john powell:
As Dr. Copeland Carson and Brewer get prepared for questions, I want to tell a quick story. I was with Dr. Myers and met an aboriginal man who was quite successful. He told me that as he grew up, he was prepared to live in a time that no longer existed. He talked about the dislocation of, as Dr. Copeland Carson raised it, modernity. He grew up in a traditional environment and everything changed. He was college educated and had a very good job. He felt completely dislocated, not because he did not know who his people were but rather as if he did not know where his time was. I remember trying to think: 'What is it like to be prepared to live in a world that no longer exists?' Let's start the questions and comments from with a person under 30.

Audience Member:
On the television series, "Star Trek," the Borgs say, "You will be assimilated. Prepare to be assimilated." We feel like the Borgs here in the United States. In 1972, I heard Shirley Chisholm talk about America as a tossed salad rather than a melting pot; that made sense. We have all got some of these ingredients. There seems to be some sort of resistance to it. This genetics thing reminds me of Nazi Germany. It could happen again the way that they tried to genetically eliminate us or take away our culture. I wonder, especially when you look at these knuckleheads who are in office today, these neo-Nazis. These people are trying to get rid of dissent. Is there a way that we can make this connection to find each other, because I'm still trying to find me and my people too.

Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
My point is that though our culture has experienced disconnections and dislocations, we still have one and we need to recognize what it is and build upon it. That is the foundation - you said you were looking for connections - that is the place to start.

Audience Member:
I have a question in reference to the shaping of identity in the African diaspora. I am not sure how important it is to me or to other people of African descent to know a particular genealogy in relation to ascribing descendants to particular tribes. However, hearing from social scientists, the question came up about how to shape an African-hyphenated identity in the absence of one. There was a reference to African American culture. Yesterday there were Capuera dance demonstrations with the Afro-Brazilian culture. In Canada, where I have lived, there is not a strong sense of an African Canadian identity and that harms African Canadians. There is a unified sense of we are all being harmed because we are black, but there is no sense of sharing the same French or English, sharing a Haitian or Jamaican descent, or sharing a descent from slaves or freed loyalists who escaped during the American revolution. How can black people define themselves in the absence of singular cultural institutions or a common language, common identity? Is it important to have that identity?

Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
The same is true in Minneapolis. I am a transplant here, but even when our culture is right underneath our noses, we often do not recognize it as such. Here are some examples. If there are black churches in your community, the form of worship, ritual, music, the entire esthetic experience is a place to start. There are also cultural festivals.

Nonprofit, informal, and voluntary organizations have played a key role in providing forums for us to experiment with different ways of expressing our identity; consider the Garvey movement or the Black Church. Voluntary organizations like the National Association of Negro Women do work in Africa. There are all kinds of organizations that we support and which are in our own back yards that we sometimes do not recognize as our own cultural institutions. The next time you turn on some hip-hop music or jazz, consider that learning about the history of these artistic forms is enlightening about the African-derived cultures that we have built in the Americas. These can provide a foundation for you to backtrack and understand more about their African origins.

Rose Brewer:
It takes a high degree of intentionality, especially in this very materialistic, consumer oriented culture for black people to define their identity. Histories, curriculum, how we come to grips with a common experience that might not be tangible in terms of material culture but which does affect the stances we take and the way we move in the world, these are other aspects of being that must be more understood. It is important to craft those kinds of understandings and connections. Culture is also a political stance and orientation that that should be done under that broader umbrella. So, cultural creation is not always the tangible or literal, it exists between the spaces and lines that we hone our sense of self and identity.

john powell:
The questioner also raised the question about Afro-Canadians. In Making Race, Making Nations, Anthony Marks observes that liberation struggles were muted where people were unable to create a strong, unified black identity. He mainly focuses on South Africa, the United States, and Brazil but he talks about Brazil and Canada in this way. He argues that the ability to create a strong, unified identity is important to pursuing a political agenda of emancipation, as opposed to just self-identity. In that sense, he thinks that the unified black identity in the United States has been the most successful in creating an emancipatory struggle.

Dr. Copeland Carson talks about how we are constantly making identity. In some of my writing, I talk about how in our identity there are multiple selves; not a single self. It is false to appropriate one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Tony Morison, like Dr. Copeland Carson, talks about how all Americans are African Americans. African American culture is plentiful though it is just not recognized as that. In Brazil they are better at lifting up the Brazilian culture as Afro-Brazilian culture.

One of the keys in African American culture is freedom, liberation. What's best about America is African American. When Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, he said, "Four score and seven years ago…" it was an extremely controversial speech. Why? He was not talking about the Constitution; he was talking about the Declaration of Independence because it talked about equality whereas the Constitution did not. This address was talking about slavery. In this sense, this country's impulse toward freedom and equality has largely been driven by African American demands that this country really be America. The civil rights movement created freedom, not just for African Americans, but for the whole country. It redefined freedom. One of the things that I'm most proud of in being an African American is that I think we wear the mantle of freedom and equality better than any people in this country.

Audience Member:
My mother is from Birmingham, Alabama by way of Louisiana, and I have seen the migration. My mother could not wait to leave the South and migrate north. She would have gone as far as she could to get away from the South. As I am showing more interest in my lineage, she is now just starting to talk about some of those things that she had suppressed. How do we bridge that gap? Those people in Africa are my family; we have family reunions every year. I would like for them to be included in our family reunions. They feel like family to me, so how do we bridge that gap?

Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
Many of us have had the experience of having parents or grandparents who grew up in the South who have been traumatized and have repressed many of their memories of their childhoods and their lives because they were escaping and it was too painful to remember. Now, the next generation wants to do these family tree projects and classes and interviews. When I was a youngster, my grandmother loved to tell stories. She was Gullah and it was difficult sometimes to understand what she was saying because my mother escaped and went up north. It is important to listen to stories that our elders from the South tell. They sometimes do not see these stories as important. I started to record some of her stories, just took out a tape recorder and said I was trying to preserve the family history, to record and archive it. I started asking her questions that would spur her memory. There is a great deal of living trauma and repression of history and experiences because people lived in conditions of terrorism and being afraid of being lynched or taken away. This was not so long ago in the '40s, '50s and '60s. It takes a deliberate effort and some support to help them to see that these experiences that seem so painful and individualized are the stuff that the history of an entire people has been made of.

Rose Brewer:
I agree. It may not be easy but my students and I have found that once the space is opened up for that conversation to begin that things will flow. Not all things will flow. As students try to connect with just this recent generational history, they are connected to a whole point of how we haven't shared much with one another. This is a vital and important entry point.

Al McFarlane:
Dr. Carson spoke about culture and the change in the growth in culture as intentional. You also mentioned the word "intentionality" in your description of how we build community. It takes intent, wanting to do it and having a plan and an agenda. So, how can we use the science and genealogy in an intentional way that is crafted to go to a larger goal? What is that larger goal? Many voices have cautioned us against creating information that will disadvantage us or put us in a position to be further marginalized or hurt by political interests. Given our awareness of that potential, can we frame an end game and an objective that exploits the potential of the pursuit of the science and genealogical study to advantage us individually and collectively and which ultimately advantages all of humanity? We are concerned about not doing things that demonize white people, but white people and black people are all in this together. So can we craft a strategy, an agenda, an intentionality that accommodates what we feel is best for white people and for black people, in a way that somehow incorporates what white people feel is best for them as well. That is a question of negotiation, argument, and confrontation. It includes all the elements of all of our personal and collective histories as well as our personal and collective desires and our potential to be human beings including what we are and what we have been.

Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
Whether you're studying Jamaica or Haiti or Brazil or Louisiana, there are certain persistent, consistent patterns. It is helpful to people of African descent in defining and creating bridges that we can build upon across the diaspora and helpful to people who are not "black," but whose culture is influenced by African cultural creations, for example, white America. Much of what we call American culture is African derived so studying the cultural manifestations that we have created can be a healing process. It can be a means of moving towards reconciliation because in the process of our resistance and our cultural creations we have ironically become somewhat closer to the total culture.

I would emphasize the cautions of pursuing not genealogy but using genetic research as the social construct of race is a reality. Any movement toward creating notions of identity that are biologically based, open us up to being defined in racial as opposed to cultural terms. It is important to undertake this deliberate process of cultural identification, identifying what we have created as people of African descent and owning it before we search for more about our tribal or village heritage. Without that prerequisite step, I think we are setting ourselves up for more division.

Rose Brewer:
This conference is the kind of forums that should go on for a long time. The community conversations that preceded this conference served a very important function to create a bigger space in which to think about these issues and they should go on as well. Most of us are not well informed about many of these issues; further education is vitally important.

john powell:
The question of "intentionality" is very important. How do we go forward with this and related projects without the false claim of assimilation, of being inclusive. How do we do this to promote truth and reconciliation. How do we reconcile as a country, so that we all can be full members? That will not be easy to do. It is somewhat like the problem of assuring that women attain full membership and participation in society and in families? In a society where women do not have that, it means that women and men must both change. The way that race and race relations are constructed will require a change from white folks and it will require change from black folks. It will have to be done in a way that is inclusive, that offers a future for all of us without any group dominating.

I believe that James Baldwin said, "There is no hope for us as long as they think they are white." He was talking about white as a political concept of domination, not as a phenotype or as a genotype. Dr. Marian Gray Secundy said that the project if we do this project it too narrowly, we are excluding everybody else. This is not only about us and white folks; it is not just about Latinos or Asians. We cannot build a future that is only about us. The real point is the intentionality to take that project on.

Audience Member:
I feel that some of the statements that Dr. Copeland Carson made go along the lines of what we are taught and what we assume. Black and white people are typically separated out in terms of certain activities. To me, the emphasis on music or entertainment things, puts into that category in this country. In bizarre ways, little things will be brought out. During Black History Month, you might learn about various inventions by African Americans that shape our culture, for example, stoplights. Yet we are not encouraged to be scientists or mathematicians, even though it is, in a very disconnected way, connected back to Africa.

Does culture become black because you're black? I was privileged to go to high school in Berkeley, California where we had an African American studies department. One of the things that I learned in my school was that Beethoven's mother was of African descent. Does that suddenly mean that that form of music is African, or is it no longer just European? We have to take our education as individuals, as well as a community into our own hands.

Audience Member:
Naomi Scheman, I teach at the university here. What can being an American mean for me that isn't alienation, guilt and shame about it? A large part of what I think I need are the stories of African Americans and of the others with whom I share this country and fate, past and history. What I have been reflecting on, in terns of my own life and my own history as a Jew, is the way in which Jewish Americans were offered sanctuary and escape from anti-Semitism. To the extent that it was offered, it was offered by our agreeing to become white and to become in the ways that john is talking about, not as a phenotype, but as not black, to become signatories to a racist treaty. I am ashamed by the extent to which Jews in America have become signatories to the racist treaty. I need a new set of stories that I can recover in my own family past of communists and socialists and civil rights activists. I need shared stories, collective stories. I need to work together with others, including African Americans to create a culture, an American culture that is worth holding up our heads about. That requires the kind of work that has been going on here and as Dr. Marian Gray Secundy said that we too are America.

Jacqueline Copeland Carson:
I think that this entire two days has been about people of African descent taking the responsibility and the lead in constructing our own identity. That is what we are here for and what everyone, in their own way, has been talking about. I used some examples of our musical and oratorical traditions. Dr. Brewer showed the film segment about the Gullah language. There are many American cultural forms that we can look at that have been influenced by African culture. Some examples from popular culture resonate with some people of African descent because they are more immediate and more tangible. There is a larger level of esthetics, philosophy, and other areas where we find examples of our African heritage. The primary message that I would like to leave is that we must claim our own, document our own, study ourselves and take ownership of our influence on the broader culture of America and the world before we blindly go down the road of using technologies that might help us further self-destruct.

Rose Brewer:
We are at a very critical juncture in this country and globally. The issues raised these past two days go to the heart of some of the challenges that we are facing in this country and globally. I only wish that the challenge before us was simply recovering our history. Instead, we live in a world where issues of class, of gender inequality and exploitation operate on a very large level. It is not so simple to separate the "good guys" from the bad guys, especially when some of the bad guys look like people we thought were the good guys. It is a complicated and difficult place in time and space for us. We must commit to having this conversation. This conversation cannot be suppressed. It must go forward with its warts and its complexities. It is up to us to make hard decisions, in coalition and alliance with our allies to move this country forward. To be an American has been a double-edged sword. Many of us speak of being Africans in America, distancing ourselves from some of those horrors. But, we are also in the belly of the beast; if it goes down, we go down too. We have a responsibility to work together in connection while understanding that this is an issue of class, gender, race, domination, subordination. This is only one of many conversations that we'll have to have. I'm glad we are having it.