SLAVERY – AN AMERICAN INSTITUTION

The Harvard University study is just confirmation of American racism.

The news that Harvard University, arguably America’s most prestigious university, benefitted from slavery may have given some shock and pause.

It may have been embarrassing to alumna that bleed crimson, black, and white.

It may have rattled some who are less jaded about this country’s racial history.

But to Black people and our knowledgeable allies, the news is the same old stuff on a different day.

Some would give the university plaudits for funding the study that revealed this “news,” and use it as an example of transparency and honesty regarding race relations.

But it would have more laudable for the university to have eschewed having anything to do with enslaving human beings.

It would have been right and proper for those who led the school to set an example for the nation, and refused to take part in, profit from, or have any connection with chattel slavery.

In fact, Harvard did set an example for the country. The fact that the university itself enslaved over seventy people and had indirect and profitable connections to it is just another example of the institution’s foundational place in American history.

Despite the Republican Party and its acolytes’ persistent attempts to muzzle history and eradicate honest discussion, slavery is as American as apple pie, and perhaps more so, because the impact of a well-cooked pie only lasts so long.

Whereas slavery’s impact on America will endure as long as there is an America.

Anytime a country makes a choice to permit legal servitude, it has ensured that racial prejudice will be foundationally systemic and encoded, and forever tarnished its legacy, regardless of future events.

Black people live with the myriad consequences of slavery every day.

Our surnames come from an ancestral slave owner.

Some of our coloring comes from an ancestral slave owner.

The hatred and lies forged by slavery, bolstered by ignorant White Supremacy, and perpetrated by literal and figurative whitewashing persists.

We live in an age where Dr. Martin Luther King is lionized in death by the same kind of people who derided him in life as a troublemaker and a communist.

His words are used to decry affirmative action, CRT, and anything remotely resembling redressing racism.

We live at a time when the most palatable Black people in conservative circles are people like Candace Owens, Clarence Thomas, and Ben Carson who deny the existence of racism and work tirelessly to provide aid and comfort to White racists.

School textbooks and history teaching are being censored to remove any discussion of slavery and Jim Crow.

Our right to vote is being curtailed across the country.

A movement is growing to prohibit interracial marriages.

From the time we open our eyes in the morning until we close them at night, and every moment in between, Black Americans are reminded that we are continually being disenfranchised.

All of this started with slavery.

But it didn’t end with slavery.

And it will likely persist until there is no America