As always, feel free to share this weekly collection of links. A link does not imply agreement or endorsement by the Council of Independent Colleges. We’ll be on break for a few weeks until August 8.
- Jess Turner, “Saving Sapelo Island’s Legacy from Sinking,” The Xylom (July 16, 2022): LINK. Discusses “plantation slavery[’s] long-lasting impact on both people and land,” with a focus on one coastal community in Georgia.
- Cristian Arguetasoto, “TCU to research its history with racism, slavery and the Confederacy,” TCU 360 (July 15, 2022): LINK. Efforts to reckon with the legacy of slavery at CIC member institution Texas Christian University.
- Brooke Leigh Howard, “Terrorist or Revolutionary? The Rebel Still Dividing Charleston,” The Daily Beast (July 13, 2022): LINK. “Two hundred years ago, Denmark Vesey—an enslaved Black man who bought his freedom—organized an armed revolt that was ultimately thwarted. His legacy has been debated ever since.”
- Gillian Brockell, “Capitol statue collection gets first Black American, replacing Confederate,” Washington Post (July 13, 2022): LINK. Slaveholding rebel soldier Edmund Kirby Smith is replaced by educator Mary McLeod Bethune as Florida’s representative in Statuary Hall. (Bethune founded the CIC member institution now called Bethune-Cookman University.)
- Jacquelyne Germain, “The fight for reparations has stalled in Congress. Here’s what they look like in state and local governments,” CNN (July 13, 2022): LINK.
- “The REPAIR Project: A Prospectus for Change Toward Racial Justice in Medical Education and Health Sciences Research,” Academic Medicine (July 11, 2022): LINK. “The theme of medical reparations builds on the longstanding call for slavery reparations and the paying of debts owed to Black Americans for the harms of slavery. The REPAIR Project [at UC San Francisco] focuses on the specific debts owed to Black Americans for racial harm in health care settings.”
- Graeme Wood, “Just Say ‘Slavery,’” The Atlantic (July 11, 2022): LINK. A spirited protest against “misguided euphemisms,” including “involuntary relocation” and “enslaved persons.”
- Alex von Tunzelmann, “Southern Comforter,” Literary Review (July 2022): LINK. A review of Sarah Churchwell, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells, which argues that the novel and movie remain “a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself.”
- Palma Joy Strand and Nicholas A. Mirkay, “Interest Convergence and the Racial Wealth Gap: Defusing Racism’s Divide-and-Conquer via Universal Basic Income,” Kentucky Law Journal (forthcoming): LINK to preprint. The authors provide an overview of the racial wealth gap in America—“[it] is strong, it is stubborn, and it is structural”—and suggest a potential solution in Universal Basic Income.