Eag News reports:
Officials at DePauw University canceled classes Thursday for the first time in over 100 years to hold a campus-wide discussion on white privilege and social justice.
The day, dubbed “DePauw Dialogue,” was organized by students and faculty to discuss “microaggressions” against minorities at the university, as well as DePauw’s history of inclusiveness, from its first black graduate, Tucker Wilson, in 1888 to recognition as a diverse liberal arts school in the 1980s, according to The DePauw student newspaper.
Freshman Diamond McDonald said she helped to organize the day-long discussion because as a black woman she always feels like “the odd one out.”
“At first I didn’t want to do (anything) because I felt like it was going to be really intense,” McDonald told The DePauw. “But then I thought ‘How selfish of me not to do this for future generations.’”
The program was mandatory for students, who were penalized if they did not attend, according to the student newspaper.
What about the
descendants of white slaves, here in America ? What about the
blacks involved in the slave trade:
For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.
How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
The New York Times was good enough to tell the truth here.
