Georgetown To Treat Descendants Of Slaves They Owned Just Like Any Other Legacy Applicant

It's an empty gesture. But so are most symbolic policies, and yet that meaninglessness does not make them unimportant.

(Photo by Matt McClain for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

(Photo by Matt McClain for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Slaves that “they owned” is the operative phrase in my headline. It’s the phrase that demotes the rest of the headline from “policy initiative” to “public relations BS.” But we’ll get to that.

The Jesuits who founded Georgetown University used to own slaves (don’t act like they were the only ones). In 1838, they sold those slaves — those assets — to cover key debts that the University owed. Georgetown might not be here today without their proceeds from selling slaves.

Georgetown established a faculty commission to figure out what to do with the knowledge of its slave trading past. Today, Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia announced that the University would be making some efforts to “acknowledge and respond” to its immoral past. Georgetown will rename some buildings, engage in some ongoing “dialogue,” the usual stuff. But the note that jumps out is this one from DeGioia’s statement:

Giving descendants the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community in the admissions process

That’s interesting. It’s not a general affirmative action plan: which Georgetown already has… because affirmative action is more about creating a diverse learning environment that benefits all students than making “reparations” for slavery (and don’t let anybody gaslight you otherwise).

Instead, this plan is a direct acknowledgement that the slaves were part of the Georgetown “community,” in some sense (though, not by the sense that included the freedom to “join” or “stay” with the community of their own volition). Their descendants should at least be accorded with the same preference as Lafayette DuPont Washington the Eighth.

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It’s a nice public relations gesture, and a nearly meaningless public relations gesture. Two things can be true at the same time. Here, Georgetown was really light on the details of how it would notify the descendants of these 272 people, much less actually identify them. The Jesuits kept good books, but when they sold their slaves down the river, records become fractured. Ancestry.com runs out of steam.

DeGioia says he’s met with some descendants already, but let’s remember, we are potentially talking about hundreds of thousands of people here. I found an online calculator on the internet, so take this number with a huge grain of salt, but it estimates that a single person living 100 years ago might have had 450 direct descendants over time. The Georgetown slaves were sold almost 175 years ago. Finding even a significant number of their descendants is an impossible task. We barely even know who was related to Prince, and he was nobody’s “property.”

It’s an empty gesture. But so are most symbolic policies, and yet that meaninglessness does not make them unimportant. Georgetown is symbolically acknowledging the person-hood of their former captives, and acknowledging their contributions to the University. It can’t retroactively confer degrees to the slaves they sold. It won’t pay restitution for the lifetime of economic opportunities the school denied to its former chattel. But it can give whatever descendants they can find “alumni status.” And that’s a nice thought, at least.

I reached out to the Law Center to see if this gesture would apply to applicants to the law school. No word back yet, but if there’s some guy who has a better chance of getting a Tax LL.M now because his ancestor was sold by the Jesuits, that may be the best we can do right now.

Georgetown University, Learning From Its Sins [New York Times]
Georgetown Shares Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation Report, Racial Justice Steps [Georgetown]

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