Good for the Jesuits, who understand how atonement works. From NBC:
Georgetown will offer an admissions edge to descendants of slaves as part of a comprehensive atonement for the university’s historical ties to slavery, its president announced Thursday.
Those ties go back nearly two centuries, when the Washington, D.C., school sold 272 slaves and used the proceeds to pay off debt.
Georgetown President John J. DeGioia offered a public apology Thursday afternoon for the 1838 sale and outlined what the university plans to do to acknowledge racism in its past…
In addition to offering descendants the same preferential status in admissions that Georgetown currently offers children of alumni, the university will develop a memorial to the enslaved and will rename two buildings — one after Isaac Hall, a slave whose name is the first mentioned in the 1839 sale documents, and another in honor of Anne Marie Becraft, an African-American who founded a school for black girls in Georgetown’s neighborhood in 1827.
The moves come a year after DeGioia asked a group comprised of faculty, students, alums and staff with coming up with ways to address the university’s history of slavery… A couple months after the group started its research, the need to address Georgetown’s history became more apparent: Students staged a sit-in last November outside DeGioia’s office calling for a dialogue about how the school benefited from slavery.
“The most appropriate ways for us to redress the participation of our predecessors in the institution of slavery is to address the manifestations of the legacy of slavery in our time,” DeGioia, who met with descendants over the summer, said in Thursday’s press release…
None of the usual ‘we’re sorry if anyone might have been offended by actions which may have taken place a long time ago’ boilerplate. Acknowledge terrible things were done (human beings were sold ‘down the river’ to save the university from bankruptcy), work with the victims (the families of those slaves) to take concrete steps towards reparation, and remember it’s a process not a single action.
Wish I could’ve found the clip from the evening news where DeGioia announced that the African-American families who’d first broght this history to national attention “were as much a part of the Georgetown family as any of our most storied alumni”…
Open Thread: Georgetown Starts Its AtonementPost + Comments (77)