaine: Congregations are pivotal to this work. Reparations involve a deeply moral concern that strikes at the heart of what it means to be a person capable of moral reflection, activity, and transformation; and congregations are ground zero for our moral development in this society.  But congregations have also been ground zero for persuading people that Christianity is about how the blood of Jesus exempts you from contributing to ending historic problems in historic time when those problems concern reparations to Afro-Americans and respecting Indigenous sovereignties. In this way, congregations are both part of the problem and part of the solution.

Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, MN (Photo courtesy of PC(U.S.A. Communications.)

If congregations can acknowledge that we once helped people feel good about ignoring this problem, that we've falsified our theology and blasphemed the Holy Spirit in the process, we can then be part of reorienting entire families, entire communities, and entire denominations to recognize that God has given us the power to solve the historic problem of the economic legacies of slavery in historical time.  The Center for Repair is in the final stages right now of creating a video with Oak Grove Presbyterian Church in Bloomington, Minnesota where church members and members of the elder board reflect on how they went from No to Yes, on reparations.  If that congregation’s faith-filled process can become a witness to other congregations, allowing them to become public witnesses to impossibilities now becoming possibilities as well, then I am certain that more congregations will begin to resemble something like the body of Christ in the infamous year of 2025 and beyond!