"Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities"

     This article is a book review that appeared on October 29^th, 2013 in the online news source Democracy Now. It was written by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. In the piece the two discuss the new book by MIT history professor Craig Steven Wilder in which he makes the claim that our post-secondary education system has helped create and reinforce racism in this country. The work, entitled Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, is both a logos and a pathos argument based on ten years of in- depth personal research. Through his narrative, the author implies that the warrant for his argument is that mistreatment of indigenous peoples by white colonial powers is deeply imbedded in academia. Wilder backs his claim with the individual stories of men like Henry Watson of Connecticut, who attended Trinity College in the nineteenth century prior to the abolition of slavery.  While conceding to the potential counter-argument or rebuttal that education has qualitative and measurable value within society; Wilder maintains that collegiate life and structure was still prone to historical revisionism and hopelessly intertwined with, “the founding, financing, and development of higher education” that was built on the backs of oppressed peoples. As such they became both “beneficiary and benefactor of the process.” In fact, argues Wilder, the process of Ivy League tutelage perfectly prepared graduates to operate within the slave system itself. The graduates of these prestigious schools emerged into the larger world as teachers, professors, bureaucrats and professionals who had been taught the acceptance and or desirability of American empirical dominance and superiority through conquest but without the context of residual effect.  One illustration of this skewed world view is the way in which Wilder says Mr. Watson was introduced to the Native American experience. Indian culture was reduced to human bones and possessions that were often presented as decorations to campus building or displays. Slavery too, was offered up as a sterilized institution that could be reduced to mere economic factors. In so-doing, schools effectively inoculated their students against the inhumanity inherent to its structure. While Wilder concedes that over time many of these men began to actively struggle with the moral and ideological hypocrisy of this mindset:  At core, Wilder makes an even broader claim which is that the schools which were built on the backs of colonial conquest of indigenous cultures, depended on that dynamic to uphold their society. He concludes that as such the active oppression and marginalization of those peoples by Americans, cannot logically be separated from the agenda of its academic institutions, or the later negative outcomes of their economic, social and political disenfranchisement.

p://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/10/29/read_ebony_and_ivy_race_slavery?utm