"Two people could be doing research on slavery, but what questions are they asking? Somebody could map out where people go, how many people moved, do a nice quantitative map, maybe say how many people in North America are related to people in Nigeria, but it wouldn’t get you to the heart of what people are feeling today, to the injustice, to the issue of reparations. If we’re crunching numbers, how about we try and calculate the cost, including the psychological cost? Who would fund that if it was linked to reparations? I suspect it wouldn’t be seen as serious science."