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272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html?module=WelcomeBackModal&contentCollection=N.Y.%20%2F%20Region®ion=FixedCenter&action=click&src=recg&pgtype=article&_r=0<snip>
The human cargo was loaded on ships at a bustling wharf in the nation’s capital, destined for the plantations of the Deep South. Some slaves pleaded for rosaries as they were rounded up, praying for deliverance.
But on this day, in the fall of 1838, no one was spared: not the 2-month-old baby and her mother, not the field hands, not the shoemaker and not Cornelius Hawkins, who was about 13 years old when he was forced onboard.
Their panic and desperation would be mostly forgotten for more than a century. But this was no ordinary slave sale. The enslaved African-Americans had belonged to the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests. And they were sold, along with scores of others, to help secure the future of the premier Catholic institution of higher learning at the time, known today as Georgetown University.
Now, with racial protests roiling college campuses, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students, alumni and genealogists is trying to find out what happened to those 272 men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival?
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28 replies
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http://www.autistichoya.com/2015/11/in-solidarity-with-black-students-at.html
Disclaimer: The author is an FB friend.
I did not write the text of the letter below the asterisks (and do not want to claim credit for the words -- it's circulating among many conscious and conscientious alumni), but I wholeheartedly endorse it as a non-Black alumn of color only recently removed from the Hilltop. I experience daily the damaging effects of white supremacy and structural racism as an East Asian person, but for precisely the same reason, I am also part of the many Asian American communities so frequently used in service of white supremacy. Asians like me continue to be offered the illusions of respectability and equality in the white supremacist system so long as we disavow and dissociate from Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Racial justice demands solidarity -- recognizing that we must support and work alongside the Black, Brown, and Indigenous led movements fighting against the most overt and widespread state violence.
To any disability people reading this post who think this is a distraction, or irrelevant, or somehow losing a focus on disability -- stop. Stop with the single-issue politics. Disabled people of color -- and disabled Black people in particular -- don't have the luxury of pretending that we can engage with only one issue, one category of identity or experience. Our experiences with ableism are inevitably and inextricably intertwined with our experiences with racism. Racial justice IS disability justice, and disabled people of color must demand disability solidarity with Black-led movements.
To Georgetown University: Step up your game. Listen to your Black students -- my friends, my former classmates, my colleagues. These are the moments that will mark our university's history for the next generation to come as either the institution that chose to make hollow, conciliatory gestures or the institution willing to embark on the infinitely harder path of self-examination and long-term, systemic change centered around the members of the university community most impacted by white supremacy.
To any disability people reading this post who think this is a distraction, or irrelevant, or somehow losing a focus on disability -- stop. Stop with the single-issue politics. Disabled people of color -- and disabled Black people in particular -- don't have the luxury of pretending that we can engage with only one issue, one category of identity or experience. Our experiences with ableism are inevitably and inextricably intertwined with our experiences with racism. Racial justice IS disability justice, and disabled people of color must demand disability solidarity with Black-led movements.
To Georgetown University: Step up your game. Listen to your Black students -- my friends, my former classmates, my colleagues. These are the moments that will mark our university's history for the next generation to come as either the institution that chose to make hollow, conciliatory gestures or the institution willing to embark on the infinitely harder path of self-examination and long-term, systemic change centered around the members of the university community most impacted by white supremacy.
Disclaimer: The author is an FB friend.
She is presently a 1L at Northeastern in Boston. 
