Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on Georgetown’s latest debacle over slavery:
The idea that Georgetown University should pay reparations for slavery has been kicking around for a few years on the Jesuit campus. In 1838, Georgetown sold 272 slaves to help pay off its debts. Now there is a proposal that would require students to pay for it: a student fee would be assessed.
The referendum is a joke. Why are students dishing up cash for something they had nothing to do with? Why aren’t members of the board of directors (many of whom are millionaires), administrators, the faculty, and alumni paying for it? They represent the university more than the students, and they have the kind of money the students don’t have. Why are they allowing this exercise in regressive taxation—the kind the professors rail about all the time in the classroom—to take place?
It’s even more absurd than this. All of these parties to this grand display of white guilt are phonies. Georgetown employs a professor, Jonathan Brown, who justifies slavery.
In 2017, the convert to Islam told the crowd at the Institute for Islamic Thought, where he teaches, that “there is no such thing as slavery.” Indeed, he said, “I don’t think you can talk about slavery in Islam until you realize that there is no such thing as slavery.”
Some student should ask this wizard why there is slavery in Mauritania and Somalia today. The masters are Muslims. They may also want to ask him to explain why he says, “Slavery cannot be treated as a moral evil in and of itself.” It would be enlightening to learn why.
If the Georgetown ruling class is okay with having a tenured professor teaching that slavery is not necessarily a moral evil—in the 21st century—why are they so exercised about slavery in the 19th century? Finally, if the students have to pony up, shouldn’t Brown be hit with a surcharge?
