Universities that profited from slavery substitute symbolic gestures for material reparations

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

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reparations-as-accounting argument: concrete institutions (Georgetown, Emory) that benefited from enslaved labor and yet only offer symbolic remedies — ‘admissions preference’ and ‘Reconciliation Fund’ versus actual scholarships. This is perfect evidence for the remedy-design argument.