Friday, September 2, 2016

"Georgetown to Give Slave Descendants Priority for Admission"

"Georgetown University will give preference in admissions to the descendants of slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits as part of its effort to atone for profiting from the sale of enslaved people."
Georgetown president John DeGioia told news outlets that the university in Washington will implement the admissions preferences. He says Georgetown will need to identify and reach out to descendants of slaves and recruit them to the university.

On Thursday morning, a university committee released a report that also called on its leaders to offer a formal apology for the university’s participation in the slave trade.

In 1838, two priests who served as president of the university orchestrated the sale of 272 people to pay off debts at the school. The slaves were sent from Maryland to plantations in Louisiana.

The university says it will give descendants of those slaves “the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community” when they apply.
I wonder if I'm the descendent of slaves. What Am I missing out on here?

19 comments:

ricpic said...

"....and breaking ahead of the field as they come around the far turn in the Virtue Signaling Derby....it's Georgetown!"

edutcher said...

Y'know, blacks owned slaves. They also probably owned indentured servants.

Maybe it's time we started demanding reparations from them.

The Dude said...

Now just how far back does one get to go to claim slave ancestors? Ireland? Egypt? Cro-magnon?

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

How about we all take a big collective dump during the National Anthem and call it a day.

Synova said...

The Georgetown thing seems very direct... they kept extensive records and the Jesuits (I find this shocking) did sell a bunch of people to pay off debt on the school itself. They have records of who they sold, who they were sold to...

Giving preference to the descendants of those people seems very different to me than the vague and never ending demands for reparations that we hear. Most of the old private schools give preference to the children of alumni, why not the children of humans that they sold to pay their debt on the school?

Jim in St Louis said...

Is Georgetown’s motivation that by taking these actions they will avoid being labeled as racist by BLM, (or whomever)?
Do they think this will act as insurance so that if there is a racial incident (noose in a tree, poop swastika, etc) they will be protected from negative blowback?
I doubt this is a wise calculation. There are many examples of the left turning on each other and biting the hand that feeds it.

Jim in St Louis said...

Hi Julie-
I assume there are a limited number of slots for freshman at Georgetown. So for each slave-legacy student who gets in, there is a matching rejection sent to a qualified student if only their ancestors had been slaves. I think that unfair.

I have sympathy for affirmative action goals, but they never seem to actually help the persons they are intended to. Set-asides and race based preferences are not scholarships that pluck smart kids from the ghetto, they give an unfair advantage to middle class blacks who are already at an equal level with their white counterparts.

Synova said...

Jim, that's no different from alumni preferences which are also unfair and also let people like George Bush and Obama get into Ivy League schools before better qualified applicants on account of their ancestors graduated from the school.

Nor is this for anyone who has been a slave. It's for anyone who's specific ancestor was sold by the specific Jesuits to pay off the Jesuit's specific debt on the specific university.

It may be an issue now to mollify BLM types. It's certainly to mollify guilt that the school debts were paid by a large sale of human beings. Setting up a sub-school to study slavery may be for both reasons but it also reflects that the Jesuits were obsessive keepers of records all along and they have a unique repository of historical documents at a unique level of detail.

I'm as against affirmative action as anyone and for the same reasons but I don't think that it's useful to view every situation as equivalent because it hits a few of the same notes.

Rabel said...

This is unacceptable. Georgetown has acknowledged that the university only exists because of its involvement in the ownership and sale of human beings. As penance they are trying to escape with an apology, renaming a few buildings and granting double affirmative action to a small subset of the many, many Americans whose ancestors suffered at the hands of the evil, slaver Jesuits and whose suffering continues today.

Georgetown has an endowment of 1.5 billion dollars. The only righteous response is to hunt down those descendants (the alt-right could be used here to good effect) and distribute this ill-gotten pile to those who are due reparations for these cruel and inhuman deeds. Beyond that a significant portion of all future income from tuition and donations should be dedicated to righting the wrongs of the past, along with a portion of all future monetary outflows such as faculty salaries (just to name one example).

Also, while we're at it, we should probably burn down the White House which was built by slave labor. Whether or not we give warning to the inhabitants is open for discussion.

Amartel said...

How do they know who the descendants are?

Amartel said...

They know who there alumni are and are free to give alumni descendants preference.
But how do they know who their slave descendants are?
Does the applicant just check a box? __ Descendant of former Georgetown Slave.

Synova said...

Amartel, the article (at least the one I saw) said that they've been able to track the histories and descendants of many of the people who were sold. It comes with the Jesuits keeping extensive records and documents to start with.

Jim in St Louis said...

Good point about legacy admissions- and I’m sure that dimwitted sons and daughters of senators get in free as well. And children of trustees and big donors, etc. Georgetown is a private school and they can do as they please. But pretending that this is recompense for past crimes, is just as lousy as pretending that modern people are damaged by actions from 150 years ago.

ricpic said...

If all Whites gave all their money to all Blacks the relative economic status of the races would be back to where it was before the great guilt gift in one generation. One generation. Why? The incorrect answer is, "Because Whites are Evil!" And if you don't know the correct answer you're dumber than I think you are.

Rabel said...

I knew that little trick Father Karras pulled on the stairsteps wasn't gonna work.

Jim in St Louis said...

Rabel- you are wicked! love it.

Rabel said...

Why, thank you Jim. I was wondering if anybody got the alt-right joke. I'm quite pleased with it myself.

ndspinelli said...

Rabel is very witty and does not eat corn dogs.

Amartel said...

They TRACKED their slaves? Gross! Creepy!
Now they want them baaaaack.