I can’t imagine requiring students to pay slavery reparations, let alone black students. None of these students had anything to do with slavery.
Looks like Georgetown University students themselves will vote on it.
The back story is that it is specific to the descendants of 272 slaves that the Maryland Jesuits sold in 1838 to pay off the debts of Georgetown College (as it was named then).
http://www.thehoya.com/tag/gu272/
http://features.thehoya.com/beyond-the-272-sold-in-1838-plotting-the-national-diaspora-of-jesuit-owned-slaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Georgetown_slave_sale
Can you imagine paying $75,000 to go to Georgetown and then getting asked for an additional slavery reparation fee?
If it passes, the $27.20 will be included in the cost of attendance numbers, so that prospective students can see the cost before they decide to attend.
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/tuition-and-fees indicates that Georgetown University tuition (at list price) seems to increase by $1,500 to $2,000 every year.
If you find it objectionable, then you are free not to attend.
Many current students are paying fees that cover past lawsuits against universities or its staff. Georgetown is just being open about it.
Georgetown should shut down, and turn over all it’s land to the descendants of the slaves owned by the Jesuits.
Problem solved.
. I’m curious, was the your position when GT was refusing to cover birth control?
It seems that certain persons find the idea of righting past wrongs to be objectionable. I do not understand why.
As long as the fee is included in COA for financial aid purposes, so the wealthy students can cross subsidize the poor ones, I’m ok with it.
After all, everyone deserves a chance to virtue signal. Especially with other people’s money.
/sarc off
Does anyone watch Finding your Roots on PBS? It’s a great show and so interesting.
This past episode touched on Georgetown University slavery. http://www.pbs.org/weta/finding-your-roots/home/
Since Georgetown is a private university, I think they can do whatever they want. And if you don’t want to pay the extra 27.20/semester, you can choose to attend another school. That’s the great thing about America, we have choices.
It’s too bad those slaves didn’t.
Every time a student pays that 27.20, they should think about the 272 souls who had no choices.
Genealogy Roadshow better. I find genealogy of celebrities not as interesting.
The proposal makes no sense.
My daughter has never owned a slave.
Her parents never owned slaves.
Her grandparents didn’t own slaves either.
And her great-grandparents came to America in the 1890s after slavery was abolished.
Must she also pay reparations for the Rape of Nanking, the Holodomor or the Killing Fields because she is just as responsible for those horrible things as she is for slavery in America.
A simple solution would be to set up a fund and allow alumni contributions and give current students the choice to opt in to make a yearly donation.
Didn’t the US compensate people who were in Japanese internment camps? Taxpayers who weren’t alive back then helped pay for that.
It’s not difficult to understand conceptually. Native Americans would be extraordinarily wealthy, and most of the rest of us disposed, if the US “righted past wrongs” with respect to them. That is why no one talks about those kind of “reparations”, and American Indian descendents aren’t expecting them. I have a loyalist ancestor who owned 160 acres of land on the Hudson River in NJ. There was no legal reason for the land to have been confiscated. What would that be worth now? Again, I’m not holding my breath.
Thomas Sowell is my go-to thinker for these sorts of questions. In opposing reparations, he offered:
Worth reading the entire interview: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/thomas-sowell-taking-on-the-invincible-fallacy
Watching the video is even better.
I don’t get it. So the university sold 272 slaves, and presumably it owned more slaves who were not sold. Why only the first ones’ descendants deserve compensation?
Just to clarify - this proposal is coming from student government and the students will vote on it. They think the university isn’t doing enough to atone for or correct the past actions of the university. The “other persons once enslaved by the Maryland Jesuits” are included.
Reparations are giving to those who weren’t wronged from those who did no wrong.
Let’s say my grandmother was murdered 75 years ago. Do I now have a claim against the murderer’s grandchildren to pay me money in reparation for my loss?
It will be interesting to see if the students vote to increase this fee. Maybe the faculty and administration should have money deducted from their paychecks to fund the reparations. I wonder how that would go over.
But since more than half the students are on financial aid, and GT has already said the fee will be added to COA and therefore fully covered, this is pretty much a meaningless act of atonement. It costs more than half the kids literally nothing. And the rest pass it on to their parents paying the bill.
Moreover, the approximately $800K that will be collected annually is not going to be distributed directly to any descendants, but rather through intermediary charity organizations, which will of course pay themselves first, as we have seen so many other times. Doubtful that anyone will have the stomach to hold them accountable.
GT has already said it is going to give a “boost” in admissions chances to descendants of the original slaves. (Not sure how they are going to identify them.) This presumably adds to the boost that affirmative action already provides. Black students at GT no doubt contend with widespread perceptions that they were only admitted due to the color of their skin. I can’t see how an additional boost for certain black students - who are not going to be readily distinguishable from other black students - is going to improve this dynamic. Again, a gesture that makes GT administrators feel good about themselves - great to drop during conversation at cocktail parties - with the costs borne by someone else.
Race relations have gotten much better - remarkably so - in my experience in the lower and more middle classes (what’s left of it) over the last 30 years. But the elites are hell bent on picking at old scabs and preventing people coming together, all to the cheering of self-congratulatory PTB. It is distressing, to say the least.
Yes, I saw the Finding Your Roots episode. It focused on S. Epatha Merkerson, an actress familiar to those who have watched Law & Order or Chicago Med. It turns out that she is a descendant of one of those slaves–a fact she did not know until the show traced her history. His name is the first listed on the manifest of sales, and Georgetown has named a building for him. Later in the episode, she visits a reunion of the descendants of the sold slaves.
This is NOT a “reparations for anyone who is the descendant of slaves.” This proposal is for reparations by a specific private institution, Georgetown, to the descendants of the slaves the university sold into abject conditions. Merkerson did a good job of expressing shock that the Jesuits, who had fled England to avoid persecution, had no trouble buying slaves.
Has anyone every read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks? That involved the case of an African-American woman who was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins. Without telling her, Johns Hopkins retrieved cancer cells from her body to study and discovered something unusual. While most cancer cells died quickly in the lab, hers didn’t. When she died in the hospital, the hospital retrieved more cells–both those with cancer and those without–to do medical experiments. Her cancer cells became the “white mice” of cancer research. The descendants of those cells are still used. Nobody told the Lacks family; nobody asked consent. Hopkins made one heck of a lot of money from the use of the cells and the Lacks, who were poor, received nothing. Henrietta’s genome was sequenced and published; nobody asked for consent. Some of the cells were contaminated and researchers went running after members of the Lacks family trying to get cells from them.
In any event,some effort to compensate the Lacks family for the terrible invasion of privacy has been made by Johns Hopkins. Personally, I think it was long overdue.
I think this situation is comparable. The is not general reparations. It’s compensation to specific, identifiable people made voluntarily by a private instituion.
As to the way to identify descendants of these slaves, watch the show or read the articles. All 272 slaves are listed on the sales receipt. Three generations of the Hawkins family are Merkerson’s ancestors. Through documentary evidence and DNA it is possible to establish who descended from these particular slaves.