Georgetown Jumps the Symbolic Reparations Bandwagon

Reparations for the injustices of legalized slavery in the United States has been a hot topic for many decades. Everybody gets to talk about reparations for political hay with the understanding reparations will never be touched in direct financial terms. The administration of the process alone would be impossible, even if everybody kind of agreed we should all chip in for an atrocity none of us committed ourselves and very few are tied to directly through legacy. The realities therein can’t stop a private institution from doing whatever the fuck it wants to garner publicity points during an era of Black Lives Matters media saturation.

Georgetown University announced it’s going to give an admissions edge to descendants of black slaves to make up for the fact that back in 1838, the University’s Catholic brothers sold 272 slaves for profit. Finally we’ve reached the point where black Americans who aren’t descendants of slaves will be edged out by those who were. Assuming they can produce a validated genealogy chart and a 23 and Me DNA profile showing their not mostly Hungarian. This seems like a huge step forward, on a circuitous path, so keep hustling and you’ll eventually smell your own ass.

Georgetown was intentionally vague on how many applicants would even qualify and what that admissions edge might actually entail, but suffice it to say, there will be at least one dude in the next round of admissions they can trot out to show how sorry they are. Randall Kunta Kinte Jones. Pay no attention to the fact he’s also going to be our starting power forward. We are so so sorry.

Reparations activists rejoiced at the Georgetown announcement because, private institution or not, this is certainly going to start a string of me-too’s from other politically correct organizations. It will likely also re-initiate some sort of shit in Congress that never gets passed. 

The argument against reparations boils down to I shouldn’t have to pay you for something my ancestors did to your ancestors because that’s an open ended criteria that could apply to thousands of at-one-time besieged ethnic or racial or religious groups across the globe. Also, the vast majority of Americans come from families not even in the U.S. during the time of slavery and were often from horribly oppressed, impoverished, dissident backgrounds themselves. So, great-great-great-great-grandpappy didn’t even do shit. He was running from the Hessians.

The argument for reparations is shut up, you don’t know, you can’t possibly know, now where’s my money. Fairly compelling as well. Something shitty definitely happened. Georgetown sold slaves. Georgetown is still around and thriving. It’s the same Georgetown from 1838. In that case, pay your debts. You picked an asinine P.R. way, but fine. Going to the collective to repay the sins of the few to whom they have no connection is never going to make sense.

A trillion dollars gets people pretty activated. In the converse learning that you can sign up to make Sprint or Verizon give you a thirty-nine cent coupon from the latest class-action lawsuit isn’t very compelling. Scour those family trees. There’s admissions edges in the air.