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captioning performed by vitac >> the second conversation is indicative of the way some black americans are dealing with post modernity, the election of a black president, immigration of millions of nonwhites and advent of a global economy has offered many american born blacks alternative ways to self-identify, many ways to be black. while they don't reject their blackness, they nevertheless are expressing the desire to not be sir couple described by a group definition of blackness. they understand their race as one of many variables that define them. i'm going to talk a little bit

to this morning about what i found at the 1990s mass marches, the million man and woman march, to demonstrate the similarities and differences between black modernity and post modernity. in doing so, i hope to begin to answer the question that was before us this morning, who is black america. so if we start with the early -- the early conversation, at the turn of the century, african-americans understood that to be part of the modern world and to take part in what we call modernity, they had to overcome the systems of oppression that tie them to futile systems and to establish their property rights, including the rights to their own bodies and personhood and establish the rights to the fruits of their labor and to be able to move and they needed the taxes that they

paid to government to underwrite their civil educational and housing rights. the attend ees of the 1909 national negro conference took the idea that blacks were citizens entitled to human rights and demanded that blacks be given social and political rights as well. they denounced the persecution of organized workers, the system of share cropping and convict labor system and they demanded that blacks be given a free and complete education not restricted to just industrial education. they insisted that every civil right accorded under the 14th amendment be given to black people. at other times they demanded that blacks have the right to intermarry, not because black people were dying to nmarry whites but marriage is a civil right and to deny them the right to marry who they married was

the denial of the basic right of american citizenship. they were also mindful of the fact that the laws against intermarriage left black women open to sexual exploitation by white men. most black americans therefore wanted black people to be interval to this american society. though there have always been people who followed the preceps of bishop turner and envisioned blacks going back to africa, the predominant vision was not one where blacks lived separately within the country or inmigrated back to africa, the members of the niagara movement said in 1905, quote, any discrimination based simply on race or color is barbarrist, we care not how hollowed it be, discrimination based simply and solely on physical peculiarities and color or skin, all relics of that

unreasoning human savagery of which the world is and ought to be thoroughly ashamed. most black organizations therefore worked tirelessly to rid america of that barbarist discrimination. they worked for equality. for the most part when african-americans accepted segregation at all, it was accepted as a measure of self-defense, that was necessary to fight oppression and build a community strong enough to withstand the insult and injure of jim crow and the lynching that went along with it. black people involved what my colleague calls parallel institutions as a measure of self-defense. black sororities and fraternities, black colleges, the black church, black professional organizations were founded because we were excluded

from white organizations that were part of the modernity project. segregation proved to be the achilles' heel of white supremacy. it provided blacks the chance indeed the imperative to develop a range of distinct institutions that they controlled. it allowed blacks to defy whites and be modern in spite of white american's desire to confine african-americans to a primitive premodern existence. black unity was essential to black modernity because black people realized that group strength was stronger than individual strength. group accomplishments went further than individual ak flish plishmentes. it was our exclusion that created our quote/unquote country, our black unity, our black community. at the center of the book black

is a country is the notion of black people not as an imagined community as benedict anderson would have it but as a people who having been cordoned off, separated from whites were willing in the 50s and 60s to take their case before the united nations and plead for their rights as other nations had done and were doing. steven hahn traces this black nation back to the days before freedom, a nation under our feet is the title of his magnum opus, we see a son ready to embrace black modernity, equipped with a song, lift every voice and sing which became the black national anthem and equipped with the courage that he recently taken on -- he was ready to take on the world as a new negro, new

black man. because of one dropped law past during the colonial civilization, made a heritage black and numbers went from 1 to 20,000 between 1850 and 1900 and numbers increased to 140,000 between 1899 and 1937. along with him were blacks of all social and economic classes because jim crow laws and systemic terror made blacks second class citizens, forced to live and play together and forge a meaningful existence because what is called the veil, all blacks developed their own institutions in neighborhoods and culture and own style and aesthetic and food their ways of knowing. let's fast forward to the second

conversation, where he doesn't want to be limited or confined by any conceived notion of blackness and the son wants to express his individuality. if we look at the 1995 million man march and the 1997 million woman march for answers to the question of who is black america, we find the tradition of self-help and self-defense was by the 1990s disintegrating. this is ironic and paradox cal since the identity variables that drew the people to these marches were black identity. and yet, the black consciousness, the consensus over who is black that had served to energize african-americans for most of the 20th century was disappearing. let me give you just an example of what i mean. the calls for unity at both marches, if we were so united --

if we were so united, then why was there a need to call for unity? it says to me that unity was some short supply. similarly, if black men and women were so together, why were there two separate marches and two separate national malls? why did black homosexuals have to petition and fight to be part of both marches? i argue that black america is not what this used to be and this issue of post modernity and post blackness is something that

people like to array and philosopher charles s. johnson have talked about -- give me one more minute. charles s. johnson, in 2008, he gave a martin luther king talk and he called it the end of the black american narrative. in this essay he argues that african-american narrative of slavery, jim crow lynching that has dominated everything is tired. this unique black american narrative which emphasizes the experience of victimization is quietly in the background of every conversation we have about black people. even when it's not fully articulated or expressed, it's our starting point, our agreed upon premise and most important presupposition for dialogues about black america.

what johnson argues is that african-americans need to bury this narrative. because black people today are too complex and multifacetted to be so easily character iizechar. number of caribbeans and number of africans and by racials we begin to see just what he's talking about. i'd like to end with another not so imagery conversation. elected mere of a big american city, he and his bisexual black wife who traces her roots back to her grandmother from barbados have a heart felt talk with their biracial son. they explain to him what they call the drill. it is the self-imposed procedure

learned by most people of color upon being stopped by the police. quote, move slowly, keep your hands where the police can see them. explain all of your hand procedures so the cops will not what you're doing. if you are in a car, turn on the lights if it is at night. if it's at night, put your hands on the steering wheel and make no sudden moves. the biracial son with caribbean roots is startled by the candor but nods his head in the affirmative as he stares ats them in disbelief. some of you will recognize that last conversation as that between mayor de blasio of new york city and his son.

[ applause ] >> i'm give the panel one more shot of trying to deal with the question of narrative of status within communities of inher itance, of experience and circumstance, the things that make black life what our president called a mongrul people, indeed american people bringing so many parts -- so many parts together and then we'll open it up our discussion to the -- open our discussion to the audience.

all right. the panel has conceded to the audience. this is not what martin luther king suggested by authority. once you have it, you're not supposed to -- not supposed to surrender it. but we have microphones over there and microphones up there and if anybody wants a question or make a short statement, a short statement, they can go over to the microphone. please say who you are and -- >> yes, my name is bill dogget, this is an awesome panel and i missed a little bit coming arlingt arlington.

the narrative informs the political conversation at the bedrock of the 2016 election, what is more fundamental to the trump campaign than this narrative of african-americans being this or that or the other. i won't go farther but you know where i'm going. it's an interesting and important dialogue, i've done work very much around the voices, idea of double consciousness and we today in 2016 still have to deal with this concept where it's a part of our essence, this idea of double consciousness. thank you. >> i'm marvin jones -- >> closer to the mic. i'm marvin jones from a mixed race community in north carolina 270 years old and always been mistaken as white.

i've also been mistaken as black. sometimes by myself. but i grew up in -- my community, we always look different but always part of the african-american community. that's one thing i've learned. we help set up black institutions, even though we almost look near white or near indian. it was always living on the edge of what was white and what was african-american or indian. but it was -- i learned that being black is part of a community sometimes and not always even having the gene from africa, a post colonial gene from africa. and i now yield my time to this person and my neighbor from the neighboring county, alton

smallwood. >> thank you very much for yielding your time. cornell university, basically i have a question for professor penninggroff, as i understood your presentation, you're looking at the black church and the experience gained through use of the law and legal instruments. my question to you is where would you place fraternal orders such as the elks, masons and knights of pitheus and so forth since dare use of the law preceded that of the church and i'm trying to remember the name of the socioology at harvard --

>> thank you so much, i was having a brain freeze it happens more frequently than i'd like these days. anyway, she really looks at the development of the legal experience through these fraternal organizations. i wonder where do you place them in your story? >> thank you for that question. i'll answer very quickly that the fraternal orders, they are a part of my book. they should be a bigger part of my book. right now the church is occupying more space than the fraternal orders. i don't -- it's hard for me to date on the fly, i would say they used law in the late 1700s and i do know the scotch poll work and also scholar named liazos. one of the things they talk

about is this battle that develops intense fifies over th use of insignia and rituals and that's what the court battles are on sentencibleably about. and i would emphasize this more. the battle was probably just as much over the insurance business, that is to say that they are both competing for customers and the battle intensifies later when companies like prudential tried to get into the business. >> in he essence the black fraternal orders get out of the insurance business which was their life blood before the civil war. that's worth telling. thank you for that question. >> arwin smallwidth from north carolina university. the question is directed to professor miles and in general as marvin jones just mentioned

particularly in north carolina, southeastern virginia and south carolina, you have large numbers of mixed race people who are native an century and goes back to the enslavement. and i believe that that is really -- that first 200 years of history, late 1500s through 1600s, before the revolution, is it really the formation of what we consider african-americans. how do we get the next generation of young scholars to fully develop and examine that? we talked about civil rights and these other things but we have not fully examined the relationship between native americans and blacks in the first 200 years of colonial settlement. >> thank you for that question. i think one of the things we face that's a challenge is that you have to go back centuries as

your comments there just indicated. i find that it can really take some encouragement and enticement to get students to want to look at the 1700s. part of what our job is i suppose is to really unveil nuances and complexities and really interesting nature of this material in the colonial period. students can say, i can study sexuality there and migration in those same movements. >> just to jump in and underscore, i've taught both halves of the african-american history survey and my enrollments are always double for the second half. it's hard to get students to come with you to the earlier period. >> hi, i'm a student at the college -- william and mary yet,

university of maryland. i'm one of those people that actually do like to look into earlier things. so here i am, guys. no, really, i have a question for ms. miles and ms. debra about identity and talking about caveats in the african-american community. i know that a lot of people don't like to use the term afro in front of a lot of things, afro-latino or something else. with that context, how do we talk about these interactions between different races and different people and different generations of people while grappling with this identity question of putting it in front or not. some people feel it takes away their americanness or something else. >> you passed on that one pretty

quickly. thank you for that question. i'm comfortable with afro, i use afro-native in part because another term black indian that i use sometimes because it's known but not as comfortable with. black indian is a general term that collapses various identities. i feel afro-native is a little more open. bit all of these terms end up trapping us in cul de sacs. one thing i wish i could do better and encourage you to do, try to invent new language to really capture the complexities of the populations that we're talking about. >> the question -- >> i would answer that by saying that we're in a moment where i think this whole biracial

structure of american identity is in a flux. so that it's predominant -- it's mostly because we have had such a large influx of hispanics or latinos who either will identify as black or white or mostly will identify as hispanic regardless of what their color is. i think that with the immigration of so many nonwhites, the notion of being either black or white, whether it's -- what you want to check with on the census, now that you can check more than one or two, i think a lot of people see this as a way of just asserting so much greater -- asserting so many more of the variables that

make up identity and to be quite honest, i don't think that a lot of americans want to be pigeonholed anymore into being one or the other and i think when they use afro, which i don't have a problem or african, that's what exactly you're doing, you're privileging one aspect of identity over another and i think that that is what particularly millennials and more younger generation are trying to get away from. >> good morning, i live and work in newark, new jersey. i have a couple of comments, mostly spurred by my sister new jersey and debra gray white. professor white mentioned the magic word census and i'd like

to say a little bit about that looking forward along the lines that you mentioned. and that is of increasing black ethnicity, when i say i live in new jersey, that's pertinent because we have a lot of people not only from the caribbean but voluntary immigrants from the nations of africa. so some of them identify self-straight forwardly as african-american and others have very distinct -- more of an immigrant sense of superiority over local black people and so forth. there are a lot of different ways of being african african-american and that's going to become more salient in the future. the other comment i make as an expert on white people, and that has to do with the beauty, i

think the protectiveness of the community -- the black community -- i always tell my students, who is the black community? but we have a sense of a community identity. and i think that has been in some ways part of our persistence, our ability to survive. and i think what you see on the other side is that individualism has probably hurt white people in the sense of falling rates of longevity, of drug abuse and so forth. much talk now about white people dying off or poor white people dying off. and i have not seen a comment about individuality as a factor in morbidity. just two comments.

thank you. >> my name is moses massenberg and i represent the association for the african-american life and history. 100 year old organization. i haven't heard the name of the association in the east basis but i want to say that. i have two questions about anti-blackness from two particular groups with regard to solidarity and black roots movements. we have problems where young folks who don't identify as black refer to themselves and everyone around them as the "n" word and have their black peers refer to themselves as such to the point it alienates our elders at city hall meetings and at local community meetings to oppose movements like the black lives matter movement because

they feel that it's sort of a -- it's not a respectable movement with regard to what their ideas of blackness ought to represent. these individuals stand behind police officers a lot of time. every time i go to a city hall meeting, this is contingency, especially in los angeles and atlanta, conservative black people who oppose the black lives matter movement who are our elders but who also expect us to respect them as elders. so my question is how can we hold -- how can we encourage our revolutionary elders to hold our more anti-black elderss accountable and dwet our allies to stop celebrating seasing anti-blackness in their solidarity? >> not easily done.

>> i would go back to something henry lewis gates said, again, it's quoted in two arrays, who's afraid of post blackness. there are 40 million ways to be black and there always have been. it's just that we had to. we were compelled to be black in a particular way before ironically and paradoxically, before the freedom movement. but the success of that, at least in terms of letting loose a black middle class, the immigration of so many people of color and i just don't mean even african-americans or caribbeans but south asians and brown people, they are just so many

ways now and so much more freedom to be black and this is despite and in spite of the killing of young black men and women by the police. that now that there is this ability to express different kinds of blackness and to act on it, we're beginning to see what always has been and that is 40 million ways to be black. >> the paper really exposed some of those external fissures and connected with debra said and with the question about

generational tensions and age tensions and linguistic tensions. it is not a new challenge. it's an old challenge. we're trying to work every day to solve it. >> good morning, my name is bernard morton. i'm no historian or scholar, i just try to read a book every now and then written by the likes of you all. and my question is for professor white, i'm always interested in these -- in the discussion of class within the black community. history and current events clearly show that regardless of social economics, race has always been our link fate. so my question is, if the discussion of class a distraction when as i said people like you and o others has written that race has always been the link fate within the black community? >> political scientists recently

have noted and they have stas tickized it -- whatever the hell ever -- but the linked fate and the idea of linked fate and persistence of it is dissolving and this is beginning in the 1990s and through the first 16 years of the 20th century, we're finding that -- i'm not a political scientist, but they are finding that the feeling of linked fate is declining among black people. and even as late as i guess it was in 2007, the notion -- black people were asked are black people a single race?

37% -- round it off to say 40% of black people said no. they said no. and i'm not making this up. this is from the pugh research center. and i -- that i think it's rather astounding if not profound. though the linked fate that black people used to feel is tenuous. >> hello. my name is mary elliott, i'm a museum specialist here at the national museum of african-american history and culture. and i am co-cure ating the slavery and freedom exhibition with my colleague nancy burkeoff in the audience as well. i really appreciate elsa barkley brown your acknowledgement of silence. in this experience of putting together the exhibition, we've

had people come forward with objects, documents, that nonafrican-americans, white people who say i didn't know what to do with this. and i've heard it for so many years. and it helps us to have a better understanding of the black experience in america and it's important that these people are coming forward now. and in the exhibition, we look at slavery and freedom and talk about the harsh realities of slavery but the resistance resilience yens and survival, right? we've had some experiences along the way where for example, when we took apart the slave cabin, we had a young woman african-american, descended from the slave community associated with the cabin. she told me she dnidn't talk to another woman who is white and descended from the slave owning community. and she didn't want to talk to

her because she said she keeps telling me we're related and i don't want to hear it. so i told her you should talk with her because the fact is that this is a shared experience and she's going to have information about your family that she's calling her family as well just like you might have information for her. and so i think it's really powerful that you have brought this up here. i'd like to know how you will prompt dialogue, move through dialogue with your students. you talked about it and i thought about it in the context of african-american students but -- it cuts both ways it's black and white. it's family memory that people don't talk about, right? then there's some shame on both sides. i'm really interested in how you'll do that and also how you see this 21st century museum helping to move the dialogue

forward. >> so yes, my students are a range of people in the classroom. so when we're talking about silences or shame or what we want to know, we're actually talking about the range of what different people want black american history to be and for some people what they think that means if they aren't black, what they think that means about their own history. that's a conversation we're always having in the classroom. i think the main thing that i'm always trying to do is to get us to be able to talk about everything, to not have any things that can't be on the table, allow there to be conversations that we don't know the end to and i don't have any

idea to the answer to that. i'm perfectly fine with not knowing the answer as long as we don't take it off the table because i don't know how to answer that question and collectively we try to figure out what to do to help us move forward with continuing to have the conversation. i think in general, my approach to thinking about african-american history who's black, et cetera, is that i think most of the time when we see unity, what we are looking at is esilence. in order to get to unity, a lot of people have been silenced and aren't in that narrative. so if we're telling a story about that, that we need to figure out who we aren't hearing and then as long as we can actually sort of put those voices out there, we might not be able to resolve the kind -- and this is how we tell the

history but my goal is to silence less and less people and that's what i would hope we're doing in history. which is not necessarily creating -- i'm not trying to create a new narrative, if we do that now we'll come to another narrative that we'll all agree on. i guess what i hope for the museum is that there's a lot of things that we've been silent about that show up in the museum and in some kind of way and spaces for people to add other things that they think are silent. we're all going to create something that has silences in it. but to have a lot of things that have been silent and not to worry about whether -- i'm not running the museum, i can say not worry -- not to worry about the things that people are going to be upset about that shall in there or included et cetera.

yeah. [ applause ] >> my name is junior williams from newark, new jersey. the assumption that i think some of us make is that being black was only a protected device to get us through and beyond jim crow. well, i have a problem with that because there were many of us who thought that blackness or being black had a lot more value. so if you reduce it to a protective movement, then you lose that value or you are -- it's possible for someone to take it away. so i use as an example the whole concept of the blues.

we are losing the blues because we won't accept it as part of the black phenomenon and black culture, as part of the essence of not only being black but being american. and because we don't see any value to it because we're integrated no necessarily to be black, we're beyond that. somebody else picked it up off the floor and presently enjoying it. now we look upon our own culture and we say, yes, it's nice to be a part of something and not have to be considered black, white or whatever it is, we're indifferent to that. there are other people hard at work making sure that they extract -- it's like a corporate takeover, you know what i'm saying? you take the whole thing but you reject that which you don't need but keep that which is useful. we better step up and reclaim our identity.

>> let me speak very briefly to that and say that those last words i'm going to remember. we need to step up, reclaim. but also, talked about both beauty and protectiveness in her comments and i think that's also part of what you were just expressing, that there's beauty in that history and beauty in that cultural connection. i think that we need to focus on that and lift that up as well. i want to just add that i heard a presentation recently by psychologist, i wish i could give you a citation but i can't. it focused on when parents talk about black pride to their adole less ent children, those do better around issues of self-esteem and fewer instances of depression and so on. in our day, there really is a psychological protective factor to positive blackness in

discussions between parent and child. >> good morning. my name is cicely marcus, from the university of minnesota, i also wanted to thank you for bringing up the silences in the archive and my question is, in your practice as historians, when you're looking at the history of the formation of africa america in the 11500s and even today, when the documents are missing or aren't valued by institutions, how do you call attention to those silences? how do you document silences when the documents aren't there? >> very carefully. >> somebody want to --

>> i think that -- let me just say the documents are never there, at least the ones that you want. and that's true for the 20th century as well as the 17th century and in some ways i think it's easier in the 17th and 18th century because so much has been destroyed. in the 20th century you have so much you can't -- how do you sort through it? but the documents you want are the smoking gun is never -- is never there but you can find lots of evidence and put it together in ways that help us understand that story, some of which has been spoken of here. >> i also think that you have to begin to read what exists

differently. so that we've done so many historians have done really great work with say runaway ads that yield very little information. but it's amazing for -- i would give you one example, my colleague marisa fuentes, she had one document from the 1700s of a black woman who ran away from a plantation in bridgetown. it was just one runaway ad. one runaway ad. and what the runaway ad said was that forget the woman's name, but she's probably headed towards bridgetown. and that was it. and she also she had distinguishing marks. so she wrote an entire chapter based on that one runaway ad of

what she did was she went back to bridgetown and she got all of the old maps of bridgetown. so knowing that she would be coming -- barbados is not a very large island, so knowing where she would probably enter the city, what she did was to put herself in the shoes of this runaway person and then through those old maps, recreated what this woman would have seen. now, that's just really incredibly tedious, hard work. but nevertheless, we got a sense of what this woman was going to possibly feel, for example, as somebody who is running away from a rural plantation and is going to a -- an urban center and she passes a whipping post. you know, it doesn't take too much imagination.

but basically what she calls it is reading against the bias grain. that's what i think we have to do. we have to take what is there, turn it inside-out and look at it say, from the perspective of the black person. and read very differently than -- in many ways we've been taught to read. but it can be done. >> and i guess i just want to say that i think you also have to be willing to leave questions that you can't answer but leave the questions out there as opposed to wiping them out because i don't know what the answer is to that. >> one other thing is i run into silences all the time in my other project, which is on legacies of slavery in ghana. and when i run into those, i often will treat them as -- or i'll begin to think of them as

expressions of power, as residues of power. the chief is called to testify in a land case, hums and says nothing or ignores the summons all together, that's an expression of power and assertion of his -- what he sees as his right to define his boundaries. when someone brings up slave ancestry about another person, that's an expression of power. when someone does not, that tells a lot. i can sort of follow the silences to figure out some things that i want to know. >> just one other thing. i think as historians that we need to be a little more interdisciplinary than we are and that there are ways to borrow some of the skills and techniques and methods of political scientists or literary people, cultural theorists,

anthropologists as ways to read our documents. >> yes. >> hello, my name is bernice alexander bennett. i'm here wearing three hats, one is coordinator of the midwest african-american genology institute and this is we're going into our fourth year and it will be at the allen county public library july 11th through the 13th. the second as a member of the afro-american his cal and gene logical society and host and producer of research at the national archives in beyond blog talk radio. what i want to hear more about are the stories. and one of the things we

genolog genologists do, connect the stories, so when someone tree, and they find convict, what is the story behind finding your family member listed as a convict? so let me just tell you one of my stories, i began to do my research and in my family tree, i discovered a great, great uncle, listed in the newspaper as killing his brother. and there was a governor's order, in louisiana, for him, and the question that i have was, well, what's the story? there was a long story. but he was a part of my family tree. did i dismiss that? did i go into a solid mode, not share what i needed to know and understand as well as share that with our families. so when we talk about the silences, do we keep those

secret scandals and lies away from the rest of the family members or do we share them? >> yeah, no, certainly. so the film i was talking about that begins with the tree for convict, the film is the young girl learning the full histories of these women. why they killed the people that they did, but also removed from that what their histories were with their families, what they did -- what their occupations were, et cetera. it is learning that. and when i'm using that with my class, i actually want my class

not to run away from the word convict, but i want them to think of all of the people that we're looking at as multidimensional human beings that there is a lot of different things that we can ask and try to find out about them. and i'm hoping that in asking them about the questions, about what they want to be their family history or what they want to be black history, et cetera, that i am encouraging them to also then ask those questions in their own family, not necessarily that they're doing it in my class, but that one of the things they're taking from my class is to want to know more fully about their own families as well. >> we have 15 minutes. so i'll ask everybody to be efficient with their questions

and short with their comments. >> just say one -- add on one little thing. over in the moreland collection at howard university, there is a collection of family histories that howard university professor e. franklin frazer had his students go out and collect. you would be surprised, maybe not surprised, at the number of silences that the students encountered in the 1930s when asking their parents and grandparents. this is not new. >> good morning and thank you, panel. thank you, all. this question is probably in professor brown's purview, but i sincerely mean it for the entire panel. we have talked about the wrongful price of unity being silences, and when people are caught in the hurly-burly of real politic, particularly in the strong drivers of mainstream media attention, we lose our grip on history in operating with historical agency. and particularly with

intergenerational work, i'm very concerned with this kind of sense of displacement that we have as individual groups and collectives and what i really hold in high regard at the academy and i think your lodge and works present us with moving beyond the mere parameters of the academy, i'm interested in what more can be done. it is one thing to be a lively reader and practice an observation and evidence or theory. it is another to deal with young people and old people and bring together community members to aggressively attack this wrongful price of unity. thank you. >> so i think there are actually practices for how to think about

working together, so working together as opposed to unity. practices for how to think about working together without requiring or assuming uniformity, commonality, et cetera. we can see some of those practices in, i don't know, early mutual benefit societies that made very specific kinds of rules about where they met and about inclusion of wide ranges of people in the spaces in which they would meet. for the exact purpose of making sure that everyone's voice would be there, would be able to speak, i'm not mistaking everybody being able to speak for not saying some people -- some people clearly have more power than other people in that to make that decision.

so i'm not suggesting that. i think there are practices in byp 100. i've been really impressed -- i think i'm right about this, i've been really impressed with the way byp 100 has decided to deal with men in their group who have -- who allegedly have sexually assaulted women in their group. and i've been really impressed by the way they have developed a practice that holds the men accountable and does not put them out of the group. and they really worked on what the practices and how to do that and how that's going to work and it being very public about that. so i think there are practices people can develop that don't -- that aren't assuming unity, but

that are assuming we can still find ways to work together toward a particular political end. >> hello. my name is hollis gentry. i'm a genealogist. for the national museum of african-american history and culture. a comment i wanted to make in regarding to her question about evidence, it exists, it abounds, there is this myth that we're missing or we're lacking an abundance of records on african-americans and that's actually the opposite. it takes quite a bit of time to do the research but i think every historian up there on the panel has evidence to the contrary of that myth where it is a matter of reading the record differently, instead of looking for african-american records, you're looking for records in the evidence of african-americans within those records. that's from the beginning of

this country when we were recording records up until now. there are silences that abound with every group, not just african-americans. and what i think we need to do is have some sort of middle ground for genealogists and historians to come together to find the methodologies they use and to combine them to tell a better story, more nuanced story. i had an experience, for example, when i was looking for evidence of african-americans in the colonial period, and then the early national period, and ira berlin's book took me five attempts to get through masters -- a slice without masters. and what happened for me, this telling moment was when i realize you had to understand the psychology of the record keepers to understand how the recording the information in order to understand how to search through the information to find the people who we think are -- they have silences, they

may not speak themselves, but the record keepers are speaking for them. and so to navigate through that process, through the records, one must understand the other side of it. both sides of the coin. so that's just my comment. >> so the late tom schick used to, at meetings of the african-american and life and history association sit people down and say what is it you want to know and let's think about who needed and wanted that information. and if we can figure out who needed and wanted that information, we can start thinking about how to find it. >> i want to briefly add to that, that in my research, which focuses mainly on enslaved afro americans and afro cherokees in the cherokee nation, i have really benefited from the smart and savvy and knowledgeable

assistants, genealogists. i could not do half of what i did without genealogists who know how to find certain kinds of things that were really -- for me as someone coming into those records anew, and i also want to say to the point about do we have material, do we not have material, that within native american history and studies of black people and native communities, there actually is a lot of material. i always say there isn't when i write, because it is not the >> a couple of minutes left in this event. we'll leave it here. see the rest of it online at c-span.org. live now to independence, ohio, just outside of cleveland, for remarks by former new york city mayor rudy giuliani and republican political consultant and trump adviser dick morris, speaking this morning at a breakfast for florida convention delegates. live coverage here on c-span3.