Last week Brown University released the final draft of the report developed by its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The release received wide media coverage (the New York Times published two articles on it, including yesterday's editorial, which called the report "long-awaited"), and met with generally appreciative nods from those who saw fit to comment. In addition to laying out a number of steps the University could take to make amends for its involvement in the trade, the report gives a concise and illuminating history of the slave trade's place in the American economy.

The charge of the committee that produced the report was "to examine the University's historical entanglement with slavery and the slave trade and ... reflect on the meaning of this history in the present." As such, this article, in so far as it examines the report, will be primarily concerned with two things: the story of slavery that the report tells, and the story of restorative justice it hopes to begin.

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First and foremost, the report shows slavery to have been "not a distinct enterprise but rather an institution that permeated every aspect of social and economic life in Rhode Island, the Americas, and indeed the Atlantic World." Before 1800, roughly ten million people made the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Eighty-five percent of these people were Africans destined for slave labor. Eighty-five percent. That's seven slaves for every one free person; eight and a half million people in all.

The United States was the final destination for roughly five-hundred thousand enslaved Africans, and the labor of almost every craftsmen and merchant in the colonies was connected to the slave trade in some way - from the blacksmiths and carpenters who outfitted the ships that carried slaves across the Atlantic to the distillers and textile workers who made finished goods from the raw materials produced by slaves throughout the Americas. Rhode Island merchants, who were responsible for transporting roughly 100,000 slaves to the Americas, held an even more direct relationship with the trade: virtually every significant businessman had purchased shares in a slave voyage at one point or another by 1800.

The report traces the history of slavery to its end in the Americas (an end that came about through both moral and economic factors and was marked by slowness and contradiction, with merchants continuing the trade long after legislation was enacted to end it), but it also reminds us that the institution is with us to this day. Close to one million people are trafficked as slaves every year. Slavery is no longer a fundamental aspect of the world economic system, but the coincidence of forces (both economic and moral) that brought an end to the trade throughout much of the world have yet to become universal.

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The Steering Committee's report, as it points out itself, is the product of a second phase in humanity's attempts to come to terms with atrocity. Phase one began in the eighteenth century and focused primarily on the prevention of further atrocity and prosecution of those who had perpetrated past atrocities. Phase two began after WWII with the Nuremberg trials and stresses the redress of past wrongs. The story of restorative justice that this report hopes to begin will focus, then, on providing a type of social healing for the descendents of American slaves.

This second type of justice is fundamentally about restoring political power to communities that have been stripped of it. This is a complex idea -- one of the most challenging things about the word "community" is that it carries with it the danger of homogenizing the group of individuals to which it is referring. Homogeneity undermines political power, or at the very least, it undermines the individuality of political citizens. As such, one of the chief responsibilities that restorative justice has to the community it seeks to benefit is the encouragement and enabling of critical thinking among the members of that community.

In the case of African Americans living in the United States, restorative justice must begin by addressing the scholastic achievement gap and actively providing African Americans admittance to the social and political networks that operate our economy. One legacy of the slave trade is that it systematically excluded a group of people from equal access to the resources of the public education system and meaningful managerial employment. According to The Black-White Test Score Gap, "African Americans score lower than European Americans on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, as well as on tests that claim to measure scholastic aptitude and intelligence. The gap appears before children enter kindergarten and it persists into adulthood. It has narrowed since 1970, but the typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on almost every standardized test." The quality and accuracy of these tests aside, economic and political power is not possible with scholastic success.

Implicitly, Brown's committee recognizes the importance of education in enabling political power. However, its reaction - an increased emphasis on providing opportunity to African American students at the college level - is not enough. College is too late. According to The Test Score Gap "The typical black four-year-old's vocabulary score falls below the twentieth percentile of the national distribution." If Brown is serious about making a difference in the educational lives of those who bear the legacy of slavery, it will invest early.

The Committee, adhering to the University's policy of awarding scholarships based solely on need, did not recommend that Brown provide financial awards specifically for African Americans. This non-recommendation implicitly recognizes another truth about restoring political power to African Americans. Overcoming the historical exclusion of African Americans from the managerial level of the economy is about much more than money; it is about networks and connections. Think about it; how do most people get jobs? By knowing someone who knows someone who will, at the very least, help them get a foot in the door. When a class of people has been systematically excluded from knowing someone who knows someone, a person from that class cannot have those connections. If Brown is serious about the idea providing African Americans with increased access to the managerial level of the economy, the University must affirmatively - yes I used that word - do all it can to provide African Americans access to the economic networks of which the University is a part.

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