Moderator
john a. powell, JD, Executive Director, Institute on Race and Poverty, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Presenter
Sam Myers, PhD, Director, Roy Wilkins Center for Human Religions and Justice
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota

john powell:
During the last discussion, a member of the audience who was studying science herself said that this we are not focusing on the interface between science and society, or science and politics. We go from one to the other and have not spent enough time thinking about how we might inform the scientific endeavor. Her perspective was that it is not enough to say that scientists are part of the community or that scientists are informed by society at large. Science is a discipline and the community does not participate in developing the protocols for science. That is not just true of science; it is true of every major discipline. They create their own language, their own rules, their own protocols, and sometimes they do that without a great deal of input from the community. Even when the community has input, she suggests that it is as individuals rather than at the community level. That is a very important point.

We are not talking about going to a geneticist and having a one-on-one with them. But, how do we think about this collectively? Yesterday someone talked about who is going to own this information. Intellectual property is a very hot legal issue that most non-legal people, or lay people, do not get involved in. So, the rules of ownership or non-ownership of ideas, of intellectual material, is a technical/legal issue, and those decisions are made largely outside the community.

As some of you know, there is a fight about who owns the material regarding Dr. King's life. Is it in the public domain where anybody can use it. Is it private? Does it belong to the family? Some of you may know that some of the family members were upset the way some of his material was being used and tried to stop it being used that way. Other people were saying: "They are just trying to make money off of it," or "It is public domain; anybody can use it now." "Anybody can use it" often means a loss of control. Certainly, the King family felt like some of the use of material by Dr. King was used without proper control.

Another example: Chief Crazy Horse was radically against alcohol. He saw alcohol as destroying his people. A beer put Chief Crazy Horse on a beer bottle. The tribe said, "No, that is not who he was; you are misappropriating his name." But, if his name is in the public domain, there is no control over how it is used.

These are complicated issues. I thank that speaker for raising them and trying to keep us back on task of thinking about the interface between science and society and politics. It is something that the scientific community itself can not answer, nor can the political community. It takes both the social and the science coming together and grappling with these issues.

With that, let me introduce a friend and colleague Dr. Sam Myers, who is the Roy Wilkins Professor at the Hubert Humphrey Center. Dr. Meyers is an economist who has done a tremendous amount of work at the university and around the world on issues around race.

Samuel Myers:
I would like to thank the organizers of this conference for putting together one of the most exciting conferences that we have had at the University of Minnesota in several years. Let me also say that William Darity, professor of economics at Duke University very much wanted to be here to debate these issues. He couldn't make it because his son's basketball team made it to the state championships. He decided he was not going to come and he asked me to share some of his thoughts.

This conference is not about reparations; it is about the consequences of knowing what your African lineage happens to be. I will speak about the extent to which knowing what tribe I came from, or what particular boat I was on, or what job, which kind of craft my ancestors planned has for the larger reparations debate in the United States. The issue of knowing one's African lineage is a big debate among economists, particularly those in the organization called the National Economics Association, an organization of black economists.

Economists argue back and forth about reparations. The reparations question goes back to the discussion about reparations for war. The German reparations debate is about the explicit undesirable affects of forcing the loser in a war to make payments to a victor in a war and the long-term deleterious economic implications of such a responsibility.

There is never been a payment of reparations in the United States for slavery. If payment was to be made, the conventional question is, using the idea of repayment by the losers to the victors, who would receive the money? Since slavery was about property, many people argue that the payment might go to former slave owners whose property was taken away from them or to northern industrialists who were the victors in the war. Neither of those positions discusses reparations for African Americans.

Three times after the end of the Civil War, there were attempts to enroll African Americans for reparations, repayment or compensation. But, enrollment required a payment, which at the time was about $3 (but that $3 in 1868 dollars). Salesmen went to farms in the South telling Southerners that they were eligible to receive reparations but a $3 payment was due in order to sign up. Economists recall those efforts in about 1890 and 1920 where less well educated African Americans were assured that there was money that they could receive and all they had to do was to sign up.

Economists have a term for this kind of phenomenon: duping. It is a real term, an acronym: Directly UnProductive Economic activities. It arises in imperfect markets with incomplete information. For example, if only one person knows how to get your reparations and there is imperfect information about the existence of reparations, then I can open up shop and put a sign up that says: Reparations Office. I can charge people to come to find out how they can sign a form in order to get their reparations. That activity is due to imperfections in the market.

The National Economics Association has a brilliant paper in the Review of Black Political Economy which outlines the key economic justifications for reparations. One is punishment: punishment for sins of slavery and retribution to descendents of slaves. Second is restitution: restitution for unpaid labor. Third is redirection of the national income that was diverted away from blacks by way of slavery into the rest of the economy. Finally, there is recovery of a share of wealth. Wealth is different from income. Much of the discussion within the civil rights movement, affirmative action and equal opportunity, has focused on income. Wealth is the difference between your assets and liabilities. The analysis of the transferal of wealth from one generation to the next has largely been absent in the discussion about equality in America.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race and other characteristics. It focuses on income. It focuses on flows within a given time period, as opposed to stocks. The idea of wealth as a stock has not been addressed by much of the civil rights movement. The new idea is to consider the wealth that was foregone, that was displaced, and that was transferred as a direct result of slavery. These are different components of the problem that reparations is to solve. Structuring reparations to solve those problems requires practical answers to specific questions.

*Who would be eligible to receive such reparations?
*How should we compute reparations?
*What would be the consequences of paying reparations?
*How would we determine who would be eligible?
*What difference would knowing whether or not you're African, or knowing how much African we are, or knowing which African tribe you came from, make in the size and degree of payment of these reparations.

Who would be eligible to receive reparations?

In Australia, aborigines were not citizens until 1967. Aborigines were taken from their homes and placed in orphanages, despite the fact that their parents still were alive. The last orphanage was closed in 1975. They were forced to learn another language. They were prohibited from exercising their traditional ways. There are living people who were directly harmed by this racist policy. The Aborigine Reconciliation Commission identified these living people who were harmed. The compensation was along the lines of psychiatric services and counseling and family reunification. Most of the money allocated for recovery and the restitution from the harm done to the aborigines went to payment to white psychologists to provide the psychological counseling to people who were harmed by being taken away from their families.

The last African slave has died, so there is nobody who was directly harmed. The second group is the direct descendents of people who were harmed.

Dr. Royal says that she is from Jamaica and that she is not African American. In Minnesota, she is black. In 1820, the British Empire abolished slavery. Jamaicans have been free for a longer period than people who were born in the United States. This raises a question. Tom Sole argues that the reason why Jamaicans have high salaries and have high education levels and a greater work ethic is that Jamaicans have culture. Does that mean that Jamaicans have not been harmed as much by slavery as African Americans?

Who is a direct descendent of slaves? Suppose that we have a reparations plan with United States money. There is a Jamaican who was part of the British Empire. Slavery in Jamaica was British money. Does that mean that a Jamaican American is not a direct descendent and therefore ineligible to receive any of these benefits? The question of "Who is eligible for reparations?" is a complicated question.

There are those who think that it is going to be too much work to draw fine lines between Jamaicans who came to the United States and who were harmed by the stigma of being African American despite not being African Americans. There are African Americans who look like Jamaicans but who did not benefit from growing up in a country where slavery has been abolished 40 years before it was abolished in the United States. Both suffer. When the Marriott Hotel says you must take those cornrows out or you'll lose your job because it is damaging to our business, they are not making a distinction between a person whose cornrows express an African identity as opposed to someone whose cornrows are just the latest $300 fad from an elegant beauty parlor. I suggest is that the stigma or the costs are associated with being black in America is not something not about you, an individual; it is about the group. If so, then membership in the group is what one is being harmed for. Earlier a woman spoke of her daughter who was dark-skinned and she is Irish and Jewish and African American. She looks black to me. She claims to be Irish, Indian, Jewish and Black. Is she a member of the group or not? Or, if she is ¼ Irish ¼ Indian, ¼ black, does she have ¼ of the membership reparations? Or, do we go back to the earlier rule of "one drop of blood." Is group membership something defined by your genetic makeup or is it defined by how you speak, where you live, who your friends are, what neighborhood you live in?

My family moved from New Orleans to California after World War II. Creoles in Louisiana have a real mixed up idea about race. Lets talk about a family. A part of the family with straight hair, light skin color, thin lips and so forth go to Los Angeles. Another part of the same family of Creoles with kinky hair, thick lips and so forth stayed in Louisiana. This is the same family with the same genetic makeup and the same ancestors. The ones in Los Angeles are all lower class, working class whites now. The ones in New Orleans are all middle class, upper-middle class blacks. What group do these members of one family belong in? As soon as reparations passes, all of my white relatives are going to declare black.

How do we compute reparations?

The conventional way of computing the reparations is to talk about lost potential income. Potential income is what you could have earned had you been paid a wage.
*Without going into the technical details, one has to deal with interest rates due to the fact that the money was earned many years ago. It was earned at different times, so one interest rate cannot be used because the interest rates fluctuated.
*One cannot take the total population and multiply that by what wages were. Not everybody was a potential earner. There were children and elderly.
*Today's dollar now is not the same as a dollar in previous years. Using econometric techniques, in 1994 dollars (which have increased since then) we are talking about lost earnings of between $1.8 trillion to $4.7 trillion. That works out to between $60,000 and $150,000 per living black including children. This method fails to account for the investment that slave owners made. Slave owners provided housing, transportation, utensils and so forth. If a person was a free carpenter or blacksmith he would have had to have his own tools. The slave owner supplied the tools for a slave carpenter or blacksmith. If one subtract out that amount, and that means you got around $1.4 trillion. That lowers the individual reparation from $60,000 to about $50,000.

It is interesting that $50,000 is about the difference in housing equity between black homeowners and white homeowners. In order to have housing equity, a person has to own a home. So, lets consider the net worth for blacks compared to whites. The net worth for whites is ten times higher than for blacks. Among people who are home owners there is a big gap, but that gap is due principally to differences in housing value, which works out to around $50,000.

Let's consider wages as the basis for reparations. Slavery depressed the earnings of slaves. However, wages are depressed in any market with cheap workers. White people earned less during slavery than they would have earned had there not been slavery. In other words, the competition of slave labor dropped wages for everybody. Someday, somebody will say that whites ought to receive reparations. We are talking about whites who did not own slaves or property or who were not overseers (who make more money under slavery than they would have made without slaves to supervise).

Another way to compute reparations is to not think about lost wages to slaves but about wealth gained by slave owners. Slave owners gained wealth from having property that they did not need to pay wages to or rent. It is almost like a piece of equipment. That type of wealth accounts for about 25% of parent net worth.

Finally, there is the cost to blacks after slavery ended. Slaves did not acquire wealth and did not have the independence to invest in education and training. Eliminating slavery does not end the disadvantage of having been enslaved. Real costs can be attributed to labor market discrimination. This form of labor market discrimination is not the same as the total wage lost simply by job discrimination. Calculations for this loss are about $1.6 trillion, in 1994 dollars.

It is interesting that these different calculations all move in approximately the same direction. There is considerable debate about what's the right methodological approach to compute reparations but they all seem to come to the same amount of money. Between March of 2000 and December of 2000, the United States economy lost about $1.8 trillion in the stock market, approximately the value of the repayment that is due. (from Civil Rights and Race Relations in the Post Reagan-Bush Era by Dr. William Darity)

What would be the consequences of paying reparations?

There is an adverse affect of the economy of spilling $1.4 trillion without a plan for consumption. In a booming economy, if you put $1.4 trillion in it has on pushing prices up, in its inflationary effect. It is better to give out reparations during a depression, because it is almost as if you're engaging in a form of exogenous spending in the economy. But, if the economy is neither in depression or is in a boom, there are negative repercussions from spilling a lot money into the economy. There are many examples, Poland or German. This does not mean I oppose reparations. I am realistic about the consequences of making a lump sum payment. Think about the lottery. The lottery gives winners a choice: take a million dollars at one time or take a million dollars over 25 years. Most people try to take their money all at one time-this is a bad choice. It is much better for the economy and the individual to distribute the winnings over 25 years.

The second consequence is the perception of unfairness. Almost every opinion poll shows that whites are opposed to reparations. At a recent talk at a Methodist Church, people started jumping up and screaming and a friend of mine said, "I am absolutely opposed to reparations." So reparations will have repercussions that will have to be address. The vast majority of whites are going to feel there is something unfair and other racial-ethnic groups will share that feeling. We saw this with Australian reparations to specific aborigine tribes. There were other non-white people in Australia who were also discriminated against and have low income. Some of those people are from the Solomon Islands. Furthermore, the first aborigines to be slaves in Australia were islanders who were brought in to work at sugar plantations in Queensland. They were a group of people who would not have been included in the reparations, who experienced a significant harm associated with racism.

Now, lets consider the negative economic consequences of making reparations payments.

If reparations are put into capital projects and investments, scholarships, into black churches, black hospitals, black banks and higher education institutions, then there are excellent chances for positive returns on that investment. One Or you could put it into scholarship funds. You could put it into funds for similar, for [inaudible] Foundation [inaudible], that I guarantee you that when you graduate that you will have four-year tuition to go to any college you want to go to, as long as you do the work and you graduate. Bill Gates could fund this now but it could be funded with reparations.

Alternatively, reparations could be used to reduce consumer debt. Suppose that reparations are paid as a one-shot affair: the United States will pay reparations and forever more does not want to hear anything more from black folks whining and crying about slavery, discrimination and so forth. We calculate reparations as $1.4 trillion; each person gets $50,000. It is paid and then it is over. There is no more affirmative action, no more special pleas, no more special privileges for being of dark skin. It would be very important to assure that some fraction of that $50,000, if not all of it, goes to reducing debt as opposed to supporting consumption. This is the thinking of many African countries at world conference against racism in Durban. They were saying that they would like to negotiate with the European countries that devastated them through slavery a plan to reduce debt--to eliminate the burden and the dependency that they have on the European nations. One of the best things that African Americans can do, one of the best things that any individual can do, is to eliminate their debts.

How would we determine who would be eligible?

So far, my discussion of the calculation of reparations largely focused on wages and salaries. There are other types of economic harm. There are broader consequences associated with being unemployed, consequences of having a lower salary, consequences associated with having unpaid work.

Dr. William Darity presented a paper at a racial disparities in health seminar at the National Institute of Health last month. He has a forthcoming book on this topic. He argues that there are severe health consequences from being unemployed. To the extent that there are severe unemployment consequences associated with slavery and the aftermath of slavery, then there are long-term health consequences associated with slavery.

One of those health consequences is the loss of internal control, the inability to be able to have a sense of efficacy. I know I can do with my life. I have self-esteem so that I am able to control factors within my life. I may not be able to control the noise on my next door neighbor's stereo, but I can control how adversely I am affected by that noise. It is argued that people who are out of work for long periods of time or who have difficulty finding a job or who are constantly rejected tend to have a loss of locus of control.

Monahan contends that high levels of unemployment are associated with destabilization of family life. A more modern twist is the unwillingness of many women to marry men who do not have jobs or who are out of the labor force or who have a spotty work history. That does not prevent them from having the babies; it just prevents them from developing a two-parent family. This is not to say that two-parent family is the desired family structure from a moral point of view but it is desirable in that two earners make more income than one earner. Research by Susan McElaway of Carnegie Melon University shows that test scores are higher when a child grows up with two biological parents. It may have to do with reading to kids. It may have to do with the investment that people make. Unemployment affects the family structure.

Then, there is employment discrimination. The first cost or harm is the loss of wages. There is a residual cost that is associated with discrimination. One of those is residual costs is the higher levels of stress, greater difficulty in sleeping, and weight loss or gain-neither of which is good if it happens very quickly. Glen Lolly contends that the residual effect is a reduction in social capital for the community. This is similar to work that john powell has supported looking at how large concentrations of poverty in a community have adverse affects even for people with two-parent working families. So there is a spillover impact of living in a community where there are large levels of distress.

Dr. Darity has conducted a multi-city study of urban equality for Boston, Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angles. This data asks people about their perception of discrimination, the feeling that others got promotion or raises faster than you or that you were discriminated against. 20% of black males felt that others got promoted faster than them. 27% of black males felt that they had been discriminated against in the labor market. 16-20% among black females, 5-8% among white males, and 7% among black females. This means that there are larger fractions of black males and females who believe that they were discriminated against in the labor market, or that somebody else got promoted over them, based on race or ethnicity. It also says that there are a number of whites that say they were discriminated against too.

Dr. Darity and his colleagues then studied how many of these people actually were discriminated against? They used a technique called Blanta-Wahaka-Duncans Residuals Difference Test, to separate earnings differential that can be explained by time on the job, education, and so on. The unexplained difference is called discrimination. In this way they could study how many of those people who actually were discriminated against, how many of them believe that they were discriminated against?
· Only 20% of black males that feel that they are discriminated against. 97% of blacks who said that they were discriminated against were discriminated against.
· Of the whites who believed that they were discriminated against, 2% were actually discriminated against.
· 90% of blacks who said they did not think they were discriminated against were discriminated against.
· 3% of whites who said they did not think they were discriminated against were in fact discriminated against.
The point is that there is cognitive dissonance in this community. A person does not think that he or she is being discriminated against and is discriminated against. There is got to be a problem here. There is a gap between what you think is going on in the world and what is actually going on in the world.

There seems to be some cognitive dissonance among whites too. Among those whites who are saying they think they are being discriminated against virtually none of them are discriminated against. So for the purposes of argument that identifying who has been harmed, you probably do not need to isolate and distinguish between blacks who think they are discriminated against and blacks who do not think they are discriminated against. So the next time I see a black person who walks around saying, "Oh no, I do not think racism exists." "I think It is just wrong when you constantly talk about race, race this, race that." I will say: "You are probably eligible for the reparations, too, because you are engaged in cognitive dissonance."

How would we determine who would be eligible? We could use family records, physical features, or genetics. When I talk about eligibility for reparations, I tell people that I would be willing not to take mine. My grandfather came from Jamaica and my mother is down there in Louisiana. Louisiana blacks and Creoles frequently got property, so they were property owners because some French landowners gave their land to their slaves offspring. Furthermore, I do not want people to think that my advocacy of reparations is self-serving.

Dr. Darity work looks at the relation between skin color and discrimination. Dark-skinned blacks and Latinos have lower education, lower earnings and less prestigious occupations than lighter complexioned individuals. Light-skinned blacks experience greater labor market discrimination. They are all discriminated against.

Will knowing African origins make a difference?

Many issues have been explored. There is a lot of divide and conquer going on in trying to make these distinctions. Then there are degrees of culpability, because some of the slave traders were Africans. Some of the tribes themselves had slaves, so you make a distinction between a person who came from a slave selling tribe as opposed to a group that came from a slave.
Many white people are black in America. So, if African lineage is the basis for reparations, soon as I find out about what my African lineage, a white person is going to find out what his lineage is in Africa. Whites have better lawyers and they've got better investment bankers. What would happen as white folks say, "we want our share of the money?" So I conclude by saying I think we should tread very, very carefully on this issue of African lineage as we approach the broader public policy issues of reparations. Thank you very much.

Discussion of Dr. Meyers

Audience Member: What is your gut feeling with all the analysis and studies that you've done? Do you think a micro approach, as opposed to a macro approach would be better for the reparations?

Samuel Myers: I advocate a macro approach. I think that there is nothing to be gained from an economic perspective of trying to identify what my specific African lineage is. I think we have a lot to lose by doing it. Such studies can be done for disease determination or for genetic counseling but should not be done for making the case for reparations. Using genetic identity in this way actually destroys the case for reparations because the argument in favor of repayment is stronger looking at group membership, as opposed to looking at individual harm and culpability.

The first thing people are going to say is that all the slaves are dead. Then, you will have to demonstrate the indirect effects associated with being a descendent of slaves happens to be. The argument about indirect effects is particularly hard to make. If one black person has a Ph.D. from Howard University and another has a Ph.D. from Harvard University should the person from Harvard University not get reparations and the person from Howard University get reparations? The black student who got to go to Harvard had a lower indirect affect from slavery, and the black guy who went to Howard had a higher indirect affect. I do not buy it. It would be better to say that neither one of those Ph.D.'s gets the money, or they both get the money--it is part of being a member of the group.

john powell raised the issue about whether or not there is greater discrimination with the Ph.D. than with the person who is at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. This is discussed in Flint Wiley's book that just came out, called The Anatomy of Western Inequality. Part of the reason why there is a greater inequality amongst the Ph.D.'s is that there is a stigma of being a member of the group that the person at the bottom of the economic ladder. When Flint Wiley drives his Audi or Volvo up the street, he's still a black guy. So the argument isn't whether or not you're a professor at Boston University with a Ph.D. from MIT, the argument is that you're a black person. So the black person who really is qualified experiences a greater disadvantage simply because that he is a member of a group that on average is not qualified.

The answer damage is at the top and the bottom and we should be very careful about having a micro approach that says this group of blacks gets it; this group of blacks does not get it. Rather, you should take a macro approach that says that membership in the group is the general cause.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall: I agree with your preference for the group approach. Even the very fact that what we discussed here about specific information about African ethnic origins is kind of silly because we are talking about is one person among thousands of ancestors. From the genetic point of view, I do not see where this is going to get anywhere without a much more improvements.

But I have a problem with focusing on labor-work issues. What about the very painful and costly issues of lynching? What about confiscation of property, driving black folks off of their land, which they worked really hard to buy and accumulate after the Civil War, through terror? What about the GI Bill of Rights after WWII that provided the basis for widespread home ownership in the United States except that blacks couldn't get mortgages because of discrimination within FHA and private banks. What about educational discrimination among GI's, where blacks could go to black schools, but they could not go to white universities because the most prestigious white universities simply excluded black folks. Some of this stuff is recent enough so that with historical research would support specific claims for specific families and descendents and even some living people. Housing alone has been a major factor in reducing the net worth of African American families right now. People can go back, not so far in the past, to find heads of families or especially male members of families who could have been earning money except that they were lynched in their youth and many families were horribly traumatized.

I think 'truth and reconciliation' is a very good principle but in the United States there is no truth. I have been a professional historian for a number of years; nobody wants to hear the truth.

Audience Member: Dr. Meyers, the radical reality is that a crime has been committed. As I see it, slavery officially ended in 1865 with the 13th Amendment. In fact, black people lived in a modified condition of slavery, the extension of which did not end, really, until about WWII. The vast majority of black men who were gainfully employed up until WWII, and the opening of jobs, were still tied to an agrarian economy, sharecropping, serfdom, wage slavery, if you will. I do not divorce what I was born into, a rigidly segregated society, from slavery. It is still not freedom, and that is the real deal with me. I know who was segregated against. A fair-skinned black woman would be treated just like me. Genetics cannot deal with this. This is an essential experience, and that is what I want to deal with. I think in a way that by detailing, we trivialize the crime.

john powell: I think both of those comments are important. I agree with Dr. Meyers that I do not think it should be an individualized approach. The harm to whites and blacks, to our nation, to the world, It is a group harm, and the method of trying to simply parcel our individual harms, as well as individual perpetrators, I think is very, very problematic. Black people are the most segregated people in the United States, more segregated than Asian Americans, more segregated than Latino Americans, more segregated than, Native Americans. This means we are lumped together, and it is not out of personal choice. Middle class blacks, poor blacks have fewer opportunities for mobility of any people in the United States. Some of those blacks will rise to professorship but there is still the stigma.

Melvin Oliver talks about the two major periods where wealth was democratized the United States. One was shortly after the Civil War, when Native American lands were taken and distributed to whites so that the majority of whites for the first time became landowners in the United States. Blacks, Native Americans and Latinos were excluded from that. The second was housing in the 1930s and 40s. When you look at the creation of white wealth, which is inter-generational, which is not to demonize whites. White wealth came from those two phenomena, most recently from the creation of ownership of housing. Before 1930, to buy a house you had to put 50% down and amortize the debt in five years. Most whites could not afford it. The federal government put the federal purse behind the acquisition of home ownership and then said blacks can not participate in that program, and that was in the 1930s and 40s.

So most people in America own wealth in their homes and blacks are underrepresented. This policy is a form of Segregation Tax. On economist has said that when the white baby boomers parents' die, they will inherit $10 trillion dollars, a lot of that housing. When black baby boomers parents die, we will inherit debt, $10 trillion debt. What we are seeing is the accumulation of privilege or the accumulation of subjugation. It does not mean that individual black or individual white has racial animus at all. It means that we have a system of racializing wealth. An economist said that if he had no discrimination at all, no racial animus at all, the way we have wealth structured in society, we will continue to have racial disparities in the health area, in the education area, in the life expectance area, and in perpetuity, meaning forever, because wealth reproduces itself and reproduces opportunity. It is a very problematic system. So I think there are a lot of reasons to talk about reparations or distribution of wealth or to think in these terms. We should do so in a way that does not have to demonize individuals because there are whites who suffer from this.

If we really start thinking about reparations in relationship to genes, what do you say to an African American who says, I have an African gene, therefore I'm entitled to reparations, but I have a slave master gene. Does it mean I pay myself? It is a very slippery slope if you think you're going to resolve this issue based on gene mapping.

Audience Member: Good afternoon, the word "wealth" keeps coming up today. In terms of technology, especially genetic technology, who has ownership over this kind of technology and who's doing the marketing for this? I am curious who is benefiting financially from this type of information and this type of technology that is being put out and given to us. I feel like this is a business, the technology side is very much a financial investment for somebody out there. There is a lot of marketing that is going on about DNA and genetic research. I am concerned about this because I find it a lot based on our vulnerability in terms of cultural identity at this time. We are not even sure if this is going to be beneficial for our community or not.

Samuel Myers: You are correct that the technology itself is a form of wealth and there are earning streams associated with wealth. Some of that information technology might not generate any earnings at all for many years to come. It is right to ask who will be the recipient of the stream of fund or earnings from this technology in the future.

Audience member: I am with the Center for Bioethics. I see people of good faith trying to do good work with this but once genetic material gets out there databases will be created and they may begin with all the best intentions and serve very good purposes. You may surrender a DNA sample for a very good reason, for genealogy or prenatal testing, or to determine susceptibility for particular diseases, but you want to be careful because already there has been a great deal of health data that has been for other purposes that were not originally conceived of. We must be careful to keep track of as this information as it is being produced and as it is manipulated. Once the data is in databases, it can take on a life of It is own. It will be out there forever. This raises all sorts of very difficult questions about ownership and control and consent.

Audience Member: It would be possible to offer the service of genetic lineage as a form of reparations. That is different from the question of linking reparations itself to the genetic information, but rather, for those people who wanted this information, because they feel this is one of the particular harms of the experience, to make the financing of this one of the priorities. would be a very costly service offer. How would a genetic map of Africa be built? Who would do the genetic counseling?

Audience member: Dr. Meyers, you said it is better to look at reparations in a group context rather than individually. What if you do your genealogy and you find those white ancestors that you know are wealthy now. They own some major business do you advise suing them for the labor that their ancestors imposed on yours?

john powell: The rules of the determine whether they may be sued. This goes again back to your question of ownership. This is a real story. A woman was having some serious problems. The doctor kept having her come back and she thought she was being treated for illness. He actually was extracting a particular stem cell to make a product that turned out to be worth billions of dollars. When they made it, she said, I did not give you this material to be experimenting with; I want part of the profit. The court said no. That is the rules of the game.

In terms of ownership, think about this. The reason that we went to hyper-descent was because the person who was 7/8, of 35-36% white could not make claims on the slave master. So Jefferson's family, through Sally Hemings, could not make claims on the Jefferson estate. They know who their father is, or their great grandfather is, or they have a good idea at least, but the law has said that even though you can prove that genetically, we are telling you, you cannot get money.

There are many ways of structuring it. The way we did with Japanese Americans was to say it was individual. But I think that in terms of truth and reconciliation, It is better to think about how do we as a nation really claim every member of this nation as a full citizenship, full citizen. I think that is a much better model than saying. I think the individual model presents incredible technical difficulties as Dr. Meyers outlined. It also becomes very divisive because then you have to prove that Joe Smith was the bad person, that he or she committed the harm, and it was a national harm.

Part of the reparations movement is looking at insurance companies that insured the slave traffic. I say go after them. But, I think, as a large movement, that it is important that it be a national debt. I would even say that the money should not go to individuals, that we should create a pool to change the conditions of African Americans generally.