What Does It Owe Their Descendants?

April 18, 2016 8:23 AM

"More than a dozen universities — including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Virginia — have publicly recognized their ties to slavery and the slave trade. But the 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out for its sheer size, historians say." (slnyt)
posted by roomthreeseventeen (37 comments total)

Meanwhile, Georgetown’s working group has been weighing whether the university should apologize for profiting from slave labor, create a memorial to those enslaved and provide scholarships for their descendants, among other possibilities, said Dr. Rothman, the historian.

One would think that an apology would be in order, at the very least. But it's hard to say what else should be done, at least in my eyes.

The effects of institutional racism and slavery can last for generations, no question, but it's also not clear what can be done at this point. At least in the sense of making things right. Everything I can imagine being offered, right down to cold hard cash, sounds like a slap in the face, a mealy mouthed and flaccid apology for something that, perhaps, can't be made right.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:15 AM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

That said, finding the descendants of those slaves and letting their families know who they are, sounds like a very good thing to do.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:17 AM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

It's a Jesuit institution, so the language of sin, atonement, penance, and contrition is in order, I think.

Finding the descendants and then asking them what they want would be a first step, I imagine. Whether it's money, a monument, fellowships, and/or something else.
posted by thomas j wise at 9:31 AM on April 18, 2016 [13 favorites]

Georgetown University's endowment fund is above $1.5 Billion.

Just imagine how many lives could be changed if even $0.1 Billion was used to subsidize student loans for descendants of the slaves they sold.
posted by surplus at 9:32 AM on April 18, 2016 [27 favorites]

I guess if it were up to me, I'd probably end Georgetown. I mean, the university should continue, with the same endowment and employees and buildings and whatnot. But change the name and maybe rewrite the charter and formally draw an end to the old organization. The old history can go into a museum to be kept on campus or something. The new one will start out, at year one, with a clean slate.

Some evils just can't be atoned for.
posted by Mitrovarr at 9:51 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Some evils just can't be atoned for.

I dunno, I think that offering a scholarship to the descendants of those thus affected would be a great way to do it. Especially what with student loans being as prohibitive as they are in this day and age.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:55 AM on April 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Jesuits keep such amazing records! I bet Georgetown is feeling some regret about that now. Me, I think atonement must come with a special perpetual scholarship for the descendants of slaves in the United States. 272 students with a free ride every year has a nice symmetry to it.

I've been trying to figure out what personal responsibility my family bears for slavery. They were reasonably well off white people in Texas and my family history is pretty racist, so it seems likely someone in the family tree owned people. But my family wasn't a Jesuit college, there are no records. The only way I know my great-great-grandparents' names at all is lots of work on Ancestry.com.

But there are some easily accessible records about slave ownership: the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules. A tally by the US Federal Census of slave ownership. Indexed by the slave owner's name and location. Tragically they didn't record any information about the slaves themselves other than age, gender, and fitness for work. No names for the slaves, which is just hideous.
posted by Nelson at 10:06 AM on April 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

The new one will start out, at year one, with a clean slate.

As if writing a new charter has any meaningful effect on anything. This strategy sounds like something a corporation would do to wriggle out of responsibility for an environmental cleanup.
posted by ryanrs at 10:07 AM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

But there are some easily accessible records about slave ownership: the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules.

I didn't know that these existed!
posted by Mogur at 10:16 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, they were new to me; an African-American friend of mine with an interest in genealogy told me about them. I suspect most white folks would rather not know.

Come to think of it, I think Ancestry doesn't show matches on the Slave Schedules in their "hints" feature that recommends matches for people in your family tree. Perhaps they fear offending their paying customers.
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Everything I can imagine being offered, right down to cold hard cash, sounds like a slap in the face,

You'd be surprised at the power of cash money. We consider it at least partial recompense for virtually every other kind of injury a human can inflict on another human, so why not here?

Ideally the disposition of the money would be up to the descendants themselves. However, I doubt such a large and far-flung group would be able to reach a consensus on a single option (though you might get cohesion around rejecting certain options).
posted by praemunire at 10:40 AM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Everything I can imagine being offered, right down to cold hard cash, sounds like a slap in the face, a mealy mouthed and flaccid apology for something that, perhaps, can't be made right.

A sufficiently large sum of cold hard cash, large enough to sting the repentant institution, is a good way of making an apology that's genuinely sincere.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:44 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been trying to figure out what personal responsibility my family bears for slavery.

What, you mean now, in 2016? Absolutely none. If history teaches us anything, it's that once you start treating the past as a marketplace for grievance, you merely perpetuate trouble.

On pre-view:

A sufficiently large sum of cold hard cash, large enough to sting the repentant institution, is a good way of making an apology that's genuinely sincere.

You want to sting individuals as well? Such as our friend in Texas? Where to you draw the line, and one what bases? If our friend in Texas has some northern abolitionist blood does he get a discount?
posted by IndigoJones at 10:54 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

What, you mean now, in 2016? Absolutely none.

I don't see it that way.
posted by Nelson at 10:57 AM on April 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

> If history teaches us anything,

It's that the rest of your sentence is simplistic in the extreme, and serves to let comfortable people remain comfortable.
posted by rtha at 11:01 AM on April 18, 2016 [18 favorites]

You'd be surprised at the power of cash money. We consider it at least partial recompense for virtually every other kind of injury a human can inflict on another human, so why not here?

To be clear, that's my personal feeling, so I'm not trying to say there's an objectively right answer here.

Money is great, of course, but it doesn't intrinsically fix anything. It's just a thing given, where there's question of whether one deserves it and what "deserves" even means in this situation.

A scholarship sounds like a good idea, but does it *have* to be Georgetown? I'm not sure I'd want anything to do with the school if I was in this position.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:02 AM on April 18, 2016

If history teaches us anything, it's that once you start treating the past as a marketplace for grievance, you merely perpetuate trouble.

Seems like a big statement to make without providing examples.
posted by glhaynes at 11:02 AM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Where to you draw the line, and one what bases?

You know that slippery slopes don't literally exist, right? That people and organizations can actually look at each thing and say, "Okay, this makes sense. We'll do this."?
posted by Etrigan at 11:09 AM on April 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

It would be really great if people could resist giving one liners to an idea that the article in the post in fundamentally not about. It does nothing but clutter up the thread, giving more weight to that single comment.

Georgetown has already decided it owes something to the descendants of those 272 slaves and is taking steps to decide some concrete actions. Any sort of argument that nothing is owed is just ridiculous at this point and shouldn't be treated seriously. Reparations are happening, in this particular case, whether one likes it or not and anyone commenting here has zero power to decide otherwise.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:15 AM on April 18, 2016 [12 favorites]

I've been trying to figure out what personal responsibility my family bears for slavery.

What, you mean now, in 2016? Absolutely none. If history teaches us anything, it's that once you start treating the past as a marketplace for grievance, you merely perpetuate trouble.

As someone whose ancestors who fought and died for the Confederacy, and as an alumna of multiple institutions of learning that enslaved human beings, I view it as my personal responsibility to educate myself and others, to live differently, and to do the work to rid us of the disgusting legacy of this original sin, at the very least. What more I could do is something I think about often but haven't reached a conclusion on.
posted by sallybrown at 11:16 AM on April 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

I suppose a multi-generational scholarship fund might make sense...how is it even possible to measure the lasting impact of this period in time? We are 100+ years into the ramifications of this period. I imagine that a (maybe) better way to approach this would be to create new policies that focus less on redressing past grievances and more on providing more benefits moving forward.

I don't even know where I would start on this. Not being descended from slavery, I'm not even sure of where my place would be in even discussing it, let alone suggesting solutions.
posted by Chuffy at 11:20 AM on April 18, 2016

What, you mean now, in 2016? Absolutely none. If history teaches us anything, it's that once you start treating the past as a marketplace for grievance, you merely perpetuate trouble.

As Richard Fish in the TV series Ally McBeal would say immediately after an offensive transgression: "Bygones!"
posted by srboisvert at 11:25 AM on April 18, 2016

I wonder what the Vatican thinks about this.
posted by bukvich at 11:27 AM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

We found out that my great-grandparents were devoted to the cause of making Illinois a slave state. It is kind of a creepy feeling.
posted by thelonius at 11:35 AM on April 18, 2016

It's worth reading this essay in conjunction with Ta-Nehisi Coates' essays on reparations. He calls the history of blacks in America a history of plunder by white individuals and institutions. If black families now have a fraction of the wealth held by white families, isn't that an ongoing issue rather than one buried in the past and (therefore) unfixable?

As an aside: what better lives would these slaves and their descendants have had if they had stayed in Maryland? They might not (presumably) have had their families split up or children sold away from parents. But they would still have been slaves, some for the rest of their lives, working long hours in degrading conditions, subject to the whims of their owners.

Being sold was bad: but had they not been sold, they were still slaves. Georgetown should be shamed not solely for selling slaves, but for ever having owned any.
posted by suelac at 11:49 AM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

As an aside: what better lives would these slaves and their descendants have had if they had stayed in Maryland? They might not (presumably) have had their families split up or children sold away from parents. But they would still have been slaves, some for the rest of their lives, working long hours in degrading conditions, subject to the whims of their owners.

As with everything, there's shades. Being a slave is a terrible fate. Being a mistreated slave is worse. It sounds like the slaves at Georgetown weren't treated as badly as some were after they were sold. Small comfort, sure, but I would imagine that everyone little bit helps when you're treated as property.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:58 AM on April 18, 2016

There's a reason the phrase "being sold down the river" exists, after all...
posted by praemunire at 12:39 PM on April 18, 2016

What Does 'Sold Down The River' Really Mean? The Answer Isn't Pretty
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:45 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

What does it mean to "owe the descendants" of some screwed over peoples? Who holds the debt and who holds the credit and how did they manage to pass these things on to their children?

For us today "property" (credits) are a legal fiction that we can pass on to our children within a legal framework. Financial debt's though, are not legally required to be paid by one's children.

To speak of a debt in this case seems to me to invent a kind of "mystical humanitarian credit" that has been passed on a birth. A kind of "humanitarian property" and thus also requires some kind of mystical natural law framework which would provide these rights.

I can see how a christian might have a more thorough basis for this mystical law but as an atheist it all just sounds bit magical.
posted by mary8nne at 1:55 PM on April 18, 2016

What does it mean to "owe the descendants" of some screwed over peoples?

In this particular case it means that had Georgetown not sold 272 slaves "down river" then it's very probable the institution would not exist in the current day. That it did this thing, which is we now know to have repercussions across generations brings up the question of how those descendants were affected by those long ago questions.

I don't think there's any question that the effects are varied from person to person and family to family. It's not clear anything can really be done and if so, what exactly should be done. But kudos to Georgetown for being willing to investigate the question and at the very least, find out what happened to those descendants.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:08 PM on April 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Interesting fact: Georgetown had a mixed-race president named P. F. Healy, from 1874 to 1882, who had actually been born a slave in Georgia.
posted by kickingtheground at 2:29 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whom the glory shot building on campus is named after.
posted by JPD at 2:48 PM on April 18, 2016

It's interesting that they would think they owe something due to the sale rather than the years prior in which they profited from the forced labor.
posted by jpe at 3:27 PM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. It's at best misguided to drop into a discussion like this to discount people's moral feelings about particular acts of enslavement. Just don't.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 5:29 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

This makes me think, in some ways, of the Henrietta Lacks story: how her children and grandchildren were impoverished by the same entrenched mechanisms of prejudice that allowed her cells to be harvested, even as those cells massively enriched the people and companies who used them. Henrietta Lacks had her cells stolen because of institutionalized racism, and her children lacked access to medical care because of institutionalized racism. They are owed, at the very least, access to the fruits of what was stolen from their mother.

The people Georgetown sold enriched the school by the theft of their labor and their bodies, and their descendants were likely robbed of many things in turn, as a direct result of that theft. So for me, the same logic applies: they are owed, at the very least, some share in what was built with stolen wealth.
posted by nonasuch at 6:07 PM on April 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

> It's interesting that they would think they owe something due to the sale rather than the years prior in which they profited from the forced labor.

It's good that they're starting somewhere, on some portion of the problem that they think they have good records for, instead of just continuing to fling up their hands and go oh this is too hard so why should we even think about it.

Which is what most people seem to be happy to do.
posted by rtha at 10:26 PM on April 18, 2016

> What does it mean to "owe the descendants" of some screwed over peoples? Who holds the debt and who holds the credit and how did they manage to pass these things on to their children?

You're making this a lot more complicated than it has to be. Just as there are intergenerational transfers of wealth, there are also intergenerational transfers of poverty, trauma, and misery.

These descendants, to this very day, are still materially affected by the plundering of their ancestors' bodies and labor.
posted by Ouverture at 11:15 PM on April 18, 2016 [5 favorites]