Black lives in the United States are surrounded by memorials to people who did not think that black lives mattered. That is a fact of black life in America. That is a fact of black life in American academe.
I have walked past these statues, breathed inside these buildings. Growing up in New York, I would, from time to time, pass the stately statue in Central Park of Dr. J. Marion Sims, who pioneered American gynecology through experimenting — save the anesthesia — on the genitalia of enslaved women writhing in pain. After moving to Manassas, Va., I attended Stonewall Jackson High School and recoiled at being indelibly connected to the famous Confederate general who warred for the slavery he thought God had ordained. While attending graduate school in Philadelphia, I paced by Thomas Jefferson University several times, remembering his other declaration: of “never” finding “that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”
