Did they forget to ask Biology department about this whole descendants number thing? I though they are a University, maybe they couldn't estimate the number outright, but at least some tiny thought at the back of their mind should have told them that even 1 person from 300 years ago can leave a lot of descendants. That's what 15-20 generations? Each potentially doubling in numbers.
There is a rather interesting historical person called Hans Jonatan (19th century) who was an escaped slave from a Danish colony, fled to the danish fleet, fought in the Battle of Copenhagen, and then fled to live in Iceland. Because of the very small amount of immigration from people with West African ancestry to Iceland, Hans has been the subject of fairly extensive Genetic study that found around 800 descendants.
My understanding is that they intended to pay reparations to the descendants. But if they truly identified 10k descendants at $1k each they would need $10M alone for an amount that, depending on their personal circumstances, ranges from "an insult" to "not much".
not that i am defending the university, but “expensive” is somewhat removed from “an existential risk”. Such straw men tend to be easier to knock down.
Is the argument here that Harvard, an institution (not a human being), deserves to exist more than descendants of slaves (human beings all) deserve reparations?
But they are the ones setting that value per person , so there is 0 risk of bankruptcy - they can always adjust the value to fit whatever the non-bankrupting total they're comfortable with is!
The article nowhere mentions individual compensation to descendants by Harvard. I suspect the bankruptcy comment is an institutional fear of financial liability tied to large-scale identification of descendants.
How is the institution 'liable' for the slaves owned by the founders? I'm both confused that people expect the University to pay significant reparations to the many descendants of slaves and that it would be afraid of that expectation. Is a preferential entry or special scholarships not enough?
Insanity that Harvard, apparently one of the gathering places for some of the best minds in the world, to think that tracking down and compensating people who are very removed from the realities of slavery. They could've thought of revitalizing black neighborhoods in tandem with HBCUs, carried outreach to black majority high schools by alumni, the works, but nope, they thought this would be a better investment of their funds. No wonder wealthy donors are so hesitant to donate to a pack of rabid morons.
In those lines, I might as well pressure the British government to compensate me, personally, because they decided to shove one part of my family tree into a train carriage to suffocate to death.
You say that like governments, like the British government (since you brought them up), didn't finish paying off its debt to slave owners in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) for debt created decades before the American civil war over slavery. Are you okay with this? And if so, why is paying off this debt okay when slavery is so far removed, but the concept of reparations isn't?
Read up on the 'home children'. Hundreds of thousands of orphaned children were contracted(sold), indentured, to the colonies. Some faced harrowing, near starvation conditions and were beaten, tortured, and so on.
On top of that, to reduce resistance, families were broken up. One brother would be sent to Canada, another Australia, never to meet again.
This is, of course, not as severe as slavery. Once adults, after a decade or more of hard labour, their contract was often satisfied. Yet my point is that the past was a more brutal time. This is how white, British children were treated by the British. And not one descendant of home children (such as my grandfather was) has ever been compensated. There is no effort to help track down families broken apart.
And look at what happened to orphans in Catholic care? Priest raping children, and it being kept quiet for decades by the police and Catholic church.
If reparations aren't being given to cases like these, then why would they be given to other cases a centuries old?
NOTE, I'm not saying "fair or not". I'm saying that is that the past is a different world. And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
If we start getting into reparations, I feel I should also have my property returned from when the British took it from my Scottish ancestors. Or maybe Italy should be paying, for the time the Romans invaded and they took some land back then?
When does it end? Where does it end?
This comment may not be liked by many, but what I'm trying to point out is that the past was not today, mores were different, and it wasn't just one race that was treated poorly.
Everyone treated everyone poorly compared to today.
> And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.
From what I can tell, the argument is that: if your great-great grandfather became extremely wealthy off of slavery, and was then paid by the government to free their slaves, and then eventually you inherit that wealth... well... if the wealth from crimes against humanity can be inherited, why isn't the responsibility to undo the harm not also inherited?
...what is "obscene" and what is "justifiable" are about morality.
I mean, I agree with your conclusion, but I don't think trying to paint this as some kind of purely rational act is either necessary or helpful.
It is moral to try to redress past wrongs—especially when those past wrongs have created massive current wrongs and inequities.
It is moral to take from those who have built their wealth on the backs of the suffering of the many, and to give to those who suffered to make it possible.
Morality doesn't need to be a dirty word, nor does it need to be something we're not allowed to look to to guide our collective actions.
> Is your plan to analyze all current wealth for morality based redistribution?
Don't threaten me with a good time! Jokes aside, I'm generally pro-redistribution to begin with (I'm somewhat of a dirty communist) and I think trying to finagle exactly how much someone's wealth should be redistributed based on the weaving and waning of economic activity over two centuries to be rather a waste of time. Better to just redistribute based on wealth. But if this were something that happened only thirty years ago, I'd absolutely be calling for "morality based redistribution", as you put it, because it is then something that can actually be achieved.
That is not a debt to slave owners, that is a debt taken on to pay for the costs of abolishing slavery.
It's also talking about real agreements for an entity to exchange money in the future, for a bond tied to the value of the currency... Not some vibes based moral justification.
If you say we are not paying a debt to slave owners, then slave owners do not receive money.
If you say we are not paying the current holder of a bond we created to pay slave owners in the past, then you damage your current credit rating. (In the worst case, potentially hurting organisations that let you have good terms for socially beneficial causes, refusing to pay back a charity that helps end slavery for example).
Correct, the slave owners were already "compensated" for their crimes against humanity 200 years ago, so the debt being completed was the loan the UK took out to do so. But you are missing the point: the argument being made here (and in other comments) is that slavery was soooo loooonng aggoooo that considering reparations is at best virtue signalling, and at worst moronic. And yet you and others do not bat an eye at debt lasting that long. And let's be clear, I am fully supportive of OP's advocacy for funding black neighbourhoods and other such programmes. I am specifically aiming at this whining sophistry (which I'm not claiming OP made, but just in general) about slavery being ancient history so reparations are ridiculous, but debt lasting that long is totally fine and normal.
Because a debt like that is essentially a chunk of currency, that is passed between entitys; it doesn't matter when a debt a government was issued, the current holder is another contemporary entity or person.
Why a debt was created is irrelevant to the current holder, can't you understand why a government default is bad?
Can't you understand why attempting to resolve past wrongs is good? Why are finance obligations so important that they MUST persist throughout the centuries, but attempting to fix the legacies of human suffering is just "vibes based moral justification"? Why are numbers more important than people?
You dont seem to understand; the debt is owned and exchanged by contemporary people, why or when that debt was created is irrelevant, because the body (government) that owes it has many other debts created over time. You can not pick and choose which ones to repay without causing everyone who you currently owe money to be alarmed.
Deciding to default on an old debt like that would be the equivalent of deciding any coin minted in 1993 is no longer valid, suck it up whoever currently has one in their pocket.
To be clear, you are the one trying to draw this parallel without any solid foundation to make it.
When you look the moral problem, there is a discontinuity that doesn't exist for abstract financial instruments. People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability. This is a different case and needs to be made without trying to use financial instruments as a starting point.
And the institution of slavery and its legacies were and are experienced by contemporary people. In fact, penal chattel slavery was an ongoing thing well into the 20th century in the US.
And I honestly fail to see the distinction you're making: you insist that financial obligations are different because, to paraphrase: "there's a paper trail and defaulting is bad". But slavery and its legacies also has a paper trail, likewise with human life and misery, and not resolving this is also bad. You have yet to provide an argument that fundamentally CANNOT also be applied to reparations: you've only given arguments over how we merely don't apply them to reparations. This kind of definition game, that 'reparations aren't considered that way because we don't consider them that way', reminds me of when there's outrage over police murdering someone and people insisting it's not murder because murder is an unlawful killing.
So, I ask you, without resorting to mere definition, what is the difference between "People make moral choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (reparations) and "People make financial choices; you are trying to saddle people who didn't make those choices with some sort of culpability" (debt)?
Debt is a mechanic we use to settle long term concrete transactions, particularly between complicated abstract entitys like nations. To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.
Morality pertains to how individuals should behave. There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
You are trying to compare abstract concepts in a way that weakens your point. Nations are not individuals. Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
> To be able to enter into new long term agreements, we must respect existing agreements.
That is a matter of trust, it's not an obligation for the state. We are a society of people, and for us to perpetuate civil society, wrongs must be corrected, yes? Why is the respect for debt more important than the respect for humanity?
> There is no need for me to consider the actions of others I had no control over in order to act morally.
What does this have to do with anything? Slavery is not a matter of "if you don't like it, don't do it", it was a positive right protected and enforced through the state's monopoly on violence. That's what law is. Likewise with the legacies of slavery. It's not mere morality, it's existential to civil society.
If the state passes legislation to fund reparations based on past harm, that is no different to any other appropriations spending. And yes, the choice to pass such legislation is largely based on morality since there was no prior legal obligation to do so... but so was not absolving themselves of that slave-owner debt. The UK Parliament is sovereign, it could have willed away that debt with a simple majority, but it chose not to for 200 years. That too is a decision based on morality, and a telling one: that humanity is less important than debts being paid.
> Nations are not individuals.
Nations are not literally individuals, but state personhood is a thing, akin to corporate personhood. I'm not entirely sure what your point is here.
> Similarly, individuals do not inherit debt.
You're doing the whole "don't therefore can't" thing again. I have a vague recollection of debt inheritance in history's past. 'We don't do that because we don't do that' is not an argument.
You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present. This is not a morality based decision. You are again trying to conflate abstractions that pertain to individuals and ones that pertain to nations. There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals, only a financial cost for not honouring debts.
I also don't understand why you think there is a direct relationship between the debts and what they were originally created for...
You clearly do not understand the concept of state or corporate personhood if you are trying to extend individual morality to apply.
Civil society is also a strange direction to go in, from trying to make the relationship to debts. To engage, the term only makes sense as a way for current people to interact, a "wrong" in context requires both a specific victim and an offender... It cannot be applied to historical actions as it gives no information to how current people should interact.
I would go as far as saying reparations for one arbitrarily chosen historic injustice undermines civil society; as it's impossible to claim one point in history is more valid than another, making any attempt a deeply unfair exercise.
> You cannot will away an old debt without consequence because a current entity owns it, now, in the present.
You cannot do ANYTHING without consequence, why would that be a criterion for anything? And ownership is a legal fiction, hence why Russia was able to seize all those passenger planes, likewise with Western nations seizing the assets of Russian oligarchs. Ownership, particularly of intangible things like debt, is not some universal truth or force of nature like gravity: it's an emergent property of the system we have set up. One of the reasons why the UK is (or was) the centre of finance was because of its robust legal system that puts an extreme emphasis on property rights. And that's a deliberate decision. The idea that such a decision is amoral is ridiculous.
> There is not a real concept of trust like between individuals
Yes, there absolutely is? In fact, it is the currency of international relations. International law isn't even really a thing: international law is domestic law; it only exists to the extent that a country respects the Rule of Law. It's why certain countries that blatantly violate international law face no legal consequence. It's why the response to the violation of international law are sanctions, not a higher courts overruling them: there is no higher court. And even when there are hypothetical higher courts, like the ECJ, again it only works so far as the member state is willing to play along, which is partly why Hungary is in such hot water with the EU. I'd even go so far as to say that nations rely on trust more than people do. The fact that you don't think trust even a concept with nations is wild and makes me doubt whether you understand the concept of international relations at all. And all this is also true within a nation: if you cannot trust your state institutions, those institutions are worthless.
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I do not think it is worth conversing further since this is clearly unproductive.
Your fundamental problem is you are taking ideas that apply to individuals and are trying to apply them to abstract groups. You are doing it again with the idea of trust.
Trust between nations is a concept that exists, but it's not the same thing as trust between individuals.
Trust inside a state is even more interesting, how can I possibly trust a state that arbitrarily redistributes money based on one topical historic injustice? Either it should be consistent and analyse all lineages for all wrongs, or accept that it's only a structure for allowing current people to interact civilly.
You have taken the idea that reparations are right, and are now trying to draw a line between reparations and other abstract concepts that are already accepted to try to be an advocate.
The flaw is that moral arguments that apply to individuals do not apply to nations, without some solid reasoning you have not made. So you cannot extend the idea that an individual should make good some injury to reparations.
Your fundamental problem is that you presume and assert that "ideas that apply to individuals" cannot also apply to groups, communities, and institutions. You realise such things are, ultimately, just collections of individuals, right? Institutions are not freak forces of nature either, they are created by people, for people, to act on behalf of people; the institutions act as individuals (hence why you can sue an institution like it's a person) and is comprised of people. Obviously, there are things institutions can do that an individual cannot and vice versa (eg: an institution cannot marry), but this clean and objective divide you continue to insist upon is simply untrue.
> Trust between nations is a concept that exists, but it's not the same thing as trust between individuals.
And here's an example of the above: you reject my claim that trust between nations and trust between individuals are comparable and within the same category because it's not literally the exact same thing. Okay, let's follow your logic: trust between people and their institutions are not the same concept; trust people family members and friends are not the same concept; trust people have in their tools or craft is not the same concept. It is not useful or relevant to compare any of this because if it's not literally the exact same thing in the exact same context, it's irreconcilably different.
> You have taken the idea that reparations are right
Not quite. I am arguing for reparations as a form of devil's advocacy (relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364746). What I've been doing in this thread is questioning your (and others') unwavering loyalty to finance obligations regardless of whether they span centuries to where there's no overlap whatsoever between those who agreed to the obligations, those who are paying for it, and those who are receiving it. You do not bat an eye at this, and you seem somewhat exasperated at needing to explain it, asserting the apparent obviousness of it. But when it comes to material human suffering and the legacies of injustice that can still be felt and witnessed today, the idea of attempting to remedy this does not compute.
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Put simply, you are so entirely entrenched in this "don't therefore can't" mentality that you cannot comprehend alternatives. It's like when people cannot comprehend hypotheticals: What if you didn't work here? But I do. Yes, but what if? But I do work here. Societies could, if they wanted to, see past injustice as something contemporary society has an obligation to resolve... we don't do this because we've chosen not to, not because it's impossible to do so. And the choice to do so or not is a moral decision. Ditto with choosing to prioritise financial obligations over remedying human suffering. I'm sorry that you are unable to see this. I'm not going to entertain this conversation further.
I gave several real, amoral, and tangible examples to explain why we should respect old debts in the current day, as it allows us to use the tool of currency to facilitate trade. No moral arguments are needed here.
You are also still trying to assign the idea of a specific debt being somehow more relevant than a specific pound coin. Due to the way nations create and balance currency exchanges this doesn't work.
It's simply not true to say we are paying for an old debt at a national level. The creation of a debt at a national level is similar to the creation of currency, this is immediately balanced by how people we trade with view the currency. This is all resolved at the time it's created...
You seem to think a nation is just a very long lived person, taking out specific loans from other people, but again; it's an abstract group that uses a floating currency to settle large trade agreements over time.
Because these agreements are made in currencies that are also abstract, it works.
These are all material concepts, not moral ones.
A collection of individuals all have their own moral choices to make, the "group" is just a convenience, it does not make moral choices. You cannot extend the idea of morality past the individual without a good justification.
Especially in the scale of a nation (where membership is non voluntary), the current members did not make any moral decisions that occures in the past, so trying to assign culpability to the current nation is flawed.
> I gave several real, amoral, and tangible examples to explain why we should respect old debts in the current day,
An idea for why something should be done can be immoral (from the perspective of a particular moral framework), but it can't be amoral: should always presupposes an explicit or implicit value system.
> as it allows us to use the tool of currency to facilitate trade.
Why, without invoking any moral value, should be care about the ability to do that, much less weigh it more favorably than the effects of not being constrained by old debts?
Why are reparations considered "individual heroics", and why is a society fixing its past injustices not considered part of, if not integral to, long-term stability and trust in the reliably of the system? Don't you want a system where, if you were harmed, you will be remedied?
> And yet you and others do not bat an eye at debt lasting that long
People don't have debts or credits they didn't sign up for. You're failing to tell the difference between something the British government hundreds of years ago signed the British Empire up in perpetuity to pay to enforce on the world a totally new value system, and someone born today suddenly being assigned a credit or debit based on things from hundreds of years ago.
That is a distinction without a difference: my tax money went to paying off that loan. Whether it was a debt established 200 years ago that we we're still paying off, or assigned a new debt based on something that happened 200 years ago makes no difference: I still had to pay for it. It's a legal fiction, all of it. Quibbling over whether it's this category or that makes no difference to me having to pay for it.
From that perspective (thing be paid off), yes, they're the same. But that's not the point I'm making. I'm saying debts signed up to voluntarily, even 200 years ago, are not the same as debts created involuntarily today, retroactive 200 years. A noble act (helping to end slavery) freely given and in normal debt-creation circumstances doesn't justify totally different circumstances.
Correct, the difference is that one gave money to slave owners, and the other is compensating the descendants of slavery (and its ongoing legacies) for the crimes against humanity committed against them.
a.) My family weren't slaves, they were British colonial second-class subjects.
b.) They were killed in the 1920s, way after Britain decided to compensate its slavers.
c.) The whole payment to slaves till 2015 is not real, it's just a quirk of how the payments were structured via annuities - in fact the payments were done by the 1840s.
The idea of giving all the descendants of someone that lived hundreds of years ago some form of compensation because 1/32nd (or much lower) of their ancestors was harmed in some way, is completely bonkers for me. Virtue signaling at it’s best.
Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.
They would probably need to pay a little more than 5$ Comcast/Hewlett-Packard style, and if there were even 10 slaves back then, today it would be 30000 descendants. If there were 1000 slaves back then, it would be 3 million people today. Paying each even a measly thousand would require 3 billion dollars just for compensations, without any other investments or programs.
They wouldn't even have to pay out to individuals, instead they could pay to "communities"! Again, they're the ones setting up the structure of the compensation
I agree, the fact that the UK government was still paying off slave-owner debt in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) instead of freeing itself from that debt because the idea of giving the descendants of slave owners who were "harmed" in the loss of their "property", is completely bonkers.
That's more to do with the method in which it was resolved, it was ended in place of government debt. They can't simply renege on government debts purely due to its origin.
It's like saying they should in part renege on some current 2008 financial crisis debts.
Yes I would oppose it, how do you decide what is what at this juncture?
Should Alcapone's children refund any inheritance?
Do you extend this further and tax them for their privileged upbringing? This is absurd, and goes against our liberal principles of fairness. Not equity, fairness.
Not saying it's a good idea but the choice will always be there, and the decision not to do it is nonetheless still a choice. And so coming full-circle back to reparations, why don't we want societies to correct past wrongs? Why is honouring two-century old debt so world-shatteringly important, but fixing two-century old injustice (and its ongoing legacies) scoffed at?
Because two-century old injustice is handwavey pie-in-the-sky talk,it is also ridiculously selective. There are other injustices too and how do you determine what the amount is? Do you offset slave ancestors privilege for growing up in the 1st world against their ancestors losses, what is the actual tangible loss due to the past rather than those due to more modern injustices such as overt racism or mere growing up in a poorly run town?
It's completely impractical and/or virtue signalling.
Reneging on debt is a very real decision taken today (not in the past). Practically speaking it signals to bondholders you can't be trusted to keep your word. Hardly honourable, not that they'd worry about this point of view, it's cold hard calculation, will you renege when you proceed on your next ideological crusade, this signals yes.
You try help someone based on their CURRENT circumstances, not based on their relationship with someone who died 200 years ago.
Completely ridiculous, what about those whose parents were drug addicts, or were kept out of school, or were just purely unlucky to be brought up in and surrounded by poverty. You'll find there are many, more contemporaneous, reasons for suffering and that there are many people suffering that do not have any previously persecuted ancestors.
Address their current situation without bias or favouritism.
> You try help someone based on their CURRENT circumstances
You claim I'm being disingenuous and then say this as if I haven't been this entire time referring to historic injustices AND THEIR ONGOING LEGACIES. Nah, y'all just prefer to selectively ignore that part.
These bonds were a consolidated, tradable asset. They were likely traded many times over the centuries. They could end up in things like pension funds after 200 years.
Well, that's mostly because the UK, did something almost no one ever did before and not only abolished slavery (something most Cristian kingdoms did by themselves) but even took a step further and went to war to prevent it from continuing.
Sure, you don't see countries with a very, very long history of slavery like most Arab nations, or India, or most of the descendants of African kingdoms, paying debt they contracted to end slavery, because they couldn't care less about ending it, and even went to war against Britain to continue practicing it.
I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.
The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?
I found out my son is a descendant of slaves. I am not, but his mother is from a family with a few upper class connections, and in one of them there was a Danish slave ship captain, who married a "free woman of color" on St. Croix and moved to Norway. "The Creole Woman" was a family legend told to me by his great-grandmother, but I checked, and it was completely true.
Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.
I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.
If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.
As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.
First of all, to avoid misunderstanding, let me explicitly say that I agree with a lot of things in your comment.
But my question was not about whenever far descendants of slaves need (or need not) to be compensated somehow. It was about the "completely bonkers" bit. Possibly, it was a mistake to reiterate the idea to ensure it is consistently understood - the third paragraph (specifically, the emphasized part) of my comment was the point, not the second one.
We have an insanely complex system composed of multiple societies that may or may not exhibit some behaviors because of some antecedent events. Yet, GP didn't say e.g. "but it completely drowns" (essentially, claiming statistical insignificance) or that their understanding of possible corrective action has questionable effects (like @modo_mario's neighbor comment about universities), but rather that the whole thing has no rational basis to it ("bonkers") whatsoever ("completely").
This is something that I don't think I understand and that concerns me. Not whenever someone needs a preferential treatment for some injustices of the past (not that the latter doesn't concern me, but way less significantly).
Yes, it's completely bonkers. Starting by the fact that these descendants have now a much higher living standard than if their ancestor was left in the respective African country they originated from, where they were sold by their own neighbouring tribes to Arab slavers that then sold them off to be carried to the new world.
So, no it has no rational basis because, 1st, if you compare this people off with the alternative (their ancestors never left Africa centuries ago), they would be much worse off today. And 2nd, why are you expecting the last link of the slave trade to pay for compensation, but not the people that actually made them slaves and the people that traded them to Europeans?
Shall Nigeria start paying compensations to these people? After all, many of their ancestors were enslaved by Nigerian tribes? Shall Arab nations start paying compensations to them as well?
Shall Romans start paying me compensations for invading what is now my country? What about Arabs (yes, they were also here), should they?
I must be misunderstanding the term "bonkers" then.
By all means, I wholeheartedly agree that some arbitrarily-selected single factor that was present a long while ago is extremely questionable to be any meaningfully relevant, given that there were so many other things affecting it all. I also totally agree that there's a host of other issues and questions.
However, I fail to see immediate unsoundness in the basic premises that would make it bonkers, in a way I understand the word in this context ("not mentally sound, with an element of derogatory").
Generally speaking, momentarily going outside of scope of slavery - the idea that if some group was put at significant disadvantage, that could negatively affect them and their ancestry, is - at the very least - not obviously unsound, right? I think I've read that there are experiments that demonstrate this could be a thing, so I hope I'm not misinformed here.
So - back to slavery - exploring whenever it's the case for slave descendants is not obviously invalid. There could be arguments around the methodology, e.g. you have made a point about the reference group. But if we go as far as actually devising an experiment and looking at the outcomes (those who left are worse off, assuming it's true) does not it make it sound enough to not be bonkers? I mean, for this to be just crazy the core premise must be flawed, and it's not - even if it can be shown to be false. Especially so if this sparks further debate about methodology.
And then if someone is disadvantaged for any reason, it can be valid to ponder the idea whenever it should (or shouldn't) be addressed somehow, right? At least I fail to see how this question could be somehow fundamentally flawed either.
Summarized, I hear your arguments and they look valid to me (and I agree!), but I still fail to see how the fundamental premises that led to such line of thought are "bonkers", even if they're false.
The world is filled with such qualms.
People are quick to feel slighted and counterreact. For example if the uni decided to make it more financially manageable by letting those decendants in easier suddenly it starts mirroring the stories of asian and white students needing higher scores to get in that caused an outrage. Giving money because of some modern day one drop rule ends up no different.
It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate.
See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past.
On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.
Would you then not just focus on helping currently disadvantaged people, rather than some ancestry chase that might or might not be presently relevant?
I read about this elsewhere and the sentiment was "this is a very hot take" because overall Harvard remains committed to recognising, documenting and taking account of its slavery ties, it's not in denial.
All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
> this isn't the same as what the headline implies.
Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"
For example, re funding running out
> Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.
The story is from The Guardian, they have a certain point of view. I like it most of the time, but in this story it’s simpler to assume that spending money on slavery reparations and DEI activity suddenly became a political liability this January, rather than any very theoretical monetary liability in reparations.
Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.
Believe it or not, people who read newspapers get a lot of background information on lots of topics. One such topic was that US corporations, en masse, started dropping DEI policies around the beginning of Trump’s term in acts of anticipatory compliance. It was suddenly very unfashionable to be looking to the slavery reparations business. Now, we could ascribe Harvard’s actions to being in line with the larger trends. Or, we could take the researcher’s idea that the end of the study was about how good and productive the researcher was and how bad and unrepentant Harvard is. They would never be forced to pay reparations to these people, but the costs of being on Trumps bad side has already cost Harvard hundreds of millions. I think it’s simpler to assume the former is true. My own politics are kind of irrelevant here.
The first settlers created Harvard University in 1636, while slaves also started to be common during that century. That are over 200 years of slavery until 1865.
Havard benefited for more than half its existence from slaves.
The point here is that it’s not vanquished but in the archives. Havard as one of the oldest institutions started with the first settlers, probably, very likely, has one of the most extensive histories of slave ownership.
