“Why Protesting Georgetown Students Want Their School to Pay a Novel Form of Reparations”
“Activists began staging a sit-in outside the Georgetown president’s office today, calling for a conversation about race on campus and a reckoning with how the school has benefited from the institution of slavery. “We’re in a climate now were students on campus are not allowing stuff to just fly anymore,” one of the protest organizers, senior Queen Adesuyi, told me. “We’re acting in solidarity with other black students on other campuses that have to deal with the same issues.”…
Some black students had already been placed in the building, Adesuyi says, and many now feel uneasy in their own homes. The coalition of black students and allies who are leading the protest are pushing for the hall to be renamed Building 272, for the number of slaves sold to keep Georgetown afloat… the demand that could have the biggest effect on Georgetown’s future, if the university complies, comes down to money. The student activists have proposed a new endowment fund, equal to the present value of the profit garnered from the 272 slaves, for the purpose of recruiting black professors. It’s a brilliant example of how universities could enact something in the vein of reparations — a tangible admission of the link between the horrific acts of generations past and today’s racial injustice, one that would provide an equally tangible benefit to current and future students of color.”
I should really grab a new link, but the students were partially successful: the name is being changed, but not to the name they requested, it’s something like Freedom Hall. (snarky commentary: whenever white Americans get uncomfortable, they name something ‘freedom’)
This is like Firestone Library at Princeton, or all the old dorms that were originally built with a big bedroom for the student, a sitting room, and a little bedroom for their slave. And, like, a lot of the buildings were probably built by slaves.
It was so weird to walk around campus and wonder what those people would have thought about me and other descendents of slaves giving money to this institution and developing a sense of identity with it. I sometimes wondered if I wasn’t betraying the memory of their pain. And I was lucky — there isn’t any possibility that my ancestors were enslaved on that campus; I can’t imagine what it would feel like to wonder about that.
Also, in my mind, this is exactly what reparations would look like.
