*In the latest Spotlight interview, the beautiful woke Erika Alexander dishes the dirt on the racism she encountered filming the popular show “Living Single.” She says they shot on a lot where only the Black shows were produced. “We called it the ghetto,”she told me.
Her new podcast Reparations: The Big Payback, part of Charlamagne tha God’s Black Effect Series, Erika focuses on reparations and support for a 30-year-old bill in Congress to begin the conversation on compensating Black people for slavery and centuries of oppression and discrimination.
“It’s about establishing a social contract for the  deliberate destruction of an entire people and the terrorizing of us. We are the only people who got an apology from the government that says you can’t use it for reparations,” Alexander told EURweb.
Just last month, the nation’s first reparations bill was passed in Evanston, Illinois which created housing grants for some of the city’s Black families.
Erika, who works closely with Bishop William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign, believes that all Black artists should be activists:
“I don’t believe if you’re an African American artist you can divorce yourself from being an activist or an advocate… It’s who I have to be.”
Erika Alexander attributes her being woke to growing up poor and having to struggle all her young life.
“it was my childhood. My mother and father were orphans. I was one of 6 and I grew up in Hotel Starlight off route 66.”
Erika also dishes the dirt on playing Rza’s mom Linda Diggs on “Wu Tang: An American Saga” (there’s a spoiler alert in the video), the second series coming soon, how she’s dealing with being single after separating from her hubby and her new series “Run the World” on Starz by Leigh Davenport.
“It’s about four single young Black women living in Harlem,” Alexander told EURweb.
Check out the video for the full exclusive interview. Also coming up on Spotlight, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and the hilarious Bernard family from Netflix’s “Buried By the Bernards.”
Interview/article by Jazmyn Summers. Follow me @jaztalk1 on Instagram, twitter, facebook. Video editing by www.patrickhousefilms.com.
We Publish News 24/7. Don’t Miss A Story. Click HERE to SUBSCRIBE to Our Newsletter Now!
