Dartblog

Reporting on back-to-back days of fantastic learning opportunities at Dartmouth, Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School, spoke today about interracial marriage and American politics, race relations, and history across the 3 separate events I was able to attend. Professor Kennedy’s primary lecture topic was ‘Good White People,’ about those white folks who have conspicuously fought for racial justice, despite having no ‘personal’ stake in the struggle. Thaddeus Stevens ’14 (that is, the Dartmouth class of 1814) was held up as the archetypal ‘GWP.’

Stevens pressed President Abraham Lincoln to advance the anti-slavery rationale for the Civil War, in addition to the pro-Union. Among other achievements, Professor Kennedy cited Stevens’s role in the Emancipation Proclamation, enlistment of black soldiers, anti-fugitive slave laws, Reconstruction Act, and reconstruction amendments. Perhaps more controversially Stevens also championed the confiscation and redistribution of secessionist land to poor whites and former slaves.

On the topics of enlistment of black soldiers Stevens said, “I do not expect to live to see the day when, in this Christian land, merit shall counterbalance the crime of color. True, we propose to give them an equal chance to meet death on the battle-field. But even then their great achievements, if equal to those of Dessalines, would give them no hope of honor. The only place where they can find equality is in the grave. There all God’s children are equal.”

Professor Kennedy’s interest in this topic is the question of “How?” How, and why, did Stevens become so egalitarian, such a friend of blacks and other oppressed groups. “To be egalitarian in this setting was really quite striking,” Kennedy noted, pointing to the failures of even America’s greatest men in this respect. On Thomas Jefferson, for example, people argue that he was ‘caught up in times’ but there are not monuments to the people of the same age that made a different, and unequivocally better choice.

It is this manner of (intellectual and cultural) monument that Kennedy seeks to create for the oft forgotten heroes of empathy and equality. Champions of cosmopolitan empathy he calls then, those people who, despite not being personally menaced, reach their hands across a social divide and link with others who are directly hurt. In short Kennedy’s talk(s) were an intellectual treat, a testament to the time-honored and essential tradition of bringing the best minds to the Dartmouth campus to further the end of undergraduate education.