I’m going to read that book! I agree, it was unethical for Hopkins to use her cells without consent.
But in the meantime two questions, if you know from reading the book:
It’s amazing how quick people are to see injustice, when tremendous generosity is staring them right in the face.
Recent polls indicate that most people think race relations are worse now than just a few years ago.
There are far more prominent and vocal elites trying to build walls between people than anyone at GU voting on a campus-specific issue that affects no one else.
My great-grandmother was murdered in the Holocaust. I didn’t get any compensation for this. Germany paid compensation to Holocaust survivors, but not the descendants of those murdered. If I had a chance to receive compensation, I would refuse anyway. Germany today is a very different country.
I don’t see a point of giving money to people like Epatha Merkerson who is presumably not poor for something that happened to her ancestors almost two centuries ago. I can appreciate a wish to atone, but giving to a charity that helps poor black people seems a better way to me.
Two involuntary acts don’t make a right.
Trying to make people today feel guilty for slavery is a form of bullying. It’s designed to make innocent people feel bad or ashamed of something over which they had no part, no control, no nothing. There is no reason why the descendant of a slaveholder should feel remorse, guilt or shame. There is also no reason why the descendant of some famous hero should feel pride. One is only responsible for what he/she does. Not for what a parent, grandparent or great grandparent did.
I saw the Finding Your Roots episode with Anderson Cooper. Cooper’s family tree includes slaveholders. So Gates asks him “how does that make you feel” and Cooper expressed some sort of feeling of shame. Why? I would have said “That’s interesting” or something like that but there’s no shame in what others have done just because they passed their genes on down to you.
Its just as ridiculous to express pride in finding out you are descended from some famous hero. Think George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, although neither have any direct descendants. Why does that enhance your self image? It shouldn’t.
Take guilt or pride in your own actions. Nothing more.
@TatinG The descendants of my family branch that was kicked out the US for being loyalists ended up in Canada. Two of the sons had a business together, with several indentured servants and one slave. They complained that the slave was “lazy”. They were also whalers. Basically I am descended from some people that would now be considered jerks, but that was a couple centuries ago.
One thing to keep in mind about the plan, it looks to me that all Georgetown students will have to pay the fee, no matter their race or nationality. So I don’t think this is a case of whites being forced to pay for something that their ancestors may or may not have done. I think it’s more a situation where Georgetown students recognize that they received some benefit (however indirectly) from the sale of the slaves all those years ago, and now they are going to pay something back for that benefit. I will say this though, if only white Georgetown students were required to pay the fee, then I would have a problem with it.
^ Kids on financial aid are not going to pay a cent.
The university committed the atrocity, not the students. Why shouldn’t the university pay reparations from its endowment? Seems to me it would make more sense for Georgetown to pay the debt from its current coffers rather than put the burden on the backs on students which seems to me a modern form of the initial offense.
Maybe it would be better if each student had to work to earn $27.20 for the fund every year, rather than just having it paid for by FA or a rich parent. If they want students to feel the pain, do it in a way that is meaningful for all.
Or have each student perform 272 hours of community service or tutoring in nearby low SES communities.
^ I was just thinking of something along those lines.
DC has some of the very worst public schools in the US, and they are overwhelmingly AA. Require as a condition of enrollment that each student at GT has to donate 10 hours of tutoring per semester. STEM kids could help elementary school kids with math, humanities kids could offer meaningful feedback on essays.
Obviously there are logistics that would have to be worked out, but this would be in keeping with the Jesuit tradition. GT can acknowledge its history and in the spirit of Christian piety, humbly offer meaningful help to people today. Students who don’t want to donate don’t have to apply.
This would be a “leg up” - an offer of help - to a group of fellow Americans in difficult circumstances that partly reflect a tragic and difficult history of struggle. Maybe it could even catch on with other schools.
So much better than setting up an “I’m entitled / you owe me” dichotomy between people who were never slaves and people who never sold anyone.
Not a chance of something like that happening of course…
@TatinG - Maybe the faculty and administration should have money deducted from their paychecks to fund the reparations. I wonder how that would go over. -
Or maybe the reparations should come directly from the Catholic church.
Sometime back, I read this essay in the Atlantic by Ta-nehisi Coates, which completely changed my mind about the topic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
It’s a wonderfully written, but long essay. Essentially, reparations are due because of 300-400 years of systemic discrimination from slavery to bank red-lining. And discrimination continues today.
^Yes. If everyone posting here, who hasn’t read the article, would take the time to do so… there might be some very interesting discussion. He’s an intelligent and thought provoking writer. It’s worth being familiar with this essay, even if you disagree with him. imho
Ok, I read through it. It’s long, so I didn’t read the whole thing. It was mostly documenting the terrible treatment of African Americans in the slavery and Jim Crow eras. But even though the article had “reparations” in the title, I couldn’t find anything close to a general prescription that was related to the topic of this thread.
@sushiritto - how does Coates address the trillions that American taxpayers have already redistributed to the black community and that American blacks are the wealthiest blacks on the planet?
I had previously read the article and did find it very interesting, eloquent and poignant in many places.
But Coates leaves out a whole lot. Just to take one example that is often mentioned in connection with reparations: redlining. Redlining was applied to whole neighborhoods - ostensibly because black people lived there (that’s a huge oversimplification) - which caused an inability to obtain FHA-backed loans, back in the early days of FHA-backed loans.
Many white people actually were living in those redlined neighborhoods. They built them. Coates actually mentions the Jewish people who lived in North Lawndale. What happened to the value of their homes when this new financing scheme was implemented? As their home values fell, they were forced into much more expensive neighborhoods. Lacking equity, they couldn’t afford to buy either. Should their descendants be compensated for their loss of value?
Also, many, many immigrants - Italians, Irish, Polish, German - also entered into unregulated property markets, way before there were any government-backed financing schemes. What happened to them? (Hint, many of them clawed their way to home ownership in districts that were subsequently redlined in Chicago, and they lost it all.)
Last, on this aspect of the article, Coates paints a typical installment contract (often termed a “land sales agreement”) as something evil. It should be pointed out that way back in the era of “no legal protections,” this allowed Clyde Ross to purchase his house with less than 4% down ($1,000 on a $27,500 sales price). Coates fails to mention that the typical mortgage in the era prior to FHA was a 5-year balloon, requiring only interest payments but then payment in full at the end of the term. Couldn’t pay? Couldn’t refinance? Then you lost your house, your down payment and all your interest payments, just as in the sales contracts. It happened to many then-recent immigrants from Italy (sometimes in Chicago, but more often in NYC, Boston, Philly and Baltimore).
Anyway, the history of the US is a fascinating area. Probably no country in recorded history has integrated more ethnicities, races and cultures in so short a time, as imperfect as the process has been (and continues to be). Oversimplifying the past into a narrative of “us versus them” does no one any good.
@damon30 IIRC, Coates thought Congress should pass a reparations bill, where some of our tax dollars would go to repay descendents of slavery, which I think Georgetown in their small way is trying to do with this new fee.
@tpike12 Assuming you’re correct, that African Amercians are the richest Africans on the planet, then they’re still huge gaps or imbalances between whites and blacks, especially in the South, that need to be addressed. Trillions of dollars have already redistributed to the black community? When and where?
If you read the esssay and there’s another one that’s similar, so I may be mixing the two Coates’ essays, bank redlining continues to this day. In one of the articles, Coates cites a couple redlining lawsuits, I think both fairly recent by Wells Fargo.
I still didn’t see that, and this time I read through it more carefully. The only proposal I saw was John Conyers bill to study the “lingering effects of slavery”. The explicit claim was that there was no monetary renumeration to anyone.