The great woke reckoning is well upon us as we sit here in 2020. Across the country statues are falling. Schools, roads, and clubs are changing their names so as not to celebrate the noxious evils of the past. Indeed, in a very real sense hindsight is 2020. But there is one region of our sinful nation that has mostly skirted the cancellations. The Northeast, forever the country’s seat of culture and education, has gone through all this more or less unscathed. That should really change, as there are plenty of evildoers being celebrated here even as I write this.
We all know by now that Elihu Yale, namesake of one of our fanciest colleges, had a hand in the human bondage of Africans. It seems odd his name should stay on the expensive degrees handed out there. Not too far away, Amherst College and the town itself are named after Sir Jeffrey Amherst who wrote positively about using smallpox infected blankets as a kind of germ warfare against American Indians.
Even abolitionists like Horace Greeley, who has a school named after him in Chappaqua, New York, the home of the Clintons, was an unabashed racist. He called black people an “easy, worthless race, taking no thought for the morrow.” That doesn’t make for a very nice school motto. How about Peter Stuyvesant whose name and visage bubble up all over Gotham? That guy hated Jews more than Bill de Blasio does. He didn’t even want to allow them in New York City.
Speaking of New York City, that very name is problematic. It is dubbed for the Duke of York, later James II of England and James VII of Scotland, who made giant bags of money selling human beings. And John Jay, who has a criminal justice college named after him, was a slaveholder. And we wonder why police are so terrible and racist…
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