For Georgetown, Jesuits and Slavery Descendants, Bid for Racial Healing Sours Over Reparations – WSJ

In April of 2017, the U.S. leader of the Society of Jesus stood before cameras at Georgetown University and apologized for the Jesuits sale of 272 slaves to three Louisiana plantations in 1838. We have greatly sinned, said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki.

Georgetown re-christened a campus dormitory once named for the long-ago school president who had helped arrange the sale. The former Mulledy Hall was now to be called Isaac Hawkins Hall, after the enslaved patriarch of the 272.

One of Mr. Hawkins s fifth great-granddaughters felt anxious and skeptical as she participated in the ceremony. Mary Williams Wagner, a retired IT manager living in Arizona, represented a group of nearly 100 relatives pushing for monetary compensation from the Jesuits. Nobody on the podium mentioned the idea.

We were just pawns, she recalled recently. They had a script and they wanted to present it to the media and we were just props to their show.

The drive for racial reconciliation and reparations that has broken out at U.S. institutions in recent years was meant to settle longstanding tensions. It is often stoking new ones. Amid pledges and battles, pressure campaigns and apologies, fissures are opening on the issue that have inflamed emotions on all sides.

The rhetoric around reparations touches on high questions of morality and ethics, such as what, if anything, the descendants of enslavers owe to the descendants of the enslaved. But the process often boils down to practical negotiations. Factors such as money and ego come into play, along with thorny questions such as how to account for the modern consequences of long-ago systems and structures, and the most effective ways to redress past wrongs.

In the Jesuits case, the debate has cleaved the community along generational lines, with some older priests resisting any sort of reparations at all. Descendants of the enslaved, meanwhile, have fractured into feuding camps over the question of direct compensation.

via www.wsj.com

I’m not opposed in principle to reparations of this kind. If the Jesuits owned 272 slaves and then sold them to a plantation in Louisiana (a veritable death sentence for a slave BTW) then (arguably) the direct descendants of those slaves have a right to recover damages of some sort from the Society of Jesus, the entity that sold the slaves and is conveniently still around to pay damages. This is a far different thing from all African-Americans having a claim against all European-Americans, for example. There is also the non-trivial matter of slavery having been legal in 1838 in the United States. Presumably there are cases, however, where something has come to be considered so infamous that it is declared retrospectively illegal. Nazi war crimes presumably fall into this category, even though some of them were legal under German law when they were committed. Oceans of ink have been spilled on these subjects, however, so I will say no more than that, less the heads of real legal scholars explode. The Jesuits are unlikely though, I merely observe, to part with anything substantial of their sometimes filthy lucre. The very idea is ridiculous. They are the Jesuits, after all! Their walls are high and thick and their roots are deep, though their membership is increasingly aged.