Dr. David J. Johns is the CEO and Executive Director of the National Black Justice Collective, the nation’s only civil rights organization working at the intersection of Blackness and queerness. Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter is a sociologist, the first person to tweet #BlackLivesMatter, and author of Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation, which reimagines reparations across seven dimensions of repair. Together, in conversation with E.L. of Blackout Magazine ahead of DC Equity Week 2026, they delivered one of the most complete and human explanations of reparations this platform has ever published.
“Reparations is a love story. Not about white people loving Black people. But Black people loving themselves enough to demand publicly: these are the things that were done to me. Don’t cry for me. Pay me.”
— Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter
1. The Anti-Weaponization Fund Accidentally Proved Reparations Is Possible
The Trump administration’s Anti-Weaponization Fund proved something important. Overnight, the executive branch found at least a billion dollars to compensate people who claimed the government had wronged them. Dr. Hunter called this a “moral inversion” of reparations. Real reparations hold the government accountable for crimes it committed. This fund held the government accountable for prosecuting criminals. Still, the machinery is clearly there. Dr. Johns went further. He called it a slush fund, hush money given to insurrectionists. But the larger point landed clearly: if the will exists, the mechanism exists. The president simply has to press drive.
2. Slavery Was a Total Institution, So Reparations Must Be a Total Package
Dr. Hunter’s framework is built on one foundational truth: slavery covered every aspect of a person’s life from birth to death. It was a mental health policy. An education policy. A wealth policy. A language policy. A spiritual cosmology. Therefore, reparations must respond to every dimension slavery occupied. Dr. Hunter calls these the seven PILES: Political, Intellectual, Legal, Economic, Spatial, Social, and Spiritual reparations. Seven, he reminds us, is the number of completion. A check addresses one pile. Real repair attends to all seven.
3. Reparations Is Your Inheritance, Not a Handout
Dr. Hunter offered a reframe that changes the entire conversation. Stop calling it a policy proposal. Start calling it what it is: a trust fund the government has been holding back. Black people come into the world with an outstanding balance owed to them. They have been forced to build lives assuming they will never collect it. In response, Dr. Hunter asks: are you going after it like that? As inheritance? As birthright? A Pew Research Center poll found 77% of Black Americans support reparations. Dr. Hunter argues that number should be 100%, because if Black people are only performing at a C+ level, America cannot reach an A. Reparations is the unlock.
4. The Attack on DEI, Black History, and LGBTQ Rights Is Not New. It Is a System.
Dr. Johns rejected the framing that the current political attacks are something new. They are not. What is new is how visible the strategy has become. The same power that created anti-Black housing ordinances, gutted the Voting Rights Act, and overturned Roe v. Wade is the same power attacking DEI, drag, and critical race theory today. Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw warned about this years ago. The lesson Dr. Johns drew: language is a tool of colonization, and when we fail to name things precisely, we fall into traps that were designed for us. The antidote is precision, community, and showing up, especially for the most marginalized inside the movement.
5. Healing Is Not a Luxury. It Is the Prerequisite for Everything Else.
Pain and trauma distort our sense of reality and narrow our sense of choice. That is not a metaphor. It is a clinical and political fact. Dr. Hunter pointed to the 105th commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre as a reminder: Black people were building, investing, and thriving, and that was exactly why they were destroyed. Without repair, the nation keeps playing injured. Dr. Johns put it plainly. America is a so-called superpower on crutches, telling the world about their injuries while refusing to treat its own. As a result, communities reach for immediate relief instead of long-term healing. The work of reparations is to interrupt that cycle, one person, one community, one generation at a time.
“What if slavery is the root of all of our ills? Not only those that Black people experience in this country and throughout the diaspora. But all of us. You cannot make an entire society participate in something that immoral without enslaving everyone in it. Both the watchers and the watched. Both the buyers and the bought.”