Harvard hired researcher to uncover slavery ties, fires him for finding slaves

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/21/harvard-slavery-decendants-of-the-enslaved

83 90 1 year ago

ggm• 1 year ago

I read about this elsewhere and the sentiment was "this is a very hot take" because overall Harvard remains committed to recognising, documenting and taking account of its slavery ties, it's not in denial.

All projects come to an end. Maybe funding ran out, maybe it's cowardice in the context of the Anti DEI move, but this isn't the same as what the headline implies.

CaliforniaKarl• 1 year ago

Where was it that you read about this?

labster2• 1 year ago

The story is from The Guardian, they have a certain point of view. I like it most of the time, but in this story it’s simpler to assume that spending money on slavery reparations and DEI activity suddenly became a political liability this January, rather than any very theoretical monetary liability in reparations.

Unfortunately, appeasement didn’t work this time, either.

eviks5• 1 year ago

this isn't the same as what the headline implies.

Correct, you need to read the actual article to find justification for the headline, not limit yourself to a generic "everything ends"

For example, re funding running out

Even though Cellini was eventually given a budget for 2025, albeit a fraction of what he had asked for, the university would soon halt his work entirely.

wtcactus3• 1 year ago

The idea of giving all the descendants of someone that lived hundreds of years ago some form of compensation because 1/32nd (or much lower) of their ancestors was harmed in some way, is completely bonkers for me. Virtue signaling at it’s best.

Harvard tried to do it (to virtue signal, I mean) and eventually found out that the maths for their little publicity stunt would get them bankrupt. They then proceeded to try and stop the all thing.

That’s the story here.

eviks5• 1 year ago

How would it bankrupt them when they're the ones setting the compensation???

Yizahi2• 1 year ago

They would probably need to pay a little more than 5$ Comcast/Hewlett-Packard style, and if there were even 10 slaves back then, today it would be 30000 descendants. If there were 1000 slaves back then, it would be 3 million people today. Paying each even a measly thousand would require 3 billion dollars just for compensations, without any other investments or programs.

drdaeman3• 1 year ago

How is it completely bonkers?

I think the idea is that those people were put at inherent disadvantage due to unfair treatment of their long gone predecessors. Or at least that’s my understanding of it.

The validity of this claim, type and amount of corrective action (and from some viewpoints - its very appropriateness or necessity), as well as the relative importance of the subject - those can all be a matter of debate, but are any of those so obvious they render the whole idea crazy?

vintermann• 1 year ago

I found out my son is a descendant of slaves. I am not, but his mother is from a family with a few upper class connections, and in one of them there was a Danish slave ship captain, who married a "free woman of color" on St. Croix and moved to Norway. "The Creole Woman" was a family legend told to me by his great-grandmother, but I checked, and it was completely true.

Apparently it's really common in Denmark to be a descendant of slaves in a similar way.

I think it's obviously ludicrous that my son should be entitled to corrective action for this. Yes, his ancestor was subjected to an injustice, but it completely drowns in the sea of other injustices or unfair advantages his ancestors have had.

If you want to sum up the historical injustice and unearned privilege someone's ancestors had, it's much better to look at their bank account than their pedigree. DoS-restitution suggests that but for transatlantic slavery, the present distribution of resources would have been just. The further back you are willing to go in asserting the right to restitution, the more forcefully you are asserting it.

As a practical matter, you have to have some level of material comfort and/or solid family relationships to be able to document your ancestry. That already biases it away from those who would need it most.

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

Would you then not just focus on helping currently disadvantaged people, rather than some ancestry chase that might or might not be presently relevant?

KoolKat237• 1 year ago

Sorry, it's completely bonkers.

How long is a piece of string?

modo_mario• 1 year ago

The world is filled with such qualms. People are quick to feel slighted and counterreact. For example if the uni decided to make it more financially manageable by letting those decendants in easier suddenly it starts mirroring the stories of asian and white students needing higher scores to get in that caused an outrage. Giving money because of some modern day one drop rule ends up no different.

It will also always be a mess even if you do compensate. See at the fights about who gets native american tribe status and benefits. On one hand you have people actually struggling with the faults of the past. On the other hand there's groups of people who genuinely believe it's them that bear the costs of the past with less measurable ancestral ties than the average african american looking to benefit decrying what happened.

Defletter17• 1 year ago

I agree, the fact that the UK government was still paying off slave-owner debt in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) instead of freeing itself from that debt because the idea of giving the descendants of slave owners who were "harmed" in the loss of their "property", is completely bonkers.

KoolKat237• 1 year ago

That's more to do with the method in which it was resolved, it was ended in place of government debt. They can't simply renege on government debts purely due to its origin.

It's like saying they should in part renege on some current 2008 financial crisis debts.

bitshiftfaced• 1 year ago

These bonds were a consolidated, tradable asset. They were likely traded many times over the centuries. They could end up in things like pension funds after 200 years.

wtcactus3• 1 year ago

Well, that's mostly because the UK, did something almost no one ever did before and not only abolished slavery (something most Cristian kingdoms did by themselves) but even took a step further and went to war to prevent it from continuing.

Sure, you don't see countries with a very, very long history of slavery like most Arab nations, or India, or most of the descendants of African kingdoms, paying debt they contracted to end slavery, because they couldn't care less about ending it, and even went to war against Britain to continue practicing it.

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Brita...

Simulacra3• 1 year ago

Yet, it drives people to the polls. Year after year, empty money promises - no matter how asinine - drive voters.

eviks5• 1 year ago

“At one point the fear was expressed that if we found too many descendants, it would bankrupt the university,” he said.

That doesn't make sense on its surface, what's the mechanism here? This is mentioned twice without any explanation

probably_wrong• 1 year ago

My understanding is that they intended to pay reparations to the descendants. But if they truly identified 10k descendants at $1k each they would need $10M alone for an amount that, depending on their personal circumstances, ranges from "an insult" to "not much".

pyrale• 1 year ago

We have values. But only as long as they are inexpensive.

eviks5• 1 year ago

But they are the ones setting that value per person , so there is 0 risk of bankruptcy - they can always adjust the value to fit whatever the non-bankrupting total they're comfortable with is!

isaacfrond• 1 year ago

The article nowhere mentions individual compensation to descendants by Harvard. I suspect the bankruptcy comment is an institutional fear of financial liability tied to large-scale identification of descendants.

Sabinus• 1 year ago

How is the institution 'liable' for the slaves owned by the founders? I'm both confused that people expect the University to pay significant reparations to the many descendants of slaves and that it would be afraid of that expectation. Is a preferential entry or special scholarships not enough?

fakedang2• 1 year ago

Insanity that Harvard, apparently one of the gathering places for some of the best minds in the world, to think that tracking down and compensating people who are very removed from the realities of slavery. They could've thought of revitalizing black neighborhoods in tandem with HBCUs, carried outreach to black majority high schools by alumni, the works, but nope, they thought this would be a better investment of their funds. No wonder wealthy donors are so hesitant to donate to a pack of rabid morons.

In those lines, I might as well pressure the British government to compensate me, personally, because they decided to shove one part of my family tree into a train carriage to suffocate to death.

Defletter17• 1 year ago

You say that like governments, like the British government (since you brought them up), didn't finish paying off its debt to slave owners in 2015 (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...) for debt created decades before the American civil war over slavery. Are you okay with this? And if so, why is paying off this debt okay when slavery is so far removed, but the concept of reparations isn't?

typewithrhythm8• 1 year ago

That is not a debt to slave owners, that is a debt taken on to pay for the costs of abolishing slavery.

It's also talking about real agreements for an entity to exchange money in the future, for a bond tied to the value of the currency... Not some vibes based moral justification.

b112• 1 year ago

Read up on the 'home children'. Hundreds of thousands of orphaned children were contracted(sold), indentured, to the colonies. Some faced harrowing, near starvation conditions and were beaten, tortured, and so on.

On top of that, to reduce resistance, families were broken up. One brother would be sent to Canada, another Australia, never to meet again.

This is, of course, not as severe as slavery. Once adults, after a decade or more of hard labour, their contract was often satisfied. Yet my point is that the past was a more brutal time. This is how white, British children were treated by the British. And not one descendant of home children (such as my grandfather was) has ever been compensated. There is no effort to help track down families broken apart.

And look at what happened to orphans in Catholic care? Priest raping children, and it being kept quiet for decades by the police and Catholic church.

If reparations aren't being given to cases like these, then why would they be given to other cases a centuries old?

NOTE, I'm not saying "fair or not". I'm saying that is that the past is a different world. And expecting today's people to pay for what their great-great grandfather's did, isn't a thing that's often entertained.

If we start getting into reparations, I feel I should also have my property returned from when the British took it from my Scottish ancestors. Or maybe Italy should be paying, for the time the Romans invaded and they took some land back then?

When does it end? Where does it end?

This comment may not be liked by many, but what I'm trying to point out is that the past was not today, mores were different, and it wasn't just one race that was treated poorly.

Everyone treated everyone poorly compared to today.

fakedang2• 1 year ago

a.) My family weren't slaves, they were British colonial second-class subjects.

b.) They were killed in the 1920s, way after Britain decided to compensate its slavers.

c.) The whole payment to slaves till 2015 is not real, it's just a quirk of how the payments were structured via annuities - in fact the payments were done by the 1840s.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2022/the-colle...

d.) The slaves themselves never received any compensation.

sharpshadow2• 1 year ago

The first settlers created Harvard University in 1636, while slaves also started to be common during that century. That are over 200 years of slavery until 1865. Havard benefited for more than half its existence from slaves.

corimaith2• 1 year ago

Every culture that exists today over the bones of vanquished peoples long lost to history.

sharpshadow2• 1 year ago

The point here is that it’s not vanquished but in the archives. Havard as one of the oldest institutions started with the first settlers, probably, very likely, has one of the most extensive histories of slave ownership.

Yizahi2• 1 year ago

Did they forget to ask Biology department about this whole descendants number thing? I though they are a University, maybe they couldn't estimate the number outright, but at least some tiny thought at the back of their mind should have told them that even 1 person from 300 years ago can leave a lot of descendants. That's what 15-20 generations? Each potentially doubling in numbers.

belorn• 1 year ago

There is a rather interesting historical person called Hans Jonatan (19th century) who was an escaped slave from a Danish colony, fled to the danish fleet, fought in the Battle of Copenhagen, and then fled to live in Iceland. Because of the very small amount of immigration from people with West African ancestry to Iceland, Hans has been the subject of fairly extensive Genetic study that found around 800 descendants.

philipkglass• 1 year ago

There have been a couple of Hacker News stories about Hans Jonatan that made the front page:

"The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated from Living Descendants"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16188715

"A Trail Gone Cold"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41716963

RickJWagner• 1 year ago

What remains of slavery in the northeast are the economic byproducts.

What remains in the south are the descendants of the slaves, and the ironically scape goated guilt.

lovelearning• 1 year ago

Performative virtue signaling is not always easy.

Harvard hired researcher to uncover slavery ties, fires him for finding slaves

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