Georgetown, slavery and reparations

March 26, 2022. Georgetown, slavery and reparations.

For Georgetown, Jesuits and Slavery Descendants, Bid for Racial Healing Sours Over Reparat.

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The rhetoric around reparations touches on high questions of morality and ethics, such as what, if anything, the descendants of enslavers owe to the descendants of the enslaved. But the process often boils down to practical negotiations. Factors such as money and ego come into play, along with thorny questions such as how to account for the modern consequences of long-ago systems and structures, and the most effective ways to redress past wrongs.

In the Jesuits’ case, the debate has cleaved the community along generational lines, with some older priests resisting any sort of reparations at all. Descendants of the enslaved, meanwhile, have fractured into feuding camps over the question of direct compensation.

Maybe Georgetown should just turn over the keys and the bank accounts to Howard. The ultimate, confiscatory wealth/sin tax. Instead, the Jesuits decided someone else would have to come up with the funds, starting with the pledged $100 million. Reparations through lawsuits for sexual abuse bankrupted dioceses. Reparations for slavery could easily do the same to Georgetown and Loyola. It makes the discount rate and DEI issues seem minor.

This is my hypothesis.

One day people will sue and seek reparations from the oil industry for the moral crime of selling oil, either a confiscatory carbon tax or a egregious 'wealth tax' on all oil industry earnings, with the intention of destroying the industry. Using that 'reparations' model in mind, holding Georgetown or the Jesuits accountable for selling slaves would be like hold gas station owners accountable for selling gas and demanding that they pay reparations to the rest of the world.

If there is a primary responsibility for slave profiteering and reparations, it lies back in Africa, where tribes of Africans enslaved other peoples of Africa, and sold them to slave traders. This follows the above model, holding oil producing companies responsible for the carbon footprint their energy created.

Neither claim holds much water, has any logic or demonstrates any practical path out of the argument. Both slaves and oil were long considered part of the economy, although the slave industry started hundreds if not thousands of years prior to the oil industry.

Slave-owning was not exclusive to Georgetown or to Africans, and slavery did not begin in America. Slavery ended in America, while it continues in many other countries and cultures around the world. Reparation claims are based on localization of a universal problem that continues unabated today.

Consider Thomas Sowell’s study of the real history of slavery. Or these facts about slavery not likely to be found in most American history books. Here Sowell takes on comedian Trevor Noah on slavery and reparations.

And by 2023, one Jesuit college appears to have given up on their study of university slavery.