Welcome to our online tour of the illustrious and infamous Georgetown University, an esteemed educational institution with a harrowing legacy of racism, colonialism, and other forms of identity-based oppressions. Today we will be embarking on a journey across campus, highlighting various locations which exemplify Georgetown’s continuous colonial project. Together, we will analyze these spaces through the eyes of various anti-colonial philosophers and theorists, including Max Liboiron, Kristie Dotson, Esme Green Murdock, Jack Forbes, Achille Mbembe, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Olufemi O. Taíwo. Let’s begin!
We start our tour at a very important location on campus – one which many students didn’t know the significance of until 2016 when an article written by Rachel L Swarns titled “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does it Owe to Their Descendants?” was published in the New York Times. The spot is not a building, but a walkway outside of Arrupe Hall, a dormitory that opened to residents in the fall semester of 2016 – just months before the release of the article. However it is not the walkway which we are here to discuss, but what lies beneath it. Under this path lie the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people who built and maintained the University during its founding years. Ever since the discovery of Georgetown’s malicious legacy regarding the treatment of their enslaved people, the Arrupe walkway has become a physical reminder of the violence upon which the university was constructed.
The explicit erasure of these enslaved bodies through the literal burial of their corpses and subsequent construction of a dormitory on top aligns with Esme Green Murdock’s notion of the “terrortory” as a “violent landscape and environment terraformed to suit settler presents and futurities fundamentally not of their making and devoid of their consent.” Georgetown itself has always endured as a terrortory – not only is the primary goal of the educational institution to instill settler colonial values in future generations, but the university itself would not exist in the capacity it does today had it not been for the labor and exploitation of enslaved people. The terrortory persists today, as terrortories are designed to do, through what Murdock notes is a “fundamental feature of settler colonialism, which is the erasure of the physical and environmental violence that forms the settler colony.” The silence on the part of the Jesuits of this complete disregard for human life on behalf of enslaved bodies perfectly exemplifies this erasure and the continuation of the colonial state as a part of Georgetown’s legacy.
Achille Mbembe’s theorizing in the book Necropolitics echoes this concept of the terrortory by highlighting how the colonial powers of the world erase the violence they enact by disguising themselves as the democratic powers of the world. He notes that governments control their citizens by exposing them to death and suffering. While the bodies buried under Arrupe found their eternal resting place in Georgetown, this space also serves as a physical symbol for the over 272 enslaved people that the university sold to Jesuits in Louisiana when they heard that freedom for the enslaved was on the horizon. While Georgetown could have allowed their enslaved people to live free lives following their emancipation, they opted instead to maintain possession of these human beings within the Catholic Church so as to continue their “religious” mission of indoctrination, as well as to receive monetary capital which served to help support a university that was facing bankruptcy. This continuation of suffering and death is a prime example of how Mbembe’s necropolitics functions to perpetuate settler colonialism.
While the prior two theorists have focused primarily on the historical contextualization of Georgetown’s legacy regarding slavery, Kristie Dotson provides a framework for understanding the project of slavery in relation to the erasure of Indigenous communities – both serving to support and continue settler colonialism. In her article, “On the Way to Decolonization in a Settler Colony: Re-introducing Black Feminist Identity Politics,” Dotson highlights the settler-native-slave triad. The concept of the settler-native-slave triad calls our attention even further into the history of Georgetown, examining the violence which pre-dated and allowed the arrival of enslaved people – that of the forced removal of Indigenous people from their land. Dotson points out what she refers to as “twilights,” the notion of “the labor that couldn’t be eliminated immediately, or Indigenous labor, and also the labor that needed to be permanently structured, or slave labor.” Dotson denotes how a logic of elimination serves to erase the violence enacted upon both of these groups in different ways in order to support the overall settler colonial project. For example, we can look at the university and student organizing efforts on behalf of the descendants of the GU272 as lacking in their fight for reparations on behalf of the Indigenous communities which were also exploited, relocated, and erased by Georgetown.
Finally, we turn to Olufemi O. Taíwo and his public lecture titled “Reconsidering Reparations” to take a look at the question many students and descendants of the GU272+ are asking: How can Georgetown atone for its violent legacy? Taiwo discusses reparations through three key tenets: (1) Reparations should make tangible differences in the material conditions of people’s lives, (2) Reparations should address the core moral wrongs of Trans-atlantic slavery and colonialism, and (3) Reparations should discriminate – how they distribute benefits and burdens should be based on the different relationships of persons and institutions to the core moral wrong. Taíwo also places an emphasis on world rebuilding as the necessary project of reparations, noting that reparations cannot exist within a global community that was constructed on a foundational basis of settler colonialism and imperialism. One important part of this rebuilding for Taíwo is climate justice. While Georgetown student organizers and the university system have made attempts at developing a plan for reparations specifically geared towards the descendants of those 272+ slaves, they have lacked in their connection to land and the environment. If Georgetown truly wants to create a lasting impact and transform into a university which is a part of the decolonial project, climate justice must be a part of the conversation, along with Georgetown’s many other colonial benefits.
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