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> If you're curious about Yale, imagine, for starters, how living in, say, Calhoun hall would feel if you're black Repackaging a Reddit comment I wrote: Actua
by slirpee 11y ago
> If you're curious about Yale, imagine, for starters, how living in, say, Calhoun hall would feel if you're black
Repackaging a Reddit comment I wrote:
Actually, let's back up a bit and talk about Elihu Yale, the namesake of the university, who was a slave trader[0]. Anyone who is oppressed by living in a Calhoun building, should have first thought about how they'd feel about spending years on a campus named after a slave trader, putting his name on their résumés and personal history for the rest of their lives, giving money to such an institution (either now, or later as alumni donations), building a career on the name of a man who enslaved their people. Yale has also been funded by slavery[1]. To be honest I had no idea this was the case, but I had a feeling if you dig deep enough, pretty much everything has a past that is looked down upon from the modern view.
Bottom line is that if you're looking for offense, you'll find it everywhere. You can decide to either reboot the entire society because it's all irrevocably tainted by people with some negative elements of their legacies, you can choose not to go to Yale because it's named after a slaver, or you can accept that it's just a name after all and doesn't have any actual oppressive effects on your life.
[0] http://digitalhistories.yctl.org/2014/11/01/elihu-yale-was-a-slave-trader/ http://digitalhistories.yctl.org/2014/11/01/elihu-yale-was-a...
[1] http://www.yaleslavery.org/Endowments/e2schol.html http://www.yaleslavery.org/Endowments/e2schol.html