Reparations: Truisms and Strawmen; Aphorism and Anecdotes sink academic possibilities of the Brown report on Slavery and Justice

“Let us begin with a clock.”(pg. 1)

Thus commences the angst ridden report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, regarding the family clock of Admiral Esek Hopkins. His captaining of the slave voyage of the Sally overshadows to the point of nullity his service to the nation as the first commander of the continental navy, at least insofar as the authors are apparently concerned. The focus on this heirloom typifies the very shallow dip into the reservoir of intellectual thought on reparations taken by the report’s authors, perhaps worried should their clay feet get wet.

This is not to criticize the expected focus of the committee’s historical exposition on the ubiquitous commerce in slaves and with slave economies in the Caribbean and American south that powered the trade economy of Rhode Island in the colonial era and during antebellum statehood. These aspects of the report compile existing historic sources into what is a fair telling of a dark chapter in the history of the College of Rhode Island that became Brown University.

But like any chapter in a history approaching ‘sesquitricentennial’ (or do I mean ‘semiseptcentennial’) proportion, reliance on that information alone defeats the very purpose of context. Without understanding the roots of the University’s founding not tethered to the slave trade and with no retelling of the debate over civil rights on campus or in the public intellectual and economic life of those who subsequently endowed the University — especially when accepting without serious argumentation that the experience of race to this day and the legacy of slavery in America are one in the same – it is inconceivable that the committee has a proper foundation for making recommendations purported to result from a study of relevant issues.

This point was made emphatically at the steering committee’s ‘town meeting’ following publication of the report by Sylvia Brown, an 11th generation descendant of Nicholas Brown, who did not distance herself from an acknowledgment of slave trading in family commerce but upbraided the committee for having ignored the extent to which Nicholas Brown’s descendants made serious contributions to breaking the connection between race and slavery as the cultural acceptance of the institution and legacy customs wavered.

In a sense, the committee was a victim of its narrow primary charge “to examine the University’s historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade and to report our finding openly and truthfully”(pg. 4). The diligence applied to this portion of its mission was sadly lacking with regard to President Simmons’s equally important instruction ” ‘to organize academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised’ by the national debate over reparations for slavery… presenting ‘problems about which men and women of good will may ultimately disagree’.”

There was an additional structural problem to the steering committee itself that must be laid at President Simmons’s door, that the men and women of good will who disagree were not appointed to the committee. Protest over this aspect of the process could be just as fairly made by proponents of monetary reparations as by those who find arguments for the concept specious or unconvincing. The report of the steering committee is not replete with “factual information and critical perspectives” that President Simmons evoked but rather a Kumbayaesque paean to easy steps to protem absolution for the University.

In a move that bespeaks the very tokenism that they would ironically see as epitomizing the contemporary legacy of slavery, the committee saw fit to invite a single speaker among approximately 50 it presented over its two year inquiry who seriously discounts the notion of the reparations, John McWhorter. Nor did the committee even afford this effort the politeness of mention in the report of its findings, perhaps because McWhorter inconveniently attacked the very premise of the report’s conclusion, that the legacy of slavery continued in an unbroken continuum from the triangle trade through the failure of reconstruction and cultural acquiescence in Jim Crow to the statistical inequalities of today.

The committee was unable to confront even the most moderate of reparations critics such as McWhorter, never mind seriously entertain the panoply of questions raised by the concept. While acknowledging the centrality of David Horowitz’s publication of “Ten Ideas Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea – and Racist Too” to the discussion of these issues on the Brown campus and thus the very existence of the committee itself, his objections are never raised as more than strawmen. It is more than fair to say that Horowitz’s one page advertisement falls well short of the supportive argumentation necessary to make its case, but the steering committee does little better with one hundred pages.

Indeed, only one of Horowitz’s objections to reparations, that “most Americans have no connection (direct or indirect) to slavery” (pg. 59), is even addressed obliquely in the report. The committee with typical resort to platitude imagines it has solved the ‘immigrant problem’ (it’s very statement as such reflecting the committee’s attitude that its purpose is to argue away objections to reparations should they arise – considering them “problems”) (pg. 56).

First the committee states the ‘problem’ in a deliberately narrower context than Horowitz advanced: “a majority of the people living in America today are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants who entered the country after the final abolition of slavery in 1865. What possible responsibilities can people bear for an institution that ended before their ancestors even arrived in the country?”(pgs. 56,57)

The committee suggests in a gross broadside that immigrants bear significant responsibility for the perpetuation or racial attitudes attendant to slavery that persisted into the mid twentieth century. It cites visiting speakers for this proposition while continuing to remain silent on John McWhorter’s equally relevant point that to whatever extent one can trace the trajectory of black America from slavery to its obviously disadvantaged circumstance that persisted until the civil rights era, one must consider the “Great Society” undertakings and the extent to which they were considered and adopted as reparative measures. Ironically, McWhorter argues that these measures themselves backfired and figure prominently in the failure of a significant portion of the black community to avail itself of the opportunity promised by the signature civil rights enactments of the 1960s.

Further, there is no rigor in completely disregarding the institution of affirmative action, another explicitly reparative initiative that scholars such as Orlando Patterson suggest has lost its compensatory meaning with the adoption of a multi-cultural motive and the expanding of eligible constituencies (arguments not dissimilar to those advanced by Thomas Sowell in Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study that the chairman of the steering committee dismissed as desired outcome scholarship - an ironic charge given the steering committee’s report.)

Even if the committee were to take these issues on instead of ignore them, it still ignores that its argumentation really only moves the bar. If persistent discrimination constituting a continuation of a crime against humanity was perpetuated through the mid 19th century, and if obviously reparative measures taken since then still fall short of appropriate compensation, what of immigrants to this country since 1965?

Alternatively, the committee suggests that immigrants benefited from societal assets accumulated during the era of slavery and thus are fairly saddled with associated liabilities. But as most of the reports conclusory assertions this is treated as truism rather than a rational theory or prism through which to examine the contract immigrants understood themselves to be making or any extant understanding they could have had that the society as a whole faced such liability. This approach certainly is woefully short of Sarbanes/Oxley and suggests that immigrants might have been duped in this case, nevermind that even full disclosure of such future styles of justice might still have placed many in a Hobson’s choice.

And none of this even touches on the parts of the “immigrant problem” the committee refuses to confront altogether: what of those who were resident in the country when slavery and Jim Crow existed but did not partake of these institutions and/or worked actively to end them? And what is the case for not distinguishing between black immigrants to this country since 1965 or thereabouts with regards to a reparations? What is the justification for a collectivist view of reparations to the extent that the philosophical basis for the movement is common law personal injury?

And to the extent that this particular blind spot represents a predilection to racial solidarity, at least affirming its propriety here as a simple – I might say simplistic – indicator, such paternal efforts to prevent a fracturing into literally individual parts of the interests of the black community accentuates the mathematical errors of the committee that seems to forget that triangles have three points. If there is no better indicator that there were beneficiaries in Africa of the trade, it is the story of the market there in slaves. The slave ship Sally commanded by Esek Hopkins, its voyage capitalized by the Brown brothers, lay off Africa for 9 months unable to secure a suitable cargo of slaves because it was a sellers market. Nowhere does it suggest that Hopkins and company stormed ashore and went raiding villages. Rather they were waiting for willing sellers. This doesn’t morally immunize the buyers but the sellers, for some reason, never seem to come up.

So we are confronted with a report in which Esek Hopkin’s clock looms large. Yet it is not as if the clock were an award to Hopkins for his captaincy of this ill-fated contribution to an ignominious commerce. If that were the case this anecdote of its timekeeping for the committee might be an appropriate and gripping indictment of the University’s failure to come to terms with its past. Rather the clock represents the fullness of the man, Esek Hopkins, of whom the reader is awarded but a single limited perspective.

The open debate regarding slavery on the Brown campus during the antebellum tenure of University President Francis Wayland could have been chosen as a much more appropriate frontispiece to the report. Indeed, for a report flowing as it does from the academy, its greatest failing is the extent to which it misconceives the place of institutions of higher education in the currents of cultural upheaval. Are they to form activist cores or remain anchors for both traditionalist and progressive instincts, serving thus as repositories of the greatest serious thought and exposition on these matters, neither cowed by new ideas, nor afraid to entertain defense of the existing order?

Only a committee that has lost its own way in this regard could implicitly criticize Wayland for his failure to lend the school and its good offices directly to the abolitionist cause, e.g. “Whatever the limitations of Wayland’s approach”, (pg. 31). Thus the committee misses perhaps one of Brown’s finest moments as virtually the only campus of its standing during the antebellum period where an open debate on the institution of slavery was welcome. The university did fail to lead in an activist way by openly aligning itself with the abolitionist movement even though Francis Wayland was well understood to be opposed to slavery. Neither did it break racial ground through the admission of black students. But unlike Harvard, which censored discussion of slavery as too evocative of passion, Brown provided fertile ground for debate that extended so far as lecturing to the academy on the merits of abolition by a valedictorian.

Indeed Brown used to be the very kind of fertile ground that the New York Times wistfully bemoans has been lost today. Although I have no doubt that the New York Times simply wished to see the University serve as a high profile PR agency for the concept of reparations, I had more hope going into this process with the strong rhetoric of President Simmons regarding the necessity of airing disagreements and controversies. Instead the report offers us the worst kind of ‘can’t we all just get along’ consensus. It cops out for both proponents and opponents of reparations by intoning without evidence the idea that: “Determining what percentage of the money that founded Brown is traceable to slavery is impossible” (pg. 13).

Instead it relies on a series of damning anecdotes to bolster recommendations for continued self-flagellation at the institution. Perhaps the specter of contrition of this sort from a notable institution such as Brown lends moral support to those who labor under the scars of actual injury suffered at the hands of the university or its founders, but such undertakings completely fail to address the concept of indemnity at the root of the reparations movement. Thus a process theoretically designed to offer some direction towards closure, by explicitly disavowing the possibility of knowing the extent to which the university’s patrimony rests upon a foundation of slavery, proposes to create an open ended academic fiefdom for picking at this scab. (pg. 84)

It is quite possible that further academic study is merited and that serious scholarship could contribute to confronting the actual questions posed by application of theories of retributive and reparative justice to the institution of slavery. But if the work of the committee is any indication there is no serious will to undertake that work at Brown.

In an effort to demonstrate that there is a commitment liberal education at Brown and to credit President Ruth Simmons and the committee with serious if not fully encompassing work on a topic of concern to the academy and to the wider culture, the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity will endow a yearly forum in the name of Francis Wayland intending to provide a memorial of the slavery debate on Brown’s campus. The inaugural program in December will offer treatment of issues that escaped the notice of the steering committee. We invite the college community and the steering committee in particular to join this broader dialogue.

Brian Bishop is a member of the board of advisors of the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity

(all page references are to the .pdf format report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice available on the steering committee website at www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice .)