John C. Calhoun at Yale
Part of the problem with Yale’s position in the Calhoun College controversy is the assumption that John C. Calhoun’s sins are exhausted by the institution of slavery, that his crimes belong to the first half of the 19th century.
Yale President Peter Salovey’s recent email message about this controversy, in which he affirms Yale’s decision to keep the name “Calhoun College,” constantly invokes the terms “slavery”, “history,” “reminder,” and “past.”
Calhoun’s real contribution to the canon of American evil, however, is not as a defender of slavery but as a theorist of white supremacy. His was less the voice of a dying institution than a vision of the future that was only just being born.
Nearly a century before DuBois coined the notion of the “psychological wage,” Calhoun envisioned racism as a way of cleaving the American polity in two, of eliding the divisions of class by emphasizing the divisions of race, of folding class into race:
With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.
To hear in this statement a voice of the past is to miss all the ways in which Calhoun was part of a theoretical avant-garde, whose labors would come to fruition only after slavery was abolished and would persist into our own time as well.