Emory’s Continued Slavery Problem | The Emory Wheel

Image via WikipediaBy Matthew Schoener Posted: 03/21/2011 In early January, Emory’s Board of Trustees officially recognized the University’s ties to 19th-century slavery. The statement announced that it “regret[s] both the undeniable wrong and the University’s decades of delay in acknowledging slavery’s harmful legacy.”

Despite the good intentions of the Board — thirty-seven of whose forty-one members are white — it failed to realize that Emory remains a beneficiary of modern-day, race-based slavery. By allowing the Center of Ethics to bring Florida’s Modern-Day Slavery Museum to Asbury Circle on Mar. 17, Emory unknowingly illuminated this embarrassing reality. I’m sure the board wishes it hadn’t.

The museum features a truck that is modeled after those used in a 2008 slave venture. Inside the cargo space are newspaper articles, court documents and photographs relating to farmworker slavery in Florida.

The exhibit deals with immigrant tomato farmers who are lured into working on farms by the promise of a better life, but are soon told that they will not be paid and that they cannot escape. According to the museum’s website, the “central focus is on the phenomenon of modern-day slavery — its roots, the reasons it persists and its solutions.”

The primary case the museum deals with regards workers who were trapped in the back of trucks all night, tied to poles, beaten ruthlessly and pistol-whipped to prevent their escape.

The instigators, the Navarrete brothers, were sentenced to 12 years in federal prison in 2008. On the day of their sentencing, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy wrote: “we have a number of similar — and ongoing — investigations.”

In the last eleven years, cases involving more than one thousand slaves have been uncovered in Florida alone. Each has had a similar composition: labor contractors, like the Navarretes, provide low-wage workers to wealthy tomato growers who are part of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, a “big business” organization that oversees massive, subsidized tomato growing throughout the state.

Mostly, they are young Mexican men who are smuggled into the states by contractors and then told that they will be paid as little as 45 cents a day. In the case of the Navarretes, the workers were charged five dollars for the right to use a hose to take a shower.

Among the top three buyers of Florida tomatoes, along with Cargill and Tropicana, is the Minute Maid Company. Since 1960, Minute Maid has been owned by the Coca-Cola Company.

As we all know, Emory’s primary benefactor is Coca-Cola. We do homework in Coke Commons, celebrate with Coke Toasts, and only drink Coke products on campus.

The only juices sold at the DUC and in Cox are Minute Maid and Simply Orange (a division of the Minute Maid Company). The only sodas are Coke and other Coke-owned products.

We drink Dasani water. Most importantly, the school’s most dramatic expansions have been made possible with Coke money.

Coca-Cola’s website reveals its attempt to downplay the seriousness of the problem rather than address it as it should. Under a section entitled “Ethically Managing Our Supply Chain,” it brags “[A]t the end of 2009, we had assessed facilities for 65 percent of our bottling partners and direct suppliers, of which seventy-two percent had achieved compliance, and work is under way to close any gaps identified.”

That fewer than three out of four “partners” and “suppliers” fail to live up to Coca-Cola’s own Supplier Guiding Principles (which are likely less stringent than they ought to be) is shocking.

At least 28 percent of Coca-Cola’s supply chain features unethical practices. But, according to Coke, we should rest assured knowing that “work is under way to close any gaps identified?” Thanks, but no thanks.

Twenty-three universities, including the University of Michigan and New York University, have banned Coca-Cola products on campus due to the company’s nauseating labor practices.

I’m not suggesting that Emory ban Coke products. That’s obviously not feasible because of Emory’s decision to intractably link itself with the morally corrupt company. And as justified as it may or may not be, I doubt that I’ll be seeing a majority of Emory students holding a Pepsi bottle anytime soon.

But, if the Emory community is genuinely as concerned with our ties to slavery as the Board of Trustees claims it is, actions speak louder than regrets.

Matthew Schoener is a College sophomore from New York, N.Y.

Source: emorywheel.com
Emory’s Continued Slavery Problem | The Emory Wheel