Harvard leaders and staff enslaved more than 70 people, report finds | Hacker News Reader

Harvard leaders and staff enslaved more than 70 people, report finds

washingtonpost.com

9 pointssusiecambria9 comments

> Harvard is among the latest major universities to engage in a public reckoning with their role in slavery

Since Harvard is in Massachusetts, which was part of the Union, will the "role in slavery" that they're "publicly reckoning with" include the Union's bloody war against slavery and their own kin? Perhaps a big monument to all the dead and killed, to all the contributions Harvard and those connected to it made to the war, to which an annual ceremony of gratitude could be given?

Or will we only remember connections to slavery, not against? Sacrifice and good deeds get forgotten, profit and evil deeds remembered forever - if and only if the culprit is a designated oppressor, of course.

I see that ytrytr's comment is now "dead" but I think they say what needs to be said, so I copy and paste it here:

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My favourite thing about Hackernews is this type of faux intellectualism that people like to exhibit.

So please tell us, u/car_analogy, what exactly is your issue with this report? Do you not think institutions that participated in and benefited from slavery should face some reckoning? Or will a sister article praising the people that fought against slavery pacify you?

I just don't understand this HN obsession with always trying to find some 'intellectual' contrarion viewpoint to every single thing, especially in any matters of race of discrimination.

> So please tell us, u/car_analogy, what exactly is your issue with this report?

Is all you got from my post "I don't like it"? Because my entire post is explaining what my issue with the report is. Even if I could explain it more clearly, it would be useless, as you are already determined to not understand.

Everyone remembers the civil war. It wasn’t brushed under the carpet like this was, no matter how hard one particular political party tries to reframe it as “states rights”. Plus there are a lot of monuments to it already.

Brushed under the carpet? Reminders that America is colonialist/white supremacist/had slavery are daily. Just because the role of a single, specific university is less known than a war with almost a million dead does not mean the former was brushed under the carpet.

And I'm not sure everyone does remember the civil war - this report doesn't mention any links between Harvard or its donors, and the Union. It looked for "links to slavery" and used them for a "public reckoning", but ignored any reckoning already done - to say nothing of any generic good Harvard may have done that benefited people of color, such as bringing the smallpox vaccine to the US (which Benjamin Waterhouse tested on his own family), or anesthesia.

Like a trial where only the prosecution is allowed. One can only conclude that if paying a literal price in blood gets ignored, so too will any present-day efforts by Harvard at a "reckoning", and a decade from now they'll have to "reckon" all over again, forever.

Harvard does have a large Memorial Chapel, if you're looking for that monument. (Or it did when Henry James wrote The Bostonians.)

> during the 17th and 18th centuries when slavery was legal in Massachusetts,

Here I thought someone was finally doing something about undergraduates

Honestly my thought was some unpaid grad students or something

Why does nobody remember the role in slavery of Africans, Arabs, Asians, and other ethnic groups?

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