freagle, 2 years ago

Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.

Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.

Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!

The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.

It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.

The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren’t for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.

Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It’s going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific “heroes”, and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.