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| Were Yale's oldest buildings built by slaves? |
Righteous ( not SELF-righteous) indignation has been a pose which I have adopted in my writing at Yale Divinity School as the editor of Holy Smoke (1976-80) and thirty years later as editor of the blog The Anti-Yale as a means to provoke thought.
Nothing evokes my indignation more than an attempt to trivialize the evil which 100 years of slavery represents in our country.
And that, it seems to me, is EXACTLY what the posters on this Yale article "A Parade of Racism" are attempting to do: Suggest that the damage done to African Americans due to 100 years of slavery is equivalent to other forms of discrimination against races and ethnic groups.
What other groups may I ask have been bought and sold like furniture? Separated from their loved ones and offspring? Had their genealogies eradicated? Been prevented by LAW from attending school or being taught to read? Had the sanctity of their marriages and the responsibility of their parenthood ignored and trivialized by established christian churches? Had their life blood and the life blood of their mates and children whipped out of them?
It is the qualitative evil of this systematic hundred years of oppression by legislatures, judges, presidents and christian churches, which outrages me.
And so IF I SHOUT IN INDIGNATION I do so with the full knowledge that I risk sponging up my own personal angers in this larger anger about the institution of American slavery against which I rail.
Yet rail I must. I feel compelled to do so by forces larger than those Freudian; forces which seem to say that silence is complicity:
Speak or be damned.
Others who graduate from Yale Divinity School might refer to such an impulse as a "calling ". I am unable to do so for that implies a "Caller", -------one who has never addressed me.
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