{"id":149425,"date":"2019-05-13T07:40:20","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T11:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=149425"},"modified":"2019-05-13T07:47:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-13T11:47:18","slug":"one-professors-ties-reparations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/05\/one-professors-ties-reparations\/","title":{"rendered":"One Professor’s Journey to the Past Through Reparations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Georgetown University\u2019s undergraduate students voted in favor of a referendum to voluntarily charge each student a fee to be paid into a fund benefiting the descendants of enslaved people that the university sold to save itself from financial ruin in the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

The move came in response to the university\u2019s lack of action on the recommendation of its own Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation to make a \u201cmeaningful financial commitment\u201d to the descendants, says Thomas Craemer, professor of public policy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.<\/p>\n

The student vote was a historic moment, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo my knowledge it is the first time in American history that members of a slavery-related organization have taken it on themselves to voluntarily contribute towards reparations for the direct descendants of the enslaved,\u201d says Craemer, who is an expert on implicit racial bias — prejudices that subconsciously afflict nearly everyone, regardless of race.<\/p>\n

As the national dialogue on slavery reparations ramps up with presidential candidates jockeying for standing among voters, Craemer says he hopes the conversation remains in the mainstream.<\/p>\n

Reparations are not just for those who suffered, says Craemer. \u201cI feel reparations have benefits for both sides \u2013 for the givers and the receivers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Craemer\u2019s motivation to investigate implicit racial bias stems from his German heritage, within which he struggled deeply with his country\u2019s history of Nazi racism.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a child, I thought, how was it possible that in such a short time, people went completely berserk?\u201d he says. \u201cAs much as I loved my grandmother, I really doubted that she didn\u2019t know\u201d about the Nazi concentration camps, he notes.<\/p>\n

In 2001, he and family members traveled to a concentration camp memorial site with a Holocaust survivor who had lost his family there.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat spiritual journey was one of the deepest experiences of my life,\u201d Craemer says.<\/p>\n

For decades, that Holocaust survivor had received a reparations pension, worth about 1,200 Euros a month in 2015, from the German government. While it\u2019s not a lot of money for each survivor, that gesture, says Craemer, signaled that the country was trying to make amends for its behavior in a concrete way.<\/p>\n

Craemer\u2019s heritage drives his research. He was interested in how implicit biases toward groups influenced their opinions on policy issues, like affirmative action, government aid to minorities, and reparations for slavery.<\/p>\n

To understand non-conscious bias, Craemer uses both survey research and reaction time tasks. For example, a subject in his studies might be asked to categorize words as good and bad, and people according to their race, as fast as they can. Quicker or slower responses can indicate the extent a person associates positive meaning more with, for example, European Americans than with African Americans.<\/p>\n

Most Americans oppose the idea of federal reparations to descendants of enslaved people but Craemer\u2019s research has found that it depends on what kind of reparations are proposed. More people would support educational benefits rather than cash payments or mere apologies, he said.<\/p>\n

He also found that anti-black implicit bias is not the whole story behind opposition to reparations. Some white respondents who have anti-black association biases, for example, could still feel solidarity with black people \u2013 also at the implicit level \u2013 and support reparations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose results seem to suggest that we don\u2019t have to wait until the time that anti-black implicit biases disappear [from society],\u201d Craemer notes. \u201cSolidarity can come about through different psychological mechanisms.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2015, Craemer took a new direction with his work, in which he estimated the value of slavery in the United States at between $5 and $14 trillion. The often-cited statistic uses a different approach from most previous economic models, which calculated the benefit of the work performed by enslaved people to their owners. Instead, he calculated the cost of slavery to the enslaved people themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the slave owner gained was only the 10 or 12 hours that the slave worked per day,\u201d Craemer says. \u201cBut the enslaved lost all 24 hours of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, in 2017, the GU272 Isaac Hawkins Legacy \u2013 a legal team representing 200 direct descendants of the 272 enslaved people Georgetown sold in 1838 \u2013 asked Craemer to calculate the value of their ancestors\u2019 claim to the university. The descendants used Craemer’s dollar amount, which is confidential, to inform a request for restitution submitted to Georgetown leadership.<\/p>\n

After receiving no formal response from Georgetown officials, in 2018 the GU272 Isaac Hawkins Legacy held a news conference at the National Press Club asking Georgetown to make amends.<\/p>\n

Independent of the group\u2019s demands, Georgetown has taken steps toward restitution, including granting all descendants\u2019 families legacy status in admissions, which can help them be admitted as students if they are qualified. They also perform outreach with the Washington, D.C. black community and have formed a research center on slavery.<\/p>\n

However, outreach and research components \u201care things that a modern research university should be doing anyway,\u201d Craemer says. \u201cGeorgetown really needs to come up with something that benefits the direct descendants.\u201d<\/p>\n

With a response from Georgetown still absent, the university\u2019s undergraduates pursued the successful referendum to charge each student $27.20 per semester in reparations to benefit the direct descendants of the GU272.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope Georgetown University’s administration will not only implement the student’s decision, but will follow their bold example and contribute towards addressing the living conditions of the direct descendants of GU272 many of whom still suffer from the lingering legacy of slavery,\u201d says Craemer.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A key figure in the national dialogue about slavery reparations, Thomas Craemer has also examined how his own family figured into past events. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":149427,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,92],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1860],"class_list":["post-149425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-uconn-hartford"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-01 01:22:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149425"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149883,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149425\/revisions\/149883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/149427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149425"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=149425"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=149425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}