Universities’ reparative gestures fall short of real action.

Evidence

Take my current employer, Georgetown University, for example. It sold 272 enslaved persons in order to remain financially viable and become the institution it is today. And it paid no reparations to the descendants of the 272 enslaved people. Today Georgetown University provides an admissions preference for the descendants, but it offers no scholarships for them, a relatively straightforward and easy thing to do. A student referendum in 2019 supported a tuition increase that would benefit the descendants of the 272, whom the Jesuit university had sold “to secure its financial future.” In response, Georgetown created a Reconciliation Fund that awards $400,000 annually to community-based projects. My former employer, Emory University, publicly announced the creation of a Descendants Endowment to “award scholarships for descendants of enslaved persons with ties to Emory.” It represented that two full scholarships would be awarded to support undergraduate students annually, beginning in the fall of 2022. However, Emory has not publicly acknowledged that any such scholarships have actually been awarded. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 457

Categorization

• SEED: The gap between announced reparative programs and actually delivered scholarships is a concrete, reportable angle — a follow-up piece checking which universities’ announced descendant scholarships have actually materialized.
• XREF: connects to: Even sincere institutional apologies rarely lead to restitution or lasting change — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 163