Round 3 Transcript for April Baer

April Baer (AB): I'm April Baer, this is Talent Quest Round Three.

Artist Damali Ayo wants to fix things.

Her specialty is a certain kind of gonzo performance art, enticing people to think about subjects that they might normally consider… squishy. Mostly racial issues. But some other stuff too. And I've got several things I want to ask her about today.

Damali, welcome.

Damali Ayo (DA): Hey, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

AB: Did you see the Democrats presidential debate the other night, the one that CNN broadcast, where they--they took all the questions from YouTube?

DA: I watched part of it.

AB: It was 2 hours.

DA: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had to get in my reality TV, too.

AB: You know at one point… ah…. reparations came up--reparations for African-Americans for slavery, and I kind of thought of you immediately. First of all what did you think of what was said?

DA: We'll you know I went on YouTube to specifically re-watch that portion of the debate and um I love the way that question came across. I love that the guy just said "You know, can you guys handle this or not?" And then I watched three candidates completely dodge the word "reparations. They dodged that thing like it was the biggest thunderstorm ever to happen.

And I--I found a very typical answer: which is, "You know we don't really want to pay reparations for slavery. Let's just make this whole race thing better". And then they even threw in some poor whites to boot. So, to me, they stopped talking about reparations as soon as they opened their mouths.

AB: Well what about like what John Edwards & Barack Obama were saying, that you know "No, I don't want to talk about reparations, but there are definitely some inequalities in society that we should probably be getting to"?

DA: Yeah. All that is totally true, but reparations, in itself, is a very specific thing, and this is what I find as I talk about it and I do my performance piece about it, and stuff I have coming up about it. Um, People don't get that reparations is a specific financial apology for something that happened in the past. It has nothing to do with all the fallout from that, and all the racism and all the inequality. All that is true as well and we have a Constitution to help with that, supposedly, but you know, uh, the reparations bit is a very specific thing.

AB: The reason I thought of you is because there was something I saw you do… a couple of months ago at a live stage show. There--and it was an auditorium, a roomful of about 300, 400 people, and you were onstage talking. And. Um. It was a little tiny exercise in reparations. Could you explain what you were doing?

DA: Yeah, of course. It comes from a performance piece I do called "Living Flag". It's a street performance, and so I go out on the street and I collect reparations from white people as they pass by, and I pass it out to black people. It's panhandling for reparations. And so--um. So, when I'm in a crowd like when I'm onstage and I'm doing conversation, I can't you know sit with my can, so I just have all the white people in audience take out a dollar. And Look at the dollar, think about where it came from. Did they earn it or you know, what's its history? Uh, was it given to them? And then I have them to ha—I ask them to hand it to the black person sitting closest to them. Now of course when you saw me do this we were in Portland! And that meant th—

AB: Portland, Oregon!

DA: Yeah, there were only like three black people in the audience.

AB: Well and I—I- I have to, I have to break in here. Because, as one of those people sitting in the audience, I could just feel the room freeze. And I wasn't sure what I should do! I'm sitting there—

DA: One of those white people

AB: Well yeah, I'm reaching for my—in case anybody didn't know…. I'm white. I'm reaching for my wallet because – I dunno, I thought, you know, this is kind of a theater experience! And there's probably going to be something fun at the end! But -- as I reached for the dollar and I realized what was happening, … um … I froze too. And I just felt this—I had this feeling I wasn't sure what was going to happen.

DA: Mm-hmmm.

AB: What does this mean if I don't-- If I do give this, what does it mean if I don't give it. What feeling are you trying to get people to confront when you ask them to do that?

DA: Well what I found is that, uh maybe just the fact that this country has been really wrapped up with capitalism from its very beginnings—um, that when you bring an issue down to a level of money for people it makes it incredibly real. And so when you say to somebody "Give away a dollar"—it's a dollar! You know in the scheme of things for most people in that audience it wasn't that much money. But it becomes so symbolic, and it's got George Washington on it, and it becomes this whole process of saying I'm actually going to admit that I owe this to someone else or maybe admit that this dollar, you know, came from someone else's ancestors' hard work. And maybe it's NOT mine, and maybe I'm afraid to put my money where my mouth is. Everything comes up when you say, "Put your money on the table."

AB: Wai—so are you saying my money is not mine?

DA: Well, I mean I think to some extent, you know the money in this country has been made, you know, on the backs of people who were never paid. And so once that's—that that never paid thing has stayed. You know and so yeah, I think at some level there's a portion of that dollar you didn't earn.

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