Eric Holder, former attorney general under President Obama, waded into the debate over reparations for slavery at Georgetown University, reports America magazine.
While the call for reparations is an old one, the conversation really entered mainstream circles with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 essay on the subject in The Atlantic. Holder’s comments on April 29 continue that conversation.
Such reparations can take a variety of forms and may not necessarily mean cash payments to descendants of slaves, Holder said in a response to a question from a student during an April 29 program on race and justice.
Reparations, he said, "can mean a whole bunch of different things. You can come up with policies that take into account what slavery meant then, what it means now. Affirmative action can be thought of as reparations, you know? And it takes into account … the negative impacts of negative racial policies that have hobbled the progress of African-Americans, people of color in this country."
Holder's comments came after a student asked him about the growing body of knowledge of the sale of 272 slaves by the Jesuit administrators in order to pay off the school's debts in 1838.
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