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Harvard pledges $100 million to atone for role in slavery
The Associated Press ^ | April 26, 2022 | By COLLIN BINKLEY

Posted on 04/26/2022 12:07:06 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer

BOSTON (AP) — Harvard University is vowing to spend $100 million to research and atone for its extensive ties with slavery, the school’s president announced Tuesday, with plans to identify and support the descendants of enslaved people who labored at the Ivy League campus.

President Lawrence Bacow announced the funding as Harvard released a new report detailing many ways the college benefited from slavery and perpetuated racial inequality.

The report, commissioned by Bacow, found that Harvard’s faculty, staff and leaders enslaved more than 70 Black and Native American people from the school’s founding in 1636 to 1783. It cautions that the figure is “almost certainly an undercount.” Using historical records, researchers were able to identify dozens of enslaved people by name, along with their connection to the university.

“Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students,” researchers found. “Moreover, throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the University and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery.”

The report says the university “should make a significant monetary commitment, and it should invest in remedies of equal or greater breadth than other universities.” But the report stops short of recommending direct financial reparations, and officials have no immediate plans for that kind of support.

Building on earlier research at Harvard, the report details how the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college profited from the slave trade throughout its early history. It invested directly in the sugar and rum industries in the Caribbean, and the cotton and railroad industries in the United States. It also depended on wealthy donors who accumulated their wealth through the slave trade and industries that relied on it.

(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: Massachusetts
KEYWORDS: harvard; reparations; slavery; woke
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

They should use that money plus more to pay off student debt, especially considering the quality of the product they offer.


21 posted on 04/26/2022 12:21:53 PM PDT by KrisKrinkle (Blessed be those who know the depth and breadth of ignorance. Cursed be those who don't.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Come ON Harvard, you can do better thant his. How about 1 billion show how deep you feel your guilt.


22 posted on 04/26/2022 12:22:32 PM PDT by rovenstinez
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To: Seruzawa
I don't care about their make-believe problems. American citizenship is "reparations" enough. We have to go back to Charles Murray's classic "The Bell Curve". We have to reevaluate the distribution of IQ. There is the essence of the problem.

This aggrieved group is acting like spoiled children. They keep screaming for candy, and mamma keeps giving them candy to shut them up. But of course it doesn't work. They scream for more. Tough love is called for, but mamma keeps babying them.

23 posted on 04/26/2022 12:23:00 PM PDT by Governor Dinwiddie (LORD, grant thy people grace to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

$100 million? That’s chump change compared to how much Harvard benefitted from slavery. Slave trading profits formed much of the seed capital for Harvard. Remember that New England was the absolute epicenter of the slave trade industry for the entire Western Hemisphere for quite a long time. Yankee traders brought over a whole lot of those slaves to the Caribbean and to Brazil (where 95% of all slaves were sold as opposed to only 5% who were sold in North America).

This is true of the entire Ivy League + Georgetown. They’re trying to get off cheap. They need to take their measly $100 million and multiply it more than 100 times over to disgorge the unjust enrichment of all that blood money that founded and funded Harvard.

As for Yale well.....Elihu Yale WAS a prominent slave trader....


24 posted on 04/26/2022 12:23:13 PM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Just give all blacks free tuition to Harvard for the next 100 years.


25 posted on 04/26/2022 12:23:55 PM PDT by dartuser
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Like it’s their money.


26 posted on 04/26/2022 12:23:55 PM PDT by Delta 21 (It started as a virus, and mutated into an IQ test.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

It would have more and better affect if they lowered the outrageous tuitions.

But that would require a deep thinker. Universities, today have no one who would qualify as an intellectual. But, by golly, they have an almost obsessive concern for former slaves, who, by virtue of time, do not exist.


27 posted on 04/26/2022 12:26:18 PM PDT by Maris Crane
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Given their endowment, they can surely afford it.


28 posted on 04/26/2022 12:29:24 PM PDT by Demiurge2 (Define your terms!)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

How big is their endowment fund?

Billions and billions............................


29 posted on 04/26/2022 12:30:27 PM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.....................)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Over the past several decades, trillions have been spent on blacks in terms of government entitlement programs, war on poverty, free education, etc.

Plus private charities, United Negro College Fund, corporate grants, etc.

Plus affirmative action in public and private employment.

Plus vast numbers of role models in Hollywood film and TV shows. Law-and-order black cops and judges, brilliant black scientists and nerds, strong, responsible black fathers and mothers.

Yet the academic achievement gap, the poverty gap, the crime gap, remain stubbornly resilient.

Harvard's $100 million will go to the usual poverty pimps, the problems will remain unsolved, and "systematic racism" and "white privilege" will be blamed.

30 posted on 04/26/2022 12:32:27 PM PDT by Angelino97
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To: Seruzawa

Harvard has billions in endowment funds. I think it’s a great idea for them to piss away millions on useless “research” and “atonement,” whatever that means. I think virtue signaling is on the mark.


31 posted on 04/26/2022 12:35:32 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard ( Resist the narrative.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

I notice they are not planning on giving any reparations directly to the descendants of their slaves. That would be too easy.


32 posted on 04/26/2022 12:36:36 PM PDT by hinckley buzzard ( Resist the narrative.)
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To: Delta 21

Exactly, it is their money and this is not the innocent ancestors of someone whom owned slaves but the actual institution that held slaves.


33 posted on 04/26/2022 12:39:23 PM PDT by 98charlie
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

1619 this, black this, black that. Harvard’s sham at their ‘white culpability’ in perpetuating white guilt pay-off is a PITTANCE. Harvard’s ENDOWMENT is worth $53.2 BILLION DOLLARS.

All they are doing is paying off the loudest black recalcitrants and getting Dollar Store prices.

If the black descendants of former slaves want their justice, make Harvard PAY some real money....


34 posted on 04/26/2022 12:39:54 PM PDT by Gaffer
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

in fact, I think we should explore this topic in much more depth. I wrote a post called “Cancel the Ivy League” last year going over this. Let’s focus on Harvard specifically:

“In fact, Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery, in 1641.

Sugar plantations in the Caribbean devoted most of their land to growing cane. They imported grain, meat, codfish and other supplies from New England. Ship owners in New England hauled back barrels of molasses to make rum. Then they shipped the rum to Africa to pay for slaves. New England merchants used part of the profits from this triangular trade to finance Harvard and other schools.

Over time, cotton from slave plantations in the Caribbean and the American South entered the mix. Cotton fed the great textile mills owned by the Lowell family of Boston, which had extensive ties to Harvard, including a Harvard president and a prominent professor. Banks in Boston and New York supplied loans to southern plantation owners to buy slaves and seed; northern insurance companies underwrote slave voyages to Africa and the lives of enslaved people.”

“”Enslavement and the slave economy was the road for upward mobility for a lot of white Bostonians in the colonial era, and then the antebellum era. And part of becoming respectable is donating to a place like Harvard,” says Kathrine Stevens, assistant professor of history at Oglethorp University in Atlanta.”

“Scientific racism is another of Harvard’s legacies. In the 19th and 20th centuries, some Harvard professors proposed scientific theories they said proved the inherent inferiority of black people. Chief among them was Louis Agassiz, the geologist and zoologist often described as one of the “founding fathers” of American science.

Agassiz promoted the idea of polygenism — that the different races descended from different species. Other Harvard scientists propagating scientific theories of white superiority were Nathanial Shaler, dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and anthropology professor Earnest Hooton.

“The work they did contributed greatly to legitimizing slavery in the 19th century and to the discrimination that followed,” says Zoe Weinberg, a student at Yale Law School who took Beckert’s seminar as an undergraduate at Harvard. “Harvard really acted as a pioneer and champion of the field of race science. That was a history I was totally unaware of as a student.”

“Anti-slavery activists on the Harvard campus were pariahs for much of the antebellum period. Harvard professors who spoke openly against slavery invited fierce criticism from Boston newspapers and risked losing their jobs.”

“Under pressure from students, the Harvard Law School in 2016 retired its shield — essentially its logo — because it was based on the family crest of an 18th century slave-holding family of Isaac Royall Jr., who endowed the first law professorship at Harvard in 1815, described as the most distinguished chair in American legal education. Royall’s father was a Caribbean plantation owner who built the family fortune trading in sugar, rum and slaves.”

So no, its not just that several Harvard presidents were slave owners and had their slaves with them and working while they served as president at Harvard. Its not just scientific racism which was invented at Harvard and which was used as justification for slavery in the mid 19th century. It is that the very seed money which founded and built up Harvard was a direct product of slavery and slave trading.

While this doubtless comes as a great shock to respectable lefty New Englanders, exactly zero people in the South are the least bit surprised. They’ve been saying it for over 170 years but now that somebody actually at Harvard studied it and wrote about it they’re all shocked to learn about it.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2017/09/04/shackled-legacy


35 posted on 04/26/2022 12:41:19 PM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: Gaffer

Yep. $100 million is an insult. The present value of all those slave trading profits that flowed into Harvard has got to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

Harvard needs to pay up.


36 posted on 04/26/2022 12:43:13 PM PDT by FLT-bird
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To: FLT-bird

First, they should pay anything.

second, it is a drop in the bucket. $53 billion? 0.0018

and third will surely be misused.


37 posted on 04/26/2022 12:44:14 PM PDT by anton
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To: rovenstinez

Cant they just bestow PHD’s to all blacks? Problem solved.


38 posted on 04/26/2022 12:46:03 PM PDT by refermech
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To: Demiurge2
Really, Biden's policies have shrunk it to a mere $53 billion. That means they are "giving away" 0.0018 percent of their endowment to a scam effort.
39 posted on 04/26/2022 12:48:02 PM PDT by econjack (I'm not bossy. I just know what you should be doing.)
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To: anton

Elon should start buying universities.


40 posted on 04/26/2022 12:48:12 PM PDT by refermech
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