Discussion of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and Joseph Graves presentations with john powell,
Waneda Muhammad, Brikti Hiwet, Chiyedza Nyahuye, and the audience.

john powell:
Dr. Graves said that scientists, sociologists, doctors, we all have our special language. It can be intimidating to people who are outside of that language. When we talk about community, we are talking about people who don't necessarily speak that specialized language. They may speak some other specialized language. I just talked to my old high school girlfriend from a thousand years ago. She is now the athletic director in Las Vegas at Nevada University. She was telling me something and I said, "It sounds like a subterfuge." She said, "What's a subterfuge?" We grew up together, and I found myself using language that she didn't relate to. Today, we are trying to enlarge the language and make sure that people can communicate with each other.

We have heard two wonderful presentations. Dr. Graves gave a convincing presentation that race as a biological or scientific matter cannot be sustained, and that racism and race have been used as tools of oppression. As a real-life experience, race has some reality to it, as people have said, it's a scientific fiction and a social fact. That has powerful implications in terms of how we think about this work around genealogy.

Dr. Hall spoke of this rich body of literature that largely went unexamined for a long time. Through 15 years of work, she's helped compile this literature that suggests that we actually know a lot more about the relationship between African slaves, Africans in Americans, the African Diaspora than we might have though we knew.

How do we pull those two things together?

Waneda Muhammad:
I work in the community here. I believe that sharing the genealogy information with children, my children, and myself as I research my own genealogy helps overcome some of the social barriers that we face. It helps not buying into some of the stereotypes and some of the myths of race in this society. I grew up in Illinois with horrible images of Africa and being an African, from Tarzan to black women as servants and men as shuffling and dancing. Growing up with those images, I wanted to find out who I truly was and where I sort of fit in. I knew that what I saw on television and in movies was not my reality, not the people that I knew, or the experiences that I was having. I am glad that Dr. Hall has made that database so that I can look further into my own history and document it myself and share that with my children so that they do not have to go through the difficulties that I did growing up as an African in America. Being African American is something to be proud of. I want them to know that they are truly special, and they are not what this world says they are, but they are truly African and that is something to be wonderfully proud of.

Brikti Hiwet:
I am a co-founder of the Coalition of African Women Rebuilding our Communities which is based at the Powderhorn/Phillips Cultural Wellness Center. I am an African women's advocate as well as an educator on reproductive health issues concerning African immigrant women. I was bursting while I was sitting listening today with so many things I wanted to say. I would like to share my experience of an African woman born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrating to the United States about 30 years ago and a major transformation that happened to me a few months ago. We have talked a great deal about identity. For me, my identity has always been strongly Ethiopian. I am an Ethiopian woman. I think my point of view is very, very common, in the Ethiopian community in particular. Although we are born and raised in Africa, our identity is very much just Ethiopian. One day, an elder asked a group of us, 'What is your identity?' I said, 'I am an Ethiopian." I have said this many times and never thought much about it. Then as I looked around the room where sometimes there might be one or two other Ethiopians, I saw that I was the only Ethiopian in the group. I realized that the only way that I could connect with the Africans around the table was through my Africanness and not through my Ethiopianness. Being an Ethiopian limited me and I suddenly realized that these are my people though I have not been identifying as an African woman.

So I was very struck by some of the comments I heard today, about tracing our genetics to Africa. I remember one of the women in our community saying, 'I don't need genetics, I don't need DNA data to know I am an African." I was also struck by the term African-American, because I don't identify as an African-American. I am an African woman living in North America. African-American does not include me. Somehow I felt excluded from that. This is not because I have a problem with the African part of me but because I truly do not identify as being an American. Although I have been here 30 years, my identification is being an African living in America.

Last year I went to a gathering to honor young immigrants from Africa and Latin America and Mexico. The keynote speaker told a 'creation of America' story. He said that the elders decided to bring people who were running away from religious persecution from Europe. From Asia they brought people who were looking for better economic opportunities and they brought slaves from Africa and created America. There were all kinds of people in the audience, Native, African, African-American, and he got a standing ovation, and I was absolutely stunned. I had to ask myself, did he really say that? I went to him and I said, 'I have to tell you that I find this extremely disturbing. It is not only insulting and offensive to African-Americans, but also to native people." Can you imagine a group of elders of native people choosing to bring slaves from Africa?

I thought of that when I heard the story of school children talking about African-American history. It's a difficult thing for them because they feel ashamed and embarrassed. How could they not, if they only thing they're looking at in the news media is the hunger, the HIV AIDS disaster right now, how could they possibly want to be Africans, when they don't know any of the rich history that we have.

In Ethiopia, we have a very, very rich history. We are proud that we have our own language. Somebody said that knowing who your people are and where you come from really gives you power. I believe that. Having a sense of belonging to a certain group is very important. I feel very sad for some of us who came when we were adults. We have a very strong sense of who we are when we come. But the generation of Ethiopians and other Africans who are born here have such a desire to be American that they are not even speaking their language at home. If you don't speak your language, you cannot have your culture. Therefore, we are going to see a generation of lost kids, lost Africans because they do not know anything. It's as bad as when a grandparent comes, the children not being able to communicate with their grandparents because they don't speak their language and the grandparents do not speak English.

Chiyedza Nyahuye:
I am an African woman from the colonial country called Zimbabwe. I'll call it a colonial country because the African continent was cut up in 1889 by European countries, without any African peoples present at the table.

The question going through my mind is how are we going to use this information for the development of African peoples. How are we going to use this information to heal this devastation of the last 500 years that's completely destroyed many peoples who were brought here as enslaved Africans? Think also of the continent which is the mother who lost her children. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall talked about all the Bahr-Congo people that were taken away, then why is there so much war in Angola and the Congo and Zaire. Why is there so much strife, so much hatred of each other, and killing of each other? I am trying to understand what is happening to us as African peoples where we have had that seed of self-hatred through Willie Lynch and everybody else who generated it for the last couple of centuries to a point where we turn on our own people and it is continuously fueled.

Yet I feel that this is a very internal conversation amongst African peoples because I also talk of my experience in this country over the last 500 years - I mean five years. But it's true, because my ancestors are here too. I have been taught by elders in my community that African identity is a spiritual philosophy, a way of connecting to your people through a cultural way of being that is about the healing and development of intellectual and all the capacities of African people. This is how we can build ourselves to be the teachers of the world that we've always been. Many of us are suffering from the disconnection from that where we are only taught that we are only descendents of slaves, when we are only taught that you're not valuable unless you become European.

So I will tell the story of traveling all over the country. Everywhere I've gone I've always been taken in by family. I've always been adopted as a daughter. I've had my mothers. I even have a mother in New Orleans who -- I am serious - is my mother's twin, even though they've never met. When I am talking about being here for 500 years, I am serious, because I do believe I have. When we talk about African identity, it is about me recognizing that each and every person of African heritage here is my family. What are we going to do with that self recognition? After you have traced your roots back to the continent, what are we going to do? What are we going to put in place, so that we can heal ourselves and rebuild ourselves once again because there is so much disconnection? [Racism?] is talking about people letting go of their identity and their culture and valuing becoming European because that's what's promoted on a daily basis.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall: Over the last decade or longer, I have been upset by a tendency in academia to say there's no biological race or that race is a construction, and nobody should even say the word any more. This is a form of denial because there is the construction of biological race and there is social race. Those who were denying race altogether were fleeing from the fact that social race is there and strong and powerful, and in many ways, stronger than ever.

Another point that's been raised a few times here is the issue of Africans tearing each other apart. I am just finishing up a book going back to the slave trade period and just finishing research about the Congo area. There were the Portuguese, people from the island of St. Thomas, missionaries from different missionary orders, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the British - all of them collecting clients among Africans to help them and support them, all of them instigating warfare. Slave traders followed the soldiers on the battlefield like vultures, buying slaves. When you talk about the recent history of the Congo and Angola, you had Soviets, the Americans, the French… all of them were buying up clients and fighting wars in Angola and in the Congo area, on the soil of Africa, at the expense of Africans. And they were all selling arms, and they're still doing it, vast numbers of arms. I am not saying that Africans have no responsibility for this any more than I would say that impoverished young people have no responsibility for getting involved in the drug traffic in this country. People have responsibility for themselves, and they have to face the situation they're in and overcome it as a community. But it is not proper or accurate to look at the Africans fighting among themselves and killing each other and saying look at these benighted Africans. It's a much more complicated story than that.

Audience member:
I am a community member. After listening to all the speakers, I still concede that I am an African woman. No one can take that from me. It is my birthright. No amount of DNA or anthropology can affirm that for me or take it from me.

john powell:
Before you pass, let me just ask you a critical question. I would say a number of the people in this room would identify themselves as being part of the African Diaspora. This project potentially takes us to a different level by saying, john powell, you're not just an African, you are a Hausa. I started telling one of my sons about this conference and he asked, "Do you want to know which clan you came from?" I said, "I am not so sure." When you talk about being comfortable being an African, a whole continent, do you need more specificity than that? Do you think that's a helpful thing to know which part of Africa, which clan, which language group, which geography you may have come from?

Same audience member:
No, I don't think it's helpful because I think your connection to Africa has to be spiritual. It has to come from inside. It cannot be connected to a geography or a specific language, but it has to come from within. Making a connection to geography or language is not necessarily going to give you any greater connection to your Africanness. That is something that has to be done internally, and it is a work that all of us as African people must begin at a spiritual and internal level.

Audience member:
I am a community member and a mother. My stance and the teaching that I am sharing with my children is that there is a thought process that we come from as African people. It has nothing to do with what I've been taught from the American educational system, which says that we, me included, or any other thing, glass, this nametag, these flowers is a thought process that deals with things as objects and then tries to rationalize what those objects are. There is science created from these observations or from this rationale and then finally there is technology.

The thought process that I am teaching my children is that we are symbol people; we look at everything as symbol first, because symbol is attached to mythos or to a story. It's attached to a deeper meaning, and from the mythos, you get spirituality. There is a relationship, that everything is interconnected and connected. From the spirituality, the last thought process would be harmonium. African people, since the beginning of time, have been responsible, and continue to be responsible, for creating and maintaining the harmonium, regardless of where we come from.

My daughter often asks me who we are and why we practice the things we practice. It is not about the technology that goes into packets and becomes books that we value more than we value the other person's life. The work that African people have to do that has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with the work inside of ourselves, reconnecting to ourselves, studying ourselves, knowing us as symbol first. That is not a technological process, it's a spiritual process and that process mainly has to do with the way that we breathe, meditate, concentrate and contemplate on specific thoughts and ideas. It's the way that we can imagine and actualize whatever we are trying to connect to. It has very little to do with technology and the way that information is formalized and then put together in a book which becomes the authority over how we are to live our lives.

Joseph Graves:
It is too often assumed that all scientists are without spirituality and, therefore, what scientists say necessarily is counter-posed to the ideas of the spirit and belief in God. My allegiance is to God; it's not to a continent, it's not to a people, it is first and foremost to God. I was baptized in Bethel Baptist church in West Hill New Jersey. In my view of the world, my God is the God of the entire universe and the God of all people. So to make divisions and distinctions between continental origins, to me, is counter-posed to my fundamental spiritual beliefs.

Now, my scientific views happen to be consistent with those spiritual beliefs in saying that everybody on Earth is descended from people who happened to originate in Africa. Now their cultures have changed through time, and one of the things I have a real problem with is the idea that there is somehow innately something bad about the cultures that originated outside of Africa, something innately evil that led them to a conspiratorial plan to destroy the African continent and enslave its inhabitants. I don't think that that mirrors what we know about the way human beings behave, about history, and about the way cultures change through time. That's a mythological view that makes some people comfortable, for whatever reasons, I don't understand. I try to look at what human beings do, try to come up with reasons for why they do them rooted in material conditions as the world changes, and explain what those things have to do, or how we can come towards an overall liberatory philosophy. I believe our job is to free everyone on Earth from oppression. I don't have any particular relish for my African genes because I know I also have genes that originated in Europe, and I know I had some that originated in Asia. I want to see everybody be free not just one portion of my identity.

Audience member:
Ota. Bon jour. Bon suoir. Good morning. Who am I? That is the question that most of us have today, looking at the issues we are discussing today on genetics and genealogy. I want to say that coming from Cameroon, genetics and genealogy is more important to be used in Africa. We don't have those records that African-Americans would need when they go back to Africa to trace their roots.

Africans believe in extended families. Elders do make decisions for individuals when it comes to important issues of their lives. Their celebrations, marriages, the families that you get married into, elders do make that decision for you. Africans train their kids to address any male person an uncle and any female an aunt, and we grew up that way. You are not, in most cases, supposed to say, this is my step-mother; he is my cousin; I am your brothers; I am your sister. In that light, you grow up not knowing specifically who is your immediate uncle, and sometimes that is sad. And that is the question who am I?

I know I am from Africa. I know I am from Cameroon, but interestingly, I came to the US 16 years ago, to help my father who had 24 children. He loved all of us very, very much. He had the name Awasum. Incidentally, Awasum is spelled here wrong, to the name that my father had. If I had to leave America to go to Cameroon, tracing my roots from my name, which is one of the ways that we can trace our roots, I would be attached to a different family completely, if my name is spelled this way. I would be attached to a different tribe completely if my name is spelled this way. I would be attached to a different country if my name were spelled this way, so who am I?

I also found out, just when my father died, that his last name was not Awasum, and for all the years I knew him, I knew him as an Awasum. Why, because he was given that name by a family that claimed to be his parents. He was raised by different people. If you leave America and you go back looking for your roots, you should be ready for what you might find. You may be disappointed.

So what is the bottom line? We should grow, coming out from this conference, with a spiritual approach. Genetics is important. Genealogy is important, but how do we use that information for our upbringing? How do we use that information for our empowerment? We should learn to teach our kids, give them the important information, and that is the kind of information we are trying to gather here today, to enrich ourselves, to empower ourselves, not to create conflicts, and not to label anybody, and not to claim that because I am from Africa I am likely to cheat. Because I am from Africa, I am likely to defraud the US society. Because I am from Africa, I cannot be qualified for a particular type of job.

No, we should not use it in that light. We should use it to realize that as individuals we all have different genes, many genes. We come from different cultures, many cultures than we may expect. As it is popularly known today, it takes a village to raise a child, and that village is what we call the world, that is made up of continents, that is made up of countries, that is made up of tribes, that is made up of race. So who am I? It depends on how you want to see yourself and what you want to do with that information. Again, my message is the bottom line is if we all have a spiritual approach to the information that we gather, then we'll create a better world. Thank you.

Audience member:
I am from Wisconsin by way of Africa. My question is to Margaret. You said we would maybe be in trouble or disappointed at what we might find. What do you mean by that, disappointed how?

Margaret Awasom:
What I am trying to say is, what are people's expectations? What are you expecting from the science that you learn, from the information that you learn? Somebody said they want to get the information to fill the void, and sometimes we have some specifics. We are looking at some specific information. We want to believe that we are from Senegal, we are from Nigeria, but it may not necessarily be the case. Do you have an open mind as to what information you may find, and how do you use that information to build up yourself, to heal yourself? The disappointment is the expectation that a lot of us think that because we have African descent, we may say that we are specifically from Africa, from a particular country, which may not necessarily be true. Because I am from Africa, I know I am from Cameroon, but I don't know what race I am from, race in the terms of tribe.

Loutal Soure:
My name is Loutal Soure and I am at the University of Minnesota in the department of geography. Professor Graves, it's somewhat interesting, via the educational process and what we've been through, and yourself with highly technical training, you can make a better information decision and choice as to, possibly, what you would like the world to be and how you visualize yourself. However, many of us don't have those choices, and the choice that we are given at a much earlier age, before we receive university education, Ph.D." s in all kinds of fields, is between a very limited realm of choices. You can make the choice that you make to be this world citizen; however, some of the numbers bother me.

If the gene pool or if humankind began in Africa, then even the European gene pool and the Asian gene pool, are, in fact, African gene pools. So that, in fact, there is an Africanness that's involved in it and that all people derive from these common ancestors, so it is Africa, as opposed to Europe or any place else that we do look back to as home.

But my comment is this, in America we all long to go home. We are looking for a home. We are looking for a safe haven for our children, but when we begin to start thinking about our glory in the graveyard, of which we are all heading that way some way or another, we begin to wonder what it would be like to be at home or to be comfortable when we go to our final glory, and what that's going to be after that. That's what African people are really longing for. My own work is in the migration of people.

john powell:
I don't know if you have a question in that, but if you do, get it out.

Loutal Soure:
No, I just had a comment.

Joseph Graves:
The old expression is home is where the heart is. No one is born into a world of their own making, and as far as I am concerned, you are given choices in life. Again, I have to tell my students all the time. They think because I've learned how to speak the English language and I hold a Ph.D. and I have a professorship, that I was somehow born into this lap of luxury, and that's why I have everything I have.

Actually, I was born the son of poor laborers, who were themselves born in sharecropper cabins in Virginia. My father landed on the beaches of Normandy of 1944. My mother worked in defense plant industries back here in the United States. Everybody in my family, all the relatives I know, have fought to survive under the conditions in which they were born. You can always look at this as the glass is half empty or the glass is half full.

I look at it like this is where the Lord placed me. This is the lot I have to follow. He didn't say it was going to be easy. That's what they used to tell me in Sunday School. Nobody said it was going to be easy, so you do what you have to do and this is what I have to do. The fact that I wasn't born on the West Coast of Africa doesn't change my lot in life. As Kwami and [inaudible] used to talk about, if I was born on the West Coast of Africa, I'd be fighting colonialists over there. So I can fight colonialists over there or I can fight racists over here. I am still fighting, so what difference does it make where I was born. The lot has been placed to us. I am not concerned about when I die so much as what it is I did when I was alive.

Maria Marino:
I have a question for Dr. Graves. I am Maria Marino. I am a community member. My question has to do with something you said prior to this. You said that even though you did not believe there was an evil genetic for some people, the people who have been oppressed share a skin color, and the largest number of oppressors throughout history share a skin color.

Joseph Graves: I haven't noticed that at all. That's a rather inaccurate representation of human history. You can look at the last historical period, per the African slave trade, and you can say that there were industrial developments in Europe, which led to them deciding that they wanted to capture human beings and sell them to develop agricultural production in the new world, but that's not all of human history. Human history goes way back, and there was certainly a time, as most of the people in this room know, in which Eastern African and Western African kingdoms dominated Europe. So how can you sit here and tell me that skin colored has been shared by the oppressed and the oppressor. Cultural relations change through time. In the last period, it is true, it has been a cultural fact that European nations, which first developed the world political economic system known as capitalism, happened to be the ones that were buying and selling human beings and spreading imperialism around the globe. We know that. We also know that national liberation movements through Africa, through Latin America, through China and the Far East have fought that, and there have been people in Europe who have fought beside them. There have been people in America that did that, John Brown for example, the United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, the United Mine Workers…

john powell:
Dr. Graves, if I can ask you…

Maria Marino:
No, my point being that, as you said, the history is very long and there have been oppressors of color as well as white oppressors. The cruelty of buying and selling human beings and the way it was done, it's very specific. Yes, every country has its heroes and people who make a difference. The other point I was going to make is that one of the tools that was used was the Christian church, and how does that play?

Joseph Graves:
Again, if you look at American history, slave rebellion often times took its roots and organization in the Christian church. The civil rights movement took it roots in the Christian church. As far as I am concerned, it's like that double-edged sword. People of bad intent can always use the Word the way they want to. They can say that there's no prescription in the Bible against slavery, so it's OK for us to buy and sell slaves. But then Nat Turner looked at the word and he said, 'let my people go." It depends on what your motivation is, isn't it?

Maria Marino:
But it is the recent history…

john powell:
Let me get a couple other people in. Let me throw out at least one book that you might want to look at. It's called The World is a Ghetto by Howard Winnett. It's a history of modern society and the rise of racism.

Let me say a couple of things that I think are under-bellying this discussion that I want to lift up. It's largely accepted now that modern racism, white racism, is a new phenomenon that mainly came out of the Anglo American experience. It's only about 300 or 400 years old. It did create a worldwide racial hierarchy that is unprecedented. It also created the white race and the black race; they didn't exist before that. So the very creation of race as we think of it, as a social construction, came out of that period.

One other interesting thing - this is a footnote - we talked a lot about freedom. The class I taught last semester was the history and nature of freedom, which actually is only about 2000 years old as a philosophical concept. Freedom came out of women being enslaved, the first systematic slavery of a people, was women, so the first impetus toward a movement toward freedom was from women. There was more than one concept of freedom. There was the freedom to enslave others and personal freedom. When we talk about freedom, we are normally talking about the later, but there's also this idea of sovereign freedom.

The last point I'll make is that social organizations are not neutral. We keep talking about people, whether they're good or bad people. There are social organizations that have different impulses. Part of what's confusing is we are talking about people and we are talking about social organizations. I think really what we are talking about is a social organization of white supremacy and white hierarchy, which is largely an Anglo American expression in the last 300 or 400 years.

Brikti Hiwet:
I guess what I really wanted to say was I am having some problems with what Dr. Graves said about Christianity, that people do whatever information they get and use it. I am not a scholar, I am not an academic, but I know that growing up in Africa, and Ethiopia prides itself on being a Christian country since the 4th century. But it has many destructive forces, very, very destructive forces. It lost in Ethiopia as well. The ruling class used it because the poor decided it was God's will to be in the position that they were. Missionaries definitely used it very, very negatively. They were the very first people to get in, and then after them came explorers, and after them came military expeditions. So in our history, in all of African history, Christianity, as well as Islam, in later years, has been extremely destructive. I would love some other scholars to challenge that.

john powell:
Let me just say one thing. Troy set I out early on, about this double-edged sword, and Dr. Graves tried to build on that, saying everything is a double-edged sword. If I understand Dr. Graves correctly, is he's not that he's saying Christianity is necessarily good or bad; it can be used for good or bad reasons. That's the same as what he's saying about science, not that science is necessarily good or bad; it can be used for good or bad. And if that's right, and I think it's largely right, though there are a lot of people who look at social organizations. There's a Nobel economist named Simm, who talks about all social organizations carrying values with them in the social organization itself. They carry certain assumptions, certain values, so they're not completely neutral and just subject to being used.

But putting that aside for the moment, I think what that suggests is that how it's used then becomes incumbent upon us to be involved. This genealogy project is going to go forward, whether Dr. Kittles does it or someone else; it's going to go forward. So the real thing is, at least from my perspective, is how do we think about it? How do we involve ourselves so that it can be used for good, curing cancer and not for forensic evidence for rounding up black folks? That seems to me to be the real challenge.

The other piece of it seems to be the identity piece. What does it mean in terms of our identity, and I was trying to say this earlier. Most French people do not think of themselves in terms of clans, and yet when France became a country, most of the people living there didn't speak French and they weren't French. Their identity is in fact around the idea of being French. I would, in part, like our identity to be in tact around being African-Americans and Africans. Now if we want to go back further that's fine, but, and this is also, I think, what Todd was saying, there's no ultimate authenticity. We don't get to the final place.

The last thing I'll say, and then I'll see if anyone else wants to say something about this, is, to me, what's at issue with most of this stuff is not just information; it's meaning. This is what I was trying to say earlier, information or data is largely useless. It means nothing. In fact, I tell my students that experience means nothing until it is processed and appropriated. I have a nose that's bigger than most of the people's in this room. What does that mean? Now if we say people with big noses are stupid, then you're calling me stupid. The fact is I have a big nose, but what it means is open to a whole set of interpretations and meanings, and that's where culture comes into being. So even saying we are getting this information, to me that's largely irrelevant. The question is, what does it and what will it mean? That becomes a political, a social and a cultural question that we cannot leave to the scientists.

Steve Miles:
To follow up on that, I agree with you that there's no absolute beginning to our authentic identity. The question, though, that comes to mind is, to go from an African-American to the question of whether you're a Hausa, or how you, in order to identify, asked the question, are you an Ethiopian woman or an African woman, or the concepts over here about retaining an African identity, but not finding it necessary to have a particular identity within that. And then we have Dr. Hall's research suggesting that it is possible to identify specific regions, and that was kind of the focus of Dr. Kittles' work.

But let me just point out that in the war in Ireland, for example, the United States was engaged, not just because they were Europeans, but because there was a community in the United States that called itself Irish Americans that said, we have a stake here, and there's a stake in the peacemaking and nation-building process in Northern Ireland. By contrast, the civil war in Nigeria was largely ignored. How might that war have played out differently if among the African-American population in the United States, ten million people had thought of themselves as having a personal stake in that war, and does that suggest that as we construct our personal narratives that there might be value in constructing those narratives back another layer deeper, in order to tighten the types of cultural bonds, which would enable the United States culture and make it more inclined to more constructively engage these types of issues.

john powell:
Let me quickly give you my take on this, and then I'll open it up to others. To be honest, it's largely irrelevant, and I'll tell you why. In terms of the Irish example, the reason that America could be concerned is because there's a continuity in Irish culture. John Kennedy and Ted Kennedy are Irish Americans. They know that. It's not because they had a genome test and it showed that some great, great, great-grandfather, 16 degrees back was Irish. It's the cultural phenomenon. I don't think the genome test in itself will solve that issue.

Africa is struggling now. As I said, I've lived in Africa and I've worked in Africa a lot. It's interesting to me that Nelson Mandella was very clear. If you think about South Africa, the South African identity, especially urban identity, is much less ethnic than most of Africa, and Nelson Mandella is clear that we have to go that way. He's talking about nation building, and in his mind, he sees ethnicity as a problem for nation building. It doesn't have to be that way, but he sees it as a problem. As I said, when you go back and say Irish American, what tribe in Ireland? Which Irish tribe are you talking about? We don't talk about Irish tribes. There are tribes in Ireland, even today, but we have an Irish identity - that's enough. We have a French identity - that's enough, and none of it's done through genes.

I guess what I am saying is that I think if African-Americans have enough power and influence and awareness, they can raise issues in Africa on the whole continent. They don't have to just be concerned with Nigeria, like they did in South Africa around apartheid. We led that battle from this side of the globe, not because anyone could say, 'I am from South Africa,' but we said we have a cultural identity with Africans and particularly South Africans, and it was very successful. That was a wonderful model. I don't think we necessarily have to do it a different way. Again, I am not arguing against this, but I am concerned about the false promises. I am concerned about going back 16 generations and saying, 'oh, now I am Hausa,' and therefore, what? What does that mean?

Atum Azzahir:
Brother Mahmoud, I am going to ask if I could please just go around the room and hear some other voices. It's so important for us to do that. I appreciate so much, the speakers and people who really have thought about this and written about this, but I want to hear from some of these young ladies over here on the side, who are sitting right here at this table. What do you make of all this? Would you go up to the microphone, please. And maybe someone in the back here. Please go to the microphone. How about this gentleman here in the African shirt, go to the microphone please. I'd like to hear…Yes ma'am, you. What do you make of all of this?

Audience Member:
I feel like this whole discussion that's taking place with the purpose of looking for the identity, looking for the culture, but there are some pretty important things that have not yet been defined, such as what is culture? Can it be defined loosely as your geography, your religion, your clothes, or your dress, but culture has much more to do with your mindset? And it's from you peers and comes out of that. So it isn't solely off of science and technology of genealogy and DNA, and then history, and then also including within that the discussion of cosmology, if that's going to be another discipline within this study. And then also a definition of Africa itself, since we know that it's much more than geography, but exactly what is the definition of being African? I see American as a synonym for being European, but exactly what does that mean as well?

Chiyedza Nyahuye: The way that I've been taught about what culture is, in working at the Wellness Center, in taking the classes I've taken, with the elders I've been taught, the way I've learned to understand culture within myself is a way of knowing and a way of being, that in all the practices that you do as an African person, our philosophy is about reproducing life and maintaining a life force. That's the way I've been learning to understand culture, in the sense of everything that you do, whether the way you get up in the morning, the rituals that you perform every single day, the ceremonies that you do within your community, that are about promoting life, that is about honoring and valuing yourself and your people, And in every single action that you do is about that upliftment. That is my understanding of culture.

The African piece that I've been taught is that being African is not just about skin color; it is a way of thinking that is tied, as we've been taught, to spirituality, symbol, mythos and harmonium. It is in the practice of being conscious of that African philosophical way of thinking, which is grounded in ancient Khamet, which is still very much alive in every single culture in the African continent today. I know I am of the Shona peoples, and as much as I've said that, I've been in this country for five years, I keep going back to things when I am told by Mother Atum, that's exactly what my mother does. And yet the thing is having that be a conscious way of living every single day.

Atum Azzahir:
Dr. Kittles, anything about the definition of culture?

Rick Kittles:
Right, I've thought about it some. I find it interesting, and here in the room we have a large number of Africans and African-Americans in the room. This shows that, not only is there a wide range of biological and genetic diversity, but there's a wide range of ways of thinking as a community. There's no monolithic view here. We don't think the same and we have differences of opinion. That all adds to the richness of our culture, our peoples. A strong component [of mythos in the African cosmology] is the ancestors, and that's across all populations. There is this connection with your ancestors and that's a component of the African identity, the African culture. I'll just leave that there. I don't want to put my foot in my mouth.

Atum Azzahir:
Dr. Duster? You probably have done more thinking about this, just in terms of her question about the definition of culture, possibly as it's being used today at this conference.

Troy Duster:
It's very hard to be brief, but I'll try. There are two meanings of culture that have been dominant in anthropology. The first was the artifacts people use. So historically, archeologists would dig into the bones and the tools and the artifacts and say, oh, this must be the culture of those people called Spartans, or people from other parts of the world. The actual tools became the basis of cultural understanding. So you say, well, in Sparta they had all these tools for war, and they were, therefore, a military culture. And Athens had these tools for, what, conversation; therefore, they were a democratic culture. That was the first meaning of culture.

The second became culture as shared meaning, so I think what has been talked about up until this point is it became the issue in anthropology as they went around the world, saying that people who share linguistic or religious or symbolic meanings "shared a culture."

The problem with these two definitions is that they're up against a contemporary postmodern attack. Here's the attack - what do you mean shared meanings? Doesn't it matter whether you're talking about males or females among the Congo? We heard earlier in the day, the conversation that in the Congo that when the women had the opportunity they married out. If you asked males from the Congo, they would tell you they have a wonderful culture. If you asked the females, they may have a different view.

Let me give you an example that comes from India. People always say about India, that that culture, the Hindu culture, the caste system, for example, was based upon a spiritual/religious integration, that people really loved to be in that culture. However, upon closer inspection, if you asked the people at the very base, the Harijans, the untouchable caste, they would have a different view from the Brahmans. Now what's common culture? You see, in other words, the closer you get to culture, the more you start to see the dissection and vivisection, and you begin to see conflict.

I said I couldn't be brief, but those are the three versions - culture as artifacts, culture as shared meaning, and then the current, I think legitimate attack, that the closer you get to culture-and I would say this is true, for example, in much of Africa. We can have this notion that Africa has this overarching romantic view that it is spiritual, but upon closer inspection, there will be in any "culture" conflict. It's the nature of human experience to have conflict over scarce resources. That's true for every culture. It's a long course, and I've tried in two minutes.

George Hota:
I didn't come prepared to speak today, so my question will be very brief. As I listened today to all of the presentations, the thing that struck me or that comes to the forefront of my thought is that we need to prepare for the next generation, and how do we do that? Very frequently we say we need to rebuild. The question will come up, rebuild what? The question comes up, and I have to read my notes, do we know what we had that we are trying to rebuild? The other question is, do we know who we were that we are trying to recapture? How do we impart that to the young generation coming up today and make them embrace it?

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall:
Yes, I had a comment about what was said by the last two speakers. I am not an anthropologist, although I have studied a little bit of it. I have an addition to make to the definition of culture. I think that cultures evolve, so they should not be presented as something that's static and the way it is, or the way it was, even. Especially in this world, people are in constant contact with each other and they learn from each other. In this country, the whole entire country has benefited from its exposure to African culture, including the spirituality. We don't see enough evidence of that, but when we talk about culture now, and in the future, we have to realize that people from all over the world will be in greater contact. The world is getting smaller; communications are improving. In the past, the most positive things of cultural contact, has been that people have learned to adopt the most adaptive features of each others' cultures, and that's one of the main strengths of the Americas, especially of the United States. So when we look to the future, I don't think that we need to dwell on retrieving some kind of static past and reviving it. We need to appreciate each other's traditions and the strengths of each other's traditions, learn from each other, and arrive at a sense of universal, humanistic beliefs.

Audience Member:
I see this as an opportunity, and I say an opportunity because this process could be used for good or evil, so I see it as an opportunity, as another call for us to step up as a people and agree on what it is that we are going to do with the process, or get out of the way. As Mr. Little said earlier, it's going to go on anyway, and it's going to affect us anyway. I see it as a call for us to come together and agree on how we are going to do it.

My question is who is the process manager? Who owns the patent to this process? If Dr. Kittles is running for process manager, I'll vote for him because I am familiar with his program today, his platform. That's where I am coming from, who is the process manager? As far as us coming here today, is this room the representation for the rest of the nation, on how we are going to go about this? How will our opinions and comments today be measured? Will they go back and check the tape and say, so and so made a good point. Use this. This is my question.

Atum Azzahir:
Dr. Kittles, do you want to answer this question about who will own the process. I think she's referring now to the DNA work that you're doing.

Rick Kittles: It's a good question. Right now, the data that I've been accumulating with the help of others has been mainly self-generated. When I say self-generated, it isn't tied to any "grant" or outside or inside moneys. I don't know if I can answer that question right now. I don't mind being the process manager, but I don't think I can answer that question fully right now.

Audience Member:
Nobody owns this.

Sehet Tat-Siaka:
To answer the question the brother asked, what will we do in terms of attracting our children, teaching them or rebuilding what. I'd like to try to answer that. May the ancestors guide what I say. One of the strongest messages and lessons that we have to teach and have our children, including myself, become attracted to is the type of personality that is rooted in creation. We, as a people, have to participate, because we live in America, and we have to stay abreast with what is being discussed and what's being planned for us. But on the flip side of that, I keep visualizing this big place where African people will begin to do the work for ourselves. We have to become skilled and masterful in the type of personality that is rooted in creation and not rooted in chasing materialism and wealth that we are doing now.

In terms of the process manager, for us, we have to be the process manager. The process manager is going to be the intelligence of your heart. That is what is going to be the dictator, the teacher for the direction that we are trying to go in. We have to cleanse ourselves and heal ourselves from all of what has happened to us, all of what is deeply rooted in our psyche so much, to the extent that we cannot build and we cannot move. Whatever those blockages are, whatever those impediments are that black people have, that all people have, we have to figure out our process for cleansing that stuff, removing it, and then building the type of personality that is rooted in creation and not in materialism.

Audience Member:
We are still going through it though.

Atum Azzahir:
We are still going through what?

Audience Member:
What she's saying is that we have to cleanse ourselves. I am saying, the struggle, we are still in it. We are still caught up in it. Nothing has changed.

Atum Azzahir:
What do you see, thinking about all that's been said today that would help us to get out of it. You said we are still going through it - anything?

Audience Member:
Yes, for white folks to understand that racism is their problem, which, of course, spills off onto us, and for them to stop being racist and give us equal opportunities.

Sehet Tat-Siaka:
No.

Atum Azzahir:
We are not going to argue about it. That was her opinion. There's a young lady right here, I wanted to ask, did you have either a question or answer?

Audience Member:
I have a question. It seems like we are here in a place of privilege and we are talking about all these academic things and different things like that. And like how are we going to use this information of genealogy on a grassroots level to empower ourselves and create healing, because people in the prison industrial complex don't have access to all this. People dealing with the ravages of HIV either here or abroad, don't have time for all this. How are we going to take some simple steps or some tools to create change and not just get caught up in this rhetoric of evil or good or this and that? It just feels like we are going in circles. What are some tools to do this on an everyday basis?

Joseph Graves:
Having long years in this particular debate, this is probably the most unrepresentative group of people of African-American and African descent in the United States. You're talking about people who, for the most part, have university-level education, some of whom have chosen to adopt cultural nationalism as their spiritual and political philosophy, some of whom have not. Most African-Americans on the street are not concerned with this discussion. They're concerned with some really basic stuff like how long they're going to live, what schools their kids go to, whether they're going to have a job, whether there's crime in their neighborhood. They're dealing with HIV and drug addiction. Those are the things that most African-Americans deal with, and a large section of non-African-Americans, in American society every day. I have to agree with this young lady. This discussion has little to nothing to do with that condition. So if people want to talk about how to change that condition, we need to have a completely different discussion in here. African genealogy or the non-existence of biological races really isn't going to solve that question. I've never said it in anything I wrote. It's interesting to know these things, but when we are talking about social and political change, then we need to have a different discussion.

Atum Azzahir:
I really appreciate it, and I think the children are outside waiting for us. I just wanted, in response to what Dr. Graves has just said, when we were putting together the conference, one of the things we did, as I said earlier, is we took this very discussion that we are having right now to the street. The people that you're talking about, there were many people who were just out of prison; there were many people who had AIDS and still do; there were many people who are suffering from diabetes, hypertension and other things, and the question they asked of us is how they could get in touch with Dr. Kittles, because the question of identity is so critical to their development. That's what they said.

They said that they did not know anything that was much more important to them than the answer to the question of, who am I and who are my people. And these were not intellectuals. So I want to say this is a discussion that has to go to the streets, and it has to go almost in the way we've had it here today. We wanted to bring together people like you, Dr. Graves, Dr. Kittles, Dr. Duster and Dr. Hall. We wanted to bring you here. Many of us are not college educated, by the way, and we wanted to say, let's have this discussion. But we also didn't' want to fall through the cracks of the debate and the argument that goes on between the intellectuals.

To some degree, that has happened here again today. What happens is that when we get in the room together, we start to have an intellectual debate even though we are trying not to. That's what we've kind of created here. What I hope will happen is that tomorrow morning, the women who are going to be talking about ethics, and they are all here, are going to help us process this in a different way. So the whole question of process, if we can take it tonight and write in our journals, and come back tomorrow with some questions. Maybe they can help us to process this, on how will we use what we've learned today. I hope people don't go away thinking that it's been just intellectual hogwash because it really isn't. We did take it to the street in this form, because we wanted to know, how did people think about identity, looking at the genetic science and the genealogical science. Stay with us. I think it's going to come down to the ground, and for those of you who have been here all day, thank you so much.