Have House Masters reconciled with Harvard’s dark past?

Yesterday Harvard’s 12 House Masters “unanimously” decided to change the title of their position, which many students have rightfully called out for its association with slavery.

This comes as no surprise, given the onslaught of emails we’ve all received assuring us of the measures our favs like Dean Khurana and President Faust are taking to make sure “Harvard belongs to every one of us,” as Faust herself wrote in an email headed “Our Harvard.”

Across the country, students of color and their allies on college campuses, including our own, are calling attention to the injustice we face in a way that many on the outside find repulsive and disrespectful. As if the Civil Rights Movement, or even members of ACT UP during the AIDS crisis as a not entirely unrelated example, relied on decorum and compliance to bring about change we so greatly revere to this day. No one would spend so much time and energy if there weren’t a reality to be validated and a long story to be told.

And this long story of what boils down to institutional racism in the United States does not exclude Harvard.

Almost two weeks ago, we reported on the portraits of black tenured professor being taped over at Harvard Law School.

To this day, the official seal for the Law School is the crest of the Royall family, who funded Harvard Law School with the sale of 100 Antiguan slaves. Essentially, the racism that funded the institution motivated the vandalism that took place inside it.

You can’t make connections like these without special knowledge of the racially-unjust histories of present day institutions.

I’ll take this a step further and say this knowledge is necessary for entirely understanding the country in which we live today. You need to understand the early- to mid-20th Century practice of redlining to understand why we have ghettos. You need to understand Jim Crow laws in order to understand why parallels drawn between the prison industry and slavery are not unsound.

You need all the unadulterated and unfiltered knowledge of race in America to truly understand the necessity behind people taking to the streets to chant “Black lives matter.”

Our administrators did not shy away from this one aspect of Harvard’s dark past. Instead, they embraced it in discussion and collectively derived a solution they felt best to address it.

This is the engagement that will effect enormous, long-term change in this country, if we apply it in broader, nationwide contexts. It is this evaluation of the present as essentially the ramifications of sins past that will allow us to reverse the institutionalized injustices many have rallied and continue to rally against.