It's Impossible to Understand 'Watchmen' Without First Understanding 'Redfordations'

In the first episode of HBO’s new series Watchmen, Regina King’s character Angela Abar is speaking to a group of schoolchildren, describing her new business, a bakery, when someone asks her if it was paid for by something called “Redfordations.” We’ve never heard this word before, but Topher, Angela’s son, is immediately angered, jumping across the room and tackling the kid who dared to ask the question. The word, obviously, sounds super close to ‘reparations,’ but ever-so-slightly different. So, what does it mean?

As established in the first episode of HBO’s Watchmen, Robert Redford (yes, the actor) has been President of the United States for nearly 30 years; he’s a left-leaning candidate who likely helped the country re-establish itself after the squid incident that ended the graphic novel. We also saw the first episode depict the real-life 1921 Tulsa Massacre, which saw hundreds of black people killed in a horrific act of racial violence.

Showrunner Damon Lindelof specifically explained the nature of Redfordations in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There’s also this legislation that’s passed, Victims Of Racial Violence Legislation, which is a form of reparations that are colloquially known as ‘Redford-ations.'” he said. “It’s a lifetime tax exemption for victims of, and the direct descendants of, designated areas of racial injustice throughout America’s history, the most important of which, as it relates to our show, is the Tulsa massacre of 1921.”

The tax angle of Redfordations makes sense with a scene that took place in the first episode as well. When a suspected Seventh Kavalry member is being interrogated by Tim Blake Nelson’s character, Looking Glass, in ‘The Pod,’ he’s asked a key question: Do you believe every American should pay taxes? When the suspect answers yes, it’s treated as a red flag.

In the past, Lindelof has also talked about his admiration for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” In Coates’ essay, he specifically references the 1921 Tulsa Massacre as one of the historical cases explaining why reparations can and should be paid out to descendants of people who were enslaved in the past.

“When I say that I read “The Case for Reparations,” that wasn’t an academic exercise. I had an emotionally profound shift. I knew all this was happening. But to have the story so personalized in the context of Coates’s writing was moving,” Lindelof told Gen, a publication under the Medium umbrella. “I like to think of myself as an educated person interested in United States history, and the fact that I got to be 42 years old and had never heard about it; or even worse, had heard about it and just ignored it… Those feelings compelled me to tell this story. I brought together a writer’s room, where the white dudes — there were only four of us out of 12 people — had to sit back. I had to hear some hard truths.”

That being established, it’s also likely that the term is used with a negative connotation, much in the way that the kid in class used it. “He’s not racist,” Angela tells Topher in the car, following the classroom incident. “But he’s off to a good start.” This infers that the ‘Redfordations’ remarks are often treated as dog whistle-type racial slurs.

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