 everyone, thank you for joining us today. Welcome to session three of the Public Policy and Institutional Discrimination Discussion Series where today's topic is history, reparations, and policy 2.0. And the faculty discussing for today's event is Professor Earl Lewis, who we're very excited to have us to join us today. My name is Stephanie Sanders and I am the Diversity Officer and also a lecturer in the Ford School. And this is the third of four sessions of this discussion series. So today's session is co-sponsored by Students of Color in Public Policy. They are also known as SKIP. And the mission of SKIP is grounded in advocating for the success of all students, including students of color in public policy. So we're exceptionally proud of SKIP's leadership and their collaborative spirit in helping make the Ford School a more inclusive space. And before Emma introduces Professor Lewis, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the goal of the series, as well as the format of today's event. So the goal of the series is to create opportunities for engagement, really for students to get to know faculty and their research beyond the classroom. We continue to hear from students that they are interested in connecting with faculty. And this especially rings true since we're in a remote setting. So this is really another opportunity for students to engage with faculty outside of the classroom. And a second goal of the series is to foster a dialogue on important issues of U.S. public policy, like the topic of preparations. Regarding the format for today, Professor Lewis will lead today's discussion. He will speak about the topic for about 30 minutes. And the last 20 minutes of the discussion will be reserved for questions and answers. And during the Q&A portion today, participants are encouraged to make use of the chat box feature or you can also use the raise hand feature and wait to be recognized so that you can pose a question to Professor Lewis. So at this time, I'd like to welcome Emma Kern. Emma is a graduate student in the Board of School of Public Policy and she's also the communications chair for SCIP. Thank you, Stephanie. So today's faculty discussant is Professor Earl Lewis. Professor Lewis is the Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor of History, Afro-American and African Studies and Public Policy and the founding director of the U of M Center for Social Solutions. In 2013 to 2018, he served as the president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, an author and esteemed social historian. He is past president of the Organization of American Historians, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of 11 honorary degrees. He has held faculty and administrative appointments at Michigan and the University of California Berkeley. In 2004 to 2012, he served as Emery's Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Asa Griggs-Candler Professor of History and African-American Studies. In addition to prior service on a number of nonprofit and governmental boards, Dr. Lewis chairs the Board of Regents at Concordia College, is a trustee of ETS and a director of 2U and the Capital Group American Funds. Apart from his extensive and impressive resume, I have come to know Professor Lewis as a dedicated educator and compassionate mentor. It is an honor to know him and to continue to learn from him. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Lewis. Thank you, Emma, for that introduction and thanks to all for attending. I recall last year at this time where we were sitting in an auditorium and there was food and drink and there was a world before COVID and we were all a part of that world. And so this is an attempt to continue in that conversation. To get started and I want to thank Stephanie for inviting me back for 2.0. I realized that when we first talked about 2.0, there were some of you who were in attendance last year, so we're going to continue that dialogue. But I realized now as we've come a full year, some missed last year's conversations of less than a little bit of 1.0 and 2.0 into a conversation before we head into discussions. So I'm going to try to share my screen and really think of this as a conversation about an unjust past and how we connected to a just future and really moving us toward a conversation about community-based reparations. Just put it in context, of course, February is Black History Month and Black History Month really began as Black Negro History Week in 1926 and by 1970 have become a month and by the second decade of the 21st century have become globally recognized. Carter G. Wasn't created Black History Week or Negro History Week initially to really offer a correction to the broad assumptions in the Academy and beyond that African-Americans in particular and people of African descent more globally and generally have made no lasting contributions to human history. That was known to be untrue by many, but it had to be really underscored by an effort. And I say that in part because this brings us to today's topic, reparations. Some of us may have recalled an article in the New York Times as part of their 1619 project. And the 1619 project, of course, dealt with the 400 anniversary to commemorate African peoples who had been brought first to Colonial Jamestown and then to the broader British North America and who were ultimately enslaved. But in that story, we oftentimes think that the story of reparations in and of itself is a story about what transpired from 1619 to 1865 and what Nicole Handler-Jones and others wanted to remind us is that, no, this story has legs that travel well into the 20th century and in fact into the 21st century. And so I wanna anchor this by starting with a story from 1947 in Alabama, the story of Elmore Bowling. It's a gentleman who defied all probability in Longus County, Alabama, and buying leasing of plantation in where he would go on to then build a general store, a gas station, a catering business. He came to understand the economic diversification and so he grew not just cotton, but corn and sugarcane. He understood that even agricultural pursuits was not enough that he needed to diversify beyond that. So he owned and generated and created a small fleet of trucks that furried livestock and produce between Laundiceboro and Montgomery, Alabama. And at his peak in 1947, Bowling actually employed about 40 other people, all of whom were black. That was until a day in December of 1947 when he was approached along the stretch of Highway 80 in Alabama by a group of white guys and they shot him. And they shot him not because he had violated some known statute that he had been accused of any wrong other than the fact that he was deemed to be too successful to be a Negro. And hence they did not want him out of his economic place in a subservient role, shot six times with a pistol, a seven time with a shotgun. He was left to die on the side of the road. But it was not just the fact that he was executed in this fashion, but at the time of his death he had about $40,000 in the bank. He had another $5,000 in assets and he had a total of about $500,000 in today's terms of resources. His neighbors not satisfied with his death went about creating a series of credit schemes to actually steal that $40,000 in the bank to confiscate the other real assets and to force his family to flee the area within three years of this murder to in effect dispossess them of all that they had claimed and had earned. It was these stories, the stories of slavery, the stories of Jim Crow South, the stories of the ways that African-Americans have been in head to endure unjust past, the late John Conyers, who was congressman as many of you know from Detroit near Michigan, to propose a bill in 1988 that became known as HR40. That bill would come before Congress for almost 30 years is today being led by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who has taken up the mantle after John left Congress and after he died. Last year, there were 125 co-sponsors of HR40. As of yesterday, there were 173 co-sponsors of HR40. That is 173 of the 221 Democratic members of the House of Representatives. That's true last year, that's true the year before, that's true the year before that. All of the co-sponsors for Democrats, they're none to this day of the 211 Republicans have elected to co-sponsor this legislation. But as you recall, and for those who know the story, of course, HR40 calls for a commission to study the whole idea of reparations. It does not call for reparations outright, but a commission to study. This call for reparations has a long history in the US, in fact, it actually goes back to the colonial period, but it gained even more steam and energy after the Civil War. Started in part by a whole land redistribution scheme that emerged along the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina in Port Royal, South Carolina in particular where Sherman issued a special order that gave land to the formerly enslaved who was still inhabiting the land doing in times of the Civil War. It also came to include Mont Bayou in lands in and around Davidson Bend, Mississippi, which had been owned by Jefferson Davis. So that period of land redistribution, although it was short-lived, was an important chapter because it was in that period that the ideas of 40 acres in a mule, which has sort of grabbed hold and in some ways is linked to the idea of HR40 really gain some permanent public traction. Both African-Americans coming out of the Civil War, it was not just enough to talk about land redistribution because they realized this all turned upon a willing government to enforce it. And then after the Port Royalist Spermint, really the government shied away from redistributing land to the formerly enslaved and enlarged measure after a series of loyalty oaths and redistributed the land to the former Confederate soldiers who had fought against the Union. And so as a result, men and women such as Callie House decided that they needed to do something more. Callie House and herself been enslaved in Tennessee and she helped to form something called the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association. She and her colleagues reasoned that if the US government could figure out a pension plan and granted to form and Union soldiers, they could also come up with a pension plan for the former African-Americans who have been enslaved. And so in fact, they used then the soldiers pension plan as a model and calling for a government contribution. Now Callie House and others who made this argument had to win over supporters, of course. Frederick Douglass, the noted abolitionist was at one point in opposition to the idea of financial reparations. But in time, he would come to argue that justice was in Egypt and certainly was true in Russia and that there was a need for African-Americans to also be provided with some assistance. And as he knows here, but the Negro has neither spoils, implements nor lands. And today he is practically a slave on the very plantation where formerly he was driven to toil under the lash. What Douglass is inferring to is in fact that there was the end of enslavement, but with it came no assurances of food, of clothing, of tools or other resources and assets that would have made for an easier transition into freedom and that this needed to be addressed. While Douglass came to align himself with Callie House and others, that wasn't true of all African-American leaders at the end of the Civil War heading into the end of the 19th century. Republican congressman Cheetham Miller and Langston from North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, respectively, all of whom were black, supported education and voting rights over financial reparations. They would argue that the former education and voting rights would ensure that subsequent generations would be equally prepared to advance in competition with others. Interestingly, and there were some Southern whites who actually came to believe that a capitalized black population could help restore the financial fortunes of the South. And so they would actually come to champion financial reparations in an example that I noted last year and I offer again here is that Walter Vaughn and William Connell. Vaughn was the former editor of the Omaha Daily Democrat. And Connell, who was his congressman, introduced legislation in 1890. And so quarter of a century after the end of the Civil War with the following formula, where he would think in a graduated way in that a combination of age and all would contribute to how much you would pay. So $15 per month and a $500 one-time payment for each ex slave who was 70 years and older. If you were under 70, then you would receive a $300 one-time payment, $1,200 per month until 70. And then that would be increased by $3 to the $15 per month allotment. And that continued until you had another scheme if you were 60 and under 60. But it was this idea that there would be some recognition in that people had endured, had suffered and should be compensated for years of uncompensated labor. And in this notion, there was a symbiotic relationship that was sort of underscored. The Southern wise believe that African-Americans who have financial means would be contributing members to the overall revitalization of the Southern economy. And this would be down to the benefit of the individuals but also to everyone else in their midst. These earlier efforts, particularly as we look at them from the vantage point of 2021 leads to fundamental questions about what is meant by reparations, especially today. William Sanidarity and Kirsten Mullen in their recently published book, which just came out last year from Here to Equality, try to offer a definition. According to them, reparations amount to a program of acknowledgement, redress and closure for grievous injustice. A program acknowledgement, redress and closure for grievous injustice. And by acknowledgement, they're trying to actually underscore and highlight a couple of points is here that the core of it is recognition and admission of a wrong. It's not enough to just say there was a wrong but public recognition and admission of a wrong. By redress, they argue that there has to be some form both of either restitution or atonement, restitution or atonement. And they argue that you can only get to the final stage of closure when the injured and those who benefited agree on this mutual conciliation. So for Sanidarity and Kirsten Mullen then is to ARC is reparations. That is acknowledgement, redress and closure. And it is indeed a program, a dedicated program of acknowledgement, redress and closure. Which is interesting because last year at this time when you asked the average American about reparations particularly as it related to slavery, 74% of African Americans said yes, reparations were important, 85% of whites said no, they would not support reparations. Those numbers haven't moved much in the intervening year. And in part, it always turns on the issues of who benefits, who pays, who is responsible, wasn't meant here by reparations. And how much is enough? I mean, some economists and others have estimated that if you really began to try to itemize and come up with a number, we're talking in the range of the upper end of $16 trillion just for those descendants of individuals who were enslaved. And that excludes the Jim Crow era and all that followed thereafter, 16 trillion. So who benefits, who pays, who is responsible, what's meant, how much is enough becomes part of the ongoing challenge. And that seemed to be where we were until last spring, summer, and the series of racial protests that pulled us all back into the vortex of a world where we came to understand in that racial injustice and a past that is unjust has implications for our present and our future. That helped to remind many that the United States has indeed had moments where it actually could answer the question and where reparations were offered either the individual or group level. In the 19th century, Harriet Henryetta Wood as detailed in Katelyn McDonough's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Sweet Taste of Liberty became the only African-American man or woman that we can find who really received some restitution through the course because of being enslaved. Henryetta Wood, who had been born into slavery who would gain her freedom, live in Cincinnati as a free woman of color who would then be stolen back into slavery sent from Kentucky to Mississippi and ultimately, Texas who would then at the end of a 10 year travail of trauma and abuse would come out of the end of the civil war and then sue her captor and ultimately when became a singular story about an individual as we look at the story of reparations in American history. There's of course the example of native Alaskans as Alaska was seeking to become a state in the union that negotiated with the federal government and arguing that things had to be resolved before Alaska could be formally admitted and certain lands could be used for oil drilling. And in that case, native Alaskans were able to retain 16% of a landmass of Alaska which is two and a half times the size of Texas for about 44 million acres. And they were given about $1 billion and was initially was 12 corporations with now more like seven corporations were created. And of course, more of us know of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and the decision to finally compensate Japanese-American survivors of internment during World War II with $20,000 each. Each story has its own depths and complexities but the events of last summer put a spotlight on those moments in which the country came to some resolution either through the course or through legislative action. Recently, the Center I direct, the Center for Social Solutions here at the University of Michigan received a $5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. And part of that grant is to begin to use a community-based approach to think about reparations and where higher education institutions then that are geographically situated and tied to local communities can play a role. This builds on work out of Evanston, Illinois. A few years ago, Evanston decided that it needed to investigate its own racial history and racial past. And as part of that investigation, he came to realize that he had played a disproportionate role in stripping African-Americans in most instances and Latinas and Latinos and other instances of access to a whole range of things from housing and education to the ability to pursue their lives fruitfully. They especially took note of earlier attempts to essentially steal land and property from African-Americans in Evanston and also the ways in which the criminal justice system have been mobilized during the war on crime and particularly its focus on drugs to really overstate the degree to which African-Americans and Latinos and Latinas actually were responsible for this, the scourge of drugs. And so in the result, their city council ruled that as they came to legalize marijuana, they should use some of the proceeds from the legalization to identify, prioritize and quantify individuals for, among other things, restorative housing reparations but actually thinking through what it meant to think through restorative justice more broadly across the city of Evanston. And so while Sheila Jackson-Lee and others are talking for a federal solution to all of this, we began to see in the last few years a new trend, which is community-based. Evanston is one example, Asheville, North Carolina is the second example, the state of California where governor has issued now a call for a statewide examination of reparations in the state of California is yet a third example. Saying that we may find ourselves in a moment not unlike in the civil rights movement, where community-based action helped to shape and define and spur federal action. And that indeed, federal action only came because of actions taken at the community level. At least that's the assumption that has guided our grant. And so our grant is called Crafting Democratic Futures, situating colleges and universities and community-based reparation solutions. And it involves a cluster of liberal arts colleges, major research universities, spanning from Minnesota and the West to Emory and Spelman in the South and Southeast. And the goal among each is to really do three things. One is to say that universities in colleges as anchor institutions are going anywhere and have an inherent responsibility for the welfare of the community and the regions that it's part of. That two, that there are local histories that need to be crafted about questions of reparations. And at three, those local histories can't be written by those of us in universities and colleges alone. They require the careful development and curation of those who live in those communities. And so as a result, this is a community-based partnership that we have, are developing. The grant just started on the 1st or 2nd of January. And so we're in the developmental stage for sure. As part of this grant, we aim to do several things. One, we want to identify in each of those communities, not only community partners, but in individual individuals we call community fellows. These are individuals who themselves were community activists, who will help the universities and colleges in real time in real ways to write those histories that themselves will be crowdsourced. Two, we imagine that the products that we will produce would then be shared with legislative and other bodies that will be able to turn what we do into would-be policy. Now, my friends at the Mellon Foundation keep reminding me that we're not able to lobby. And I sure them, I understand that, but I also understand we're already able to educate. And so we will mount a powerful educational effort. One partner I haven't mentioned thus far is WQED, the public radio and television station out of Pittsburgh. WQED is our media partner. And their job is to not only track and chronicle what happens in each of these communities, but also in the end to help to produce a documentary that will be aired on public television. And that begins to talk about the ways in which the idea of reparations takes hold. That chronicles both the successes and failures that highlights the ways in which this either taps into a pulse for change in recognition and resolution and restitution or taps into a pulse of opposition and recrimination because both need to be discovered and uncovered. If we actually are going to move through the stages of the acknowledgement leading to closure that is called for by Senator Darity and Kristen Mullin. When they end, and so we have some time to really have a conversation with the case of Elmo Bowling. The other night I was given a talk about this project to a group in Pennsylvania, mostly individuals who live in a retirement home. And invariably one of the questions was raised is saying, you know, what do you say to those whose parents and grandparents say they were part of the wave of European immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th century and had no bearing on the story of slavery? And I say, I hear you. And that's why I started the story with the case of Elmo Bowling. Because the story of reparations is not just a story about enslavement. It's a story about Jim Crow. It's a story about the federal government and his policies of redlining and all that have led to vast racial wealth differences in the United States. It's a story that was highlighted just two days ago in the media with Black family in Texas that had his home appraised. And they thought the appraisal was extraordinarily low. And so they had white neighbors come in the next time the appraiser came and discovered that the appraisal jumped by $500,000 when the face of the owner went from black to white. In some ways, the story of reparations is not defined just by the institution of slavery. But the legacy of the institution of slavery still has its fingers and tentacles around a whole lot. And that is embedded in American history into this day. And so what we want to do both in the project that we're working on is ask, how do you actually deal with each moment? And what is each moment in American history in all of its geographic variability? Tell us about how we go about acknowledgement, redress if our aim is closure. It seems striking and important that in this month of Black history that we pause and reflect on what strategies are required if our goal really is closure. Or we can continue to go along. And I end with one little story, right? Because in the last two years, there have been high-profile comments by Senator Mitch McConnell, who was saying he was opposed to reparations because there was no one who had been involved in the institution of slavery, who was alive today. And then there was a comment by David Brooks in a series of articles in the New York Times who said that that too have been his initial interpretation and impression. But as he's traveled America and continued to see the ways in which the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow shaped opportunities in the 21st century, he's come to realize that we have to address in some formal way the whole question of reparations, that we're ever to get beyond and move forward as a nation. And I think that is a question that we all have to pose for ourselves as we get and begin to exit the month of February, move into the month of March, April, May, and June. Do we want closure or are we prepared to actually continue to come back to the same question over and over and over again? It seems the momentum is moving in a certain direction. We hope that momentum doesn't require the death of another George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or others to make it more salient for the majority of Americans. So let me stop there as a teaser to begin a conversation. And thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Lewis, for providing us with an overview of the contemporary calls for reparations, for outlining who's been involved in the process, for talking about the role of education if we are to move in your words toward closure and for speaking about it in a global context as a matter of important social policy. So for the remainder of the session, we'll open it up for a few questions for Professor Lewis. And as a reminder, participants can make use of the chat box or the raise hand feature and I will recognize you so you can pose the question to Professor Lewis. Go ahead, Mariam. Hi, Professor Lewis. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your work, your expertise and just your own career path through this work. It's really important. I took class at the last semester or two semesters now ago and I learned a lot and something that you mentioned in this series and then also in class is just how many variations and meanings the word reparations holds. And I guess my question for you and it's a very broad and general question but I'm wondering how do we move forward as a United Front when this term means so many different things to so many different people? Yeah, it's great to see you. Hope you're doing well. And now you asked a very, very important question which is that it is difficult to think through is reparations, are we talking about financial reparations? Are we talking about educational opportunities? Are we talking about voting rights? Are we talking about and you sort of fill in the blank? And in some ways the project that we've just launched through the Mellon Grant is actually designed to uncover answers to that question. What we decided we didn't want to do was to tell people exactly what should be meant by reparations. So if you go to the farthest west school in our network is Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. So Moorhead is literally right across the river three minutes away from Fargo, North Dakota. It's the Red River goes through. There are a number of Native American communities that go from Western and Northern Minnesota and Eastern North Dakota down to South Dakota and Iowa. And so Concordia, for instance, is asking a question about reparations as in partnership with Native American communities. And so that's a different story. The timeline is different, the conditions are different. And so what we want to be able to do is to argue that a community-based approach to reparations may require us to do something that is even more uncomfortable and then coming up with a national strategy which is to go into the communities and ask where were those moments of injustice and that was systematized that need to be addressed, redressed and certainly acknowledged and redressed before you can bring closure? If you think of North Dakota as an example right now you're trying to figure out the pipeline and so it's almost impossible to talk about contemporary politics in North Dakota without talking about oil and the pipeline and why it was moved from Bismarck to where it is on Native lands and what the implications are. So those are the kinds of examples which is different than if we go to Norik which is another institution, Rutgers-Norik which has had a long history of dealing with restitution if not reparations in Norik and the symbiotic relationship between the university, Rutgers University, Norik and the city there. And that's a complicated question but if you think about it almost every land-grant public institution in the United States was created as a result of confiscation of lands that had been owned by Native peoples. How do you begin to think about reparations and what are reparations in that context? Or use Georgetown as an example. The history recently that the Jesuit order in and around Maryland secured the future of Georgetown in part by selling 272 African descendant peoples in farther south into Louisiana and using those proceeds to both show up the order and to advance the institution. What should reparations look like if the center focuses Georgetown University? And as we talked about last year in class is one thing for Georgetown as it has done to promise access to a Georgetown education to anyone who can gain admission to Georgetown who was part of that original family of 272. But then when the student body decided to tax itself to for $400,000 a year how small that seemed to the descendants when they sort of did the arithmetic and try to figure out $400,000 divided by 3,000 people what does that get us? And so that leads to a whole different conversation about reparations, three different sites three different institutions in this case all higher ed institutions with different kinds of stories to tell. And I think part of our work ahead is actually unbirthing some parts of those stories to think about the implications of a community based solution in addition to a federal solution. Go ahead Tia. Okay, thank you so much for Professor Lewis. I'm wondering for a while now at least I think since Hillary Clinton's loss there's been a lot of talk amongst pundits that class based policies and retribution are a political winner but that race and identity is unfortunately less like much less popular and even a political loser. So I was wondering if you have any thoughts on how to make reparations more popular among the general electorate and then also on the morality and the efficiency of using income based or well based redistribution is sort of like a proxy. Yeah, so that's a very complicated question. Let me see if I can pull it apart but thank you for that question. And one thing I would end up saying is that people are never one thing they never did black or white. And so as you sort of think of the whole person and they sit across a spectrum of identities but talk about their class and their race and gender and their religious and their political beliefs, et cetera, et cetera. And so part of the challenge when we get into the political domain is that sometimes we highlight one or two of those variables without thinking about their intersectionality and asking questions there. But I would argue in this case at the very least a starting point has to be race and I don't always argue that. I've written a number of articles and books about intersectionality and the need to deal with the ways and with race and class and all these things sort of interact with one another. But I fear that if we don't tackle the racial dimension here we will always find ourselves in a sort of loop coming back to the start. And I worry that as a nation, particularly as we move toward 2040 and 2045 when we will have a non-white majority for the first time in all of American history that's to say there have been places that had non-white majority in Mississippi in the 1860s, South Carolina in the 1790s had non-white majorities but the nation is projected will have a non-white majority. We get to that point without addressing the whole question of our own racial history of injustice. Means then that will second half of the 21st century will be starting back in the same places that we ended the 20th century with and that we modeled our way through the first three or four decades of the 21st century. So I push us to have the courage to believe that we can actually engage in this forward moving effort. And if you think of it this way and got it by family and friends who says, you know, the challenge is to remind ourselves by the middle of the 21st century, America will look like the rest of the world where folks who have been defined as minorities in the 20th century will be recognized as part of the global majority in the second half of the 21st century. And that shift in language for minority the global majority begins to say something about the axis of power. It's more important, I think, to actually begin and work through all of this now. So does that mean to your question, does that mean that every African-American should benefit in the same way? No, it's the same way that I shouldn't be receiving benefits right now from the federal government for people who have been, who lost their jobs and need assistance. There should be some means testing in some places and under certain terms. But it's also the case that we know that wealth, which is different than income, is not evenly distributed across the United States and it's not even evenly distributed within a black family and households. And so there's enough sociological literature on the fact of the probability of African-Americans who are upper middle class and all being able to actually extend that to successive generations and the probability for them is much lower than it is for white Americans. And so if we start saying it's only about class and ignore those racial realities, we never get through the redress that can lead to the closure. Judy, I think it's next. Hi, Professor. Hi, Judy. Long time no see. So my question is, I'm curious, you're using the word closure and closure to me feels very finite, like you're done, you do it and you're done. And this feels like a very multifaceted issue. I'm curious, like do you think there's just, we have one shot to do this and if we don't make it work, right, it's over or do you think we have some chances? That's a very good question. And so I'm building on Sandy's and Kirsten's notion of closure and full disclosure, Judy's in my class and we'll be talking about this in full detail in a few weeks. And so I think we have one attempt to do this in a way that satisfies the majority of people. And I don't know that, I daresay there's not a few examples in a human history let alone American history where a policy or decision, legislative decision that satisfied everyone forever. And in part that you can look at the litany of lawsuits and other kinds of activities to suggest that how often that has not been the case. But my sense is, is that there is a window of opportunity and that window of opportunity will not remain open forever. And the consequences of failing to seize that opportunity means that we find ourselves yet once again, going back into communities where we're squaring off against one another for limited resources. And I think this will, I worry, I don't know, I worry that this will be heightened in the next two decades as we come to terms with the massive restriction of labor and that I can foresee happening as automation continues to expand and as whole job families themselves are altered. And so if you layer on this since that my loss is not the same as your loss and what you're asking me to give up is something that then forfeit my right to do something else. My worry is that we don't get to it in the next 10 years. It will be drowned out and by other kinds of macroeconomic changes that and the political consequences that we'll be facing as a nation and a world over the next quarter of a century. And that could be devastating for all. We're gonna talk about more of this in the next couple of weeks. So I see a lot of hands. I think we only have time for one more question and the next hand that I saw come up with Sam Hurd. Yeah, thank you Professor Lewis for this talk. This was incredibly insightful. I guess I had a question sort of specifically about HR 40 and your thoughts on it in terms of one critique that I hear from supporters of reparations on HR 40 is that there doesn't need to be like another study of how it would be done and that there's been a number of academic studies that have mapped out different ways that it could be paid out and that HR 40 while certainly more positive than the current status quo is still in effect potentially like kicking the can down the road and not actually leading towards an actual policy change. So I was just curious what your thoughts are on that are and whether HR 40 is sort of more of a necessary like political step to build support from like a congressionally mandated study. Yeah, I actually think it's probably, I thank you for that question. I think it's probably more of the ladder that indeed there have been a series of studies that can outline what needs to be done. But what HR 40 I think represents is a socialization effort to begin to socialize those solutions both at the congressional level but also at the national level. And the question is here for me it's almost a matrix, right? I mean, by reparations are we only talking about financial reparations? And so we're talking about money and the upper end of 16 trillion that some have projected. Are we talking about workforce opportunities? Are we talking about investment and co-investment in neighborhoods and communities across the country? I mean, I think what a commission could do is actually begin to delineate with some specificity. What, and going back to the earlier question what we mean by reparations is ABC and D. Here's how we will begin to actually implement in that kind of rollout that X number, I'm making this up, right? X millions of dollars would go for this and X billions of dollars would go for this and these new zones would go and here's the accountability index. And so, and then someone is watching this to make sure it ends up where it's supposed to be going. I mean, as Emma knows, one of the things we're trying to do in the center is come up with a reparations index right now to begin for all of those corporations that claim they were giving monies to these groups coming out of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor murders, among others. Who's tracking that? I mean, right now there's public facing positive pieces that are going on, but there's no way to be held accountable. And so we would need to make sure that HR40 commission would talk about not only then what's reparations, what we would end up paying, but then who's actually going to be held accountable and how do we as a public hold them accountable to make sure resources if that's there are getting to where they need to be. So I think that work still has to be done. So thank you so much, Professor Lewis for joining us today and for sharing your insights. Thank you for participating and for posing some really insightful questions. So this will end today's event. We will host our final discussion on March the 11th with faculty discussant, Roderick Johnson. And he will lead us in a discussion on lobbying and mass incarceration. So hopefully you'll be able to join us during this time. Thank you again, this concludes today's events. Thank you.