The fruits of slavery

Recently, a national columnist wrote about how university presidents were being removed because of whining college students. She even remarked on the example of students – whining students – being subjected to racial slurs.

Whoa… Are you whining when you stand up and say, “Enough!”? When this problem keeps happening and happening and the administration does nothing … and only listens when the football team stands up, too? I must admit, I thought it was brilliant to get the football team’s support. Many football players leave university with barely a college education (not to mention brain injury), but they will have brought in alumni money. What a game changer to have them involved!

A few days ago, I heard about the Harvard Law students wanting to change the official seal because it depicts sheaves of wheat from the Royall family crest. The Royall family were slave traders. One person interviewed asked, “What are we going to do? Change the name of our capital because Washington owned slaves?”

Hmm, this is an interesting question. I thought, “What if the seal featured a swastika?” That would really offend me, make me feel like every time I saw it, it was saying, “You’re not welcome here.” That’s why we object to the flying of the Confederate flag.

But then I thought about what a new university seal would mean. It would mean that no one would know about Harvard’s history coming out of the slave trade. It could quietly disappear from awareness. We could pretend it didn’t happen. What’s the best way to proceed?

I recently read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. Coates is a powerful writer, and he writes things like “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.”

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

When I visited my sister in Berlin, I saw Stolpersteine, cobblestones or “stumbling blocks,” laid into the sidewalks in front of residences where people had been deported and later exterminated in concentration camps. They’re meant to remind people – maybe even those living in the residences – that they can live there because someone else was murdered.

We don’t have anything like that in the U.S. Imagine if people who bought homes with FHA loans had to put markers in front of their houses saying that they qualified for federal mortgages – and the homes which appreciated in value – because they were white, that nonwhites were barred from living there. What if when those houses were sold, their heirs had to sign a paper acknowledging that their inheritance was a result of the racism practiced by the U.S. government in enforcing housing segregation and the creation of ghettos?

I don’t know how many of you I’m losing here, but I firmly believe that racism is so ingrained that we don’t realize how many of our benefits TODAY accrue from that.

So what if the Harvard law students instead insisted that everywhere the seal existed, there had to be a companion statement: “These sheaves of wheat represent the slave trade, which was instrumental in financing the founding of Harvard Law”? Hey, we require warnings on cigarette cartons. Ooh, I just discovered a revised seal showing black slaves hauling the sheaves of wheat!

Oh, no, here I am in my Third Third, and I still prefer the in-your-face approach to social change. But you know what? Yesterday I thought about where I was when Star Wars came out. And then I thought of where I was when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Civil Rights defined our formative years, and I’m disheartened, frustrated, and so angry that the wrongs continue unacknowledged.

I wish America could confront our “moral debts.” I wish America could become whole.