This historian says racism is not a teaching tool

by Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, teaches African-American history. His new book, "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," was published by Nation Books.

... The teaching-tool defense crystallized last month when Yale defied the wishes of student activists and kept John C. Calhoun’s name on a residential college. In his political positions before his death, in 1850, including vice president of the United States and senator from South Carolina, Calhoun was the "champion of hell-born slavery," to quote the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Calhoun defended slavery as a "positive good," proclaiming blacks inferior and better suited for picking cotton than studying at Yale, his alma mater.

In writing to the Yale community, President Peter Salovey emphasized that "erasing Calhoun’s name from a much-beloved residential college risks masking this past, downplaying the lasting effects of slavery, and substituting a false and misleading narrative.… Retaining the name forces us to learn anew and confront one of the most disturbing aspects of Yale’s and our nation’s past. I believe this is our obligation as an educational institution." ...

At first I did not appreciate the significance of the teaching-tool defense. It seemed well-meaning, logical, sound, and antiracist. I have probably articulated it at some point. As a teacher of American history, as a scholar who just published a book on the history of racist ideas, I find it difficult not to be attracted to this argument. Its appeal is seductive. Don’t we adore subjects and objects that pique the interests of learners, compel questions, and incite critical thought? Doesn’t the teaching-tool defense flatter the academic consensus that we must learn from history?

But the more I thought about it, and the more I saw it invoked, questions arose in my mind. I started seeing the teaching-tool defense from the reverse perspective. I can find museums and plaques but I am struggling to find prominent buildings and institutions, on or off college campuses, named after people whom white Americans commonly consider their enemies. I am struggling to find buildings named for those who terrorized white people on the scale that slaveholders, Confederates, and Klansmen terrorized black people. I started imagining these memorials and the teaching-tool defense. And the more I imagined the defense from the standpoint of white Americans, the more inconceivable this defense became.

Can you imagine New York University having a building named after Osama bin Laden? Can you imagine NYU officials arguing that retaining bin Laden Hall allows us to learn anew about 9/11? Isn’t bin Laden Hall unthinkable — and rightfully so?

Can you imagine Boston College having a building named after the anti-Catholic politician Nathaniel P. Banks? ...

Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education