Partly Cloudy, 64°
Greetings! With the beginning of each new academic year, my slowly-decomposing heart smiles with pride. As we are now entering yet another year of learning and enlightenment here at Brown University, I’d like to take this opportunity to address some rumors that have been circulating for the past 248 years about my means of founding this prestigious university.
Some people have commented that I may have used profits from slave trading to pay for the founding of this university. The argument goes that Brown’s values are flawed because it cannot be as open-minded and progressive as it purports to be if its financial roots lie in the slave trade.
Poppycock!
Even if I had tried to avoid investments tied to the slave trade, it would have been hard to do. I’m not what you people call a “hippie.” I’m content selling rum that was made from molasses, which was in turn made from sugarcane picked by slaves. There are no fewer than two degrees of separation between slavery and myself. It is tantamount to how Hitler didn’t personally kill people — wait, no, that came out wrong.
Do you really think John Harvard didn’t dabble a little in human trafficking as well? What about Elihu Yale? That’s a white supremacist name if I ever heard one. As for me, historians say I would be a liberal if I had been born in your times, so I don’t know why your knickers are in such a twist. And look who’s accusing whom of backwardness here! I hear you “modern-timers” are still paying women only seventy cents to every dollar paid to men; please don’t try to claim you’ve got ALL of your moral ducks in a row. (Not that I understand why you’re hiring women in the first place.)
Think about how many things you own that come from China. Not only do they not pay their employees a living wage, but they’re also communists. Isn’t that worse?
Really, some of my best friends were slaves. Slaves weren’t just property; they were human property. How dare you compare a slave to a plow? Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t have slept with a plow.
My point is, it’s not as if I had a separate bank account for my slave profits. When it came to founding a university, I sat down with my ballpoint eagle feather and wrote the cheque. I didn’t have this newfangled Quicken gizmo to characterize all my assets. Regardless of where the money came from, isn’t it worth it that I created a center of learning and innovation where young people could grow and learn how to face life’s obstacles? Obstacles like how to turn a profit in the slave trade or how to convince people you didn’t use said slave money to found an institution of higher learning. Just one entirely theoretical example.
You know what? Just forget I said anything.
