Georgetown Repairs: Superficiality Signaling Virtue | RealClearPolitics

Students at Georgetown University overwhelmingly voted Thursday to approve compulsory education fees for students to pay reparations for the school's involvement in the slave trade nearly two centuries ago. As is typical for my alma mater, Georgetown reveals that his true concern is not justice, but rather virtue, the signaling of virtue, the appeasement of guilt and the promotion of an impressive agenda: awakening".

With regard to the wider problem of reparations, the candidates for the Democratic presidency go out of their way to claim that this separatist and extremist idea can really occur. If our country had never dealt with the injustice and inhumanity of slavery, a discussion of reparations would perhaps make sense, even if the very concept of multigenerational debt is troubling.

But in reality, our country has already paid reparations powerfully, leading a devastating war to end the evil of slavery. The repairs were paid with the lives of more than 300,000 Union soldiers, men who died to reunite our country and abolish human slavery on these shores. In fact, the civil war has been so brutal that the total number of lives lost to more than 7 million deaths today. These radicals rude enough to require additional repairs should visit the Gettysburg National Cemetery, where over 3,500 Union soldiers rest for eternity, their young lives sacrificed for a great cause that led to the Elimination of slavery on our country. The repairs were paid not only by these brave men, but also by the widows and orphans they left behind.

Apart from the national problem of reparations, what should be the special response of Georgetown, whose founding priests owned slaves and sold hundreds in 1838 to keep the fledgling academy of the time afloat? For starters, the university has made a sincere apology. The school also instituted inheritance status for the descendants of Georgetown slaves who apply to be admitted and treat them, in reality, as children of former students. Both moves represent minor but still appropriate developments.

But if the university believes it has a financial debt 181 years later, it should be well above the $ 400,000 a year that student fees will collect and it should be paid directly from the school's endowment. In addition, Georgetown occupies some of America's most valuable real estate. If you think so, Georgetown, give us a good part of the campus. Better yet, how about imposing the bloated and biased faculty salary? Let's really hurt, rather a symbolic supplement paid by the parents of students. But Georgetown would prefer to take the easy way: to signal the virtues and to appear enlightened in a way that requires no real sacrifice.

In fact, the madness of this new proposal would require that an African student exchange student from Black Africa now pay an effective fine to the Americans as a reward for the trafficking of his own ancestors. Adding to the madness, some of these American slave descendants may well be Caucasian majority today. "Black Guy from Ghana, pay the white kid from Louisiana because his great-great-great-great-grandfather was a slave belonging to the priests of Georgetown."

If reparations for private institutions such as Georgetown make sense, the school should go well beyond symbolic gestures. Nationwide, the reparations represent a folly and insult the commitment of this country that poured rivers of blood to correct our national sin.

Politicians approving the reparations also insult the intelligence of black voters, thinking they could please them with fanciful promises of bribes. Minority voters do not seek the generosity of government, but rather the conditions necessary to succeed independently. That's why color Americans are increasingly aligning with Trump's growth program. This program will only accelerate over the next five and a half years, as the president's re-election prospects will soar higher, with potential opponents all playing on issues such as reparations.