Last week, a friend sent an article about the halting of work to uncover descendants of enslaved blacks whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and eventually sold to the leadership and faculty of Harvard University to labor in fields and in homes. I would have thought that since the 2013 publication of Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, disclosing the findings of research to uncover the involvement of Ivy League universities and their dependence on the subjugation and free labor of black people, would be made easily accessible to the descendants of formally enslaved blacks. Perhaps, financially compensating American descendants whose ancestors during slavery lived lives that were "'spent and exhausted' for the production of sugarcane," according to the lead researcher, Richard Cellini.
Hired to locate the descendants of Harvard's enslaved blacks, Cellini was fired before the job was completed. No misappropriation of funds. Nothing sleazy. In fact, Cellini was doing his job! The researcher, however, found too many descendants. Way too many-- for Harvard!
There may be as many as 10,000 living descendants, according to Cellini. He suggests that Harvard wasn't committed, at least on paper, to atone for the past, to confront the truth.
Cellini, according to the Guardian report, had hoped that "Harvard could demonstrate that truth telling and reconciliation are possible on a large scale." Maybe the "silence and historical revisionism" could be "overturned; and that light" could "shine into even the deepest cracks". Maybe. Harvard, the researcher explains, feared that to pursue so many descendants would "bankrupt" the university. To acknowledge, however, that black Americans contributed greatly to the building of this nation and have yet to receive such historical recognition or financial compensation is to dismiss the contribution of "free" labor in the creation of a "more perfect union".
Well, this is the US where institutions like Harvard would prefer that the history of the US's involvement with the slave trade and the beneficial factor of slavery itself would simply disappear. Americans don't want to know that the country systemically kidnapped and sold children, separating children from parents. They don't want to know that human beings were systemically tortured, maimed, and killed for those who believed in "God" and "country".
Dismiss slavery and the people enslaved can be dismissed-- if not attached to dehumanizing labels, such as "lazy", "criminals", and "inferior" beings. Institutions such as Harvard, along with many Americans, it has been my experience that most Americans bulk at the expenditure of money turned over to black Americans. Undeserving blacks, some would say.
But I suspect that the real issue is, for many Americans, involves reflection. A difficult thing for most Americans when it comes to race. Self-reflection. I imagine it's much easier to resort to those usual images associated with black Americans. To admit to the world that black Americans, while tending to fields of cotton and tobacco, made little kings of those considering themselves "hardworking", innocent", and "superior" would be tantamount to bursting the myth of white supremacy in the US. That myth is hard to untangle oneself from no matter how many descendants of the former enslaved are paid off.
Like Harvard University's administration, most Americans don't want to know the truth.
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