“Give me your working definition of reparations,” the moderator, Brian Vines, began.

Chief Dwaine Perry of the Ramapough-Lunaape Nation kicked things off.

“Perhaps the most important thing that reparations can do is present history and knowledge as it really occurred, not as a paradigm to abuse and manipulate,” he said. “Reparation, I think, has to start with the integrity of true history.”

The columnist Noah Millman spoke next.

For him, reparations means “an attempt to reconcile with the past between communities where one has suffered at the hands of the other,” he said. “Whether that is in the form of monetary or whatever, it is an intra-communal agreement, effectively, that what we are doing now is settling a long-standing grievance.”

L. Joy Williams, the president of the NAACP’s Brooklyn chapter, began by affirming that reparations should begin with truth-telling about American history. “We’re still uncovering stories and places of what harm was done, and that is part of reparations,” she said. “Following that is how do we repair … How do we repay?” That need not always take the form of a check, she emphasized. And lastly, there’s a “commitment” to never repeat the injustice again.

Later, she clarified that the state needn’t be the primary actor. “If you’re relying on American government to come and chart out a process for reparations, we’ll be waiting for 400 more damn years for that to happen,” she said. “The overall process we’re talking about starts with telling the truth … That can come from professors researching. That can come from elected officials uncovering documents. That can come from a Ta-Nehisi Coates writing … That doesn’t have to happen from the government, and I don’t think it should.”

The Reverend Mark Thompson, a member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, rooted his definition in repair and government assistance:

For many of us, reparations means spiritual repair, cultural repair, repair through the means of education, health, economics, society, all of those things together. So it’s obviously more than individual checks, but helping to build institutions so that at least African Americans can catch up with white Americans. White Americans had help through the Homestead Act—which didn’t include us—housing loans, FHA, that helped build the suburbs. Social Security did not include us … So there were all these helping hands. And we, as African Americans, not to exclude the indigenous people, none of us can catch up because some others got a head start … We have to talk about slavery’s vestiges because as soon as slavery was over, we had the Jim Crow era … And now we live in an era where we have modern-day lynchings by law enforcement, a racist criminal-justice system … the toll grows higher and higher.

Coleman Hughes, the freelance opinion journalist and Columbia University undergraduate, asserted that reparations is “something of a misnomer because the wrongs of history are generally too deep to actually be completely compensated.” What reparations should mean, he said, is “a full-hearted recognition that a wrong was committed, that something happened that should not have happened––and more than that, it’s an apology that feels more sincere because you’re attaching something tangible to it, because words are very cheap.”