Symposium explores white supremacy and abolitionism

The Africana Studies and Research Center will host a symposium, “Strange Bedfellows: White Supremacy and Abolitionism,” Friday, Feb. 13, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Hoyt Fuller Room of the center, 310 Triphammer Road. It is free and open to the public.

The symposium is the result of correspondence alumnus Dan Sleasman, J.D. ’71, had with Cornell officials last year when he expressed concern that a plaque dedicated to Louis Agassiz adorned the Sage Chapel crypt. Agassiz, who was a Harvard professor and early visiting faculty member at Cornell, was a respected Swiss-born zoologist and paleontologist, but also a proponent of polygenetics or scientific racism.

Sleasman’s correspondence has provided the opportunity for a “teachable moment” on campus.

The result is Friday’s event, which will include three papers written by freshmen in Professor Margaret Washington’s fall writing seminar “Conceived in Liberty: The Coming of the Civil War and Black Emancipation.” Washington and Gerard Aching, professor of Africana and Romance studies and director of the Africana Studies and Research Center, also will speak at the symposium.

Washington’s seminar focused on events surrounding the Civil War and emancipation, she said, and included topics on anti-slavery, pro-slavery, race economics, geopolitics, social and cultural issues.

“Frankly, it stunned me, knowing the anti-Darwinian polygenetic arguments on race which Agassiz put forth in the antebellum era, and also knowing of the university’s close relationship with abolitionism,” Washington said of the tribute to Agassiz in Sage Chapel.

“One of the most interesting things I discovered in my research was Agassiz’s daguerreotypes of slaves,” said Esha Halabe ’18, one of the students who will present his research Friday. “He visited South Carolina plantations and photographed slaves, largely naked, in order to analyze the physical differences between European whites and African blacks. He used his findings as 'evidence' to support his theory of polygenism.”

Adam Gleisner ’18 said he chose to write a paper about Agassiz to determine what impact his ideas had on scientists of his day.

“Interestingly, I discovered that his effect was limited to a very specific subset of people, as the vast majority of American scientists chose to go along with Darwin’s view on evolution rather than Agassiz’s ‘scientific’ racism,” Gleisner said.

“On one hand, Agassiz was great in his contributions to fossil science and worked with some prominent Cornellians (including Burt Green Wilder and John Comstock) who would go on to have great contributions to Cornell’s natural sciences,” Gleisner said. “On the other hand, he was a bigoted racist who used science as an excuse for hatred.”

The event is co-sponsored by the Africana Studies and Research Center, Department of History, the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines and the American Studies Program.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

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