Why Protesting Georgetown Students Want Their School to Pay a Novel Form of Reparations
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/11/13/georgetown_students_protest_a_residence_hall_named_for_a_slave_selling_jesuit.html
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.”
At the center of the students’ grievances is Mulledy Hall, a campus building named for a Jesuit and former Georgetown president who sold 272 slaves to a Louisiana plantation to pay off university debts in 1838. The building was unused for years, and reopened this fall as a student residence. At the same time the school reopened Mulledy Hall’s doors, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia tasked a Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation with instating a plan to confront Georgetown’s newly resurfaced, slave-paid legacy.
Adesuyi says that although the university began planning to reopen the residence hall last year, it didn’t tell the students until an email went out the day before school started this semester. “If we knew about it last year, we would have been organizing much earlier,” she told me. 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....
But 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.
