Ours is a nation that continues to refuse to face its own history of slavery and racism. Peter Salovey, President and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, Yale University, 27 April 2016

For President Salovey’s statement to be true, here’s a truncated list of events from U.S. history that must be both inconsequential and insincerely motivated.

— Abolition Movement

— The Civil War

— 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, 24^th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

— Brown v. Board of Education

— Civil Rights Movement

— Civil Rights & Voting Rights legislation of the 1960s, and its subsequent implementation.

— 50 years of EEO and anti-discrimination departments and complaint systems, diversity programs, race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion protocols that reach every element of the Federal government, state and local government, virtually every economic, educational, and cultural institution in the nation (including Yale University).

— More than $22 Trillion spent on Great Society poverty programs since the mid-60s, much of it purposefully targeting disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities.

If all this—only a partial list—constitutes “refusal to face” our past, what exactly is it that will constitute a fulsome embrace of it? What is it, one wonders, that would demonstrate a willingness to confront that past?

Of course, Dr. Salovey is perfectly aware of U.S. history including its historically unprecedented efforts to confront, change, and compensate for past violent, racist oppression of African-Americans. In 2016 a dwindling few senior citizens are alive who can reasonably be said to have participated in and sustained America’s official apartheid system. These people are, almost without exception, identified with the Democrat political party.

That’s the Party which organized and enforced apartheid. Yet it continues to exist, and continues to run candidates for office. Is this the “refusal to face our history” to which Dr. Salovey refers? Hardly. He himself refuses, for instance, to rename Yale’s Calhoun College, which celebrates the Democrat whose defense of race-based slavery earned him the honor of his visage adorning Confederate States’ currency and postage stamps.

Dr. Salovey drowns out these inconvenient truths with absurd and slanderous rhetoric. His propaganda panders to ignoramuses, which isn’t becoming for a college President, let alone one bearing Yale’s intellectual prominence. One presumes he panders in order to misdirect others and to avoid confrontation. Sadly, he’s probably right that he can buy peace with rhetoric.

Yet he could—and should, given his views on the subject—demonstrate with concrete action that he has overcome the inertia he claims has engulfed the nation regarding race and slavery. How about Dr. Salovey hands over the reins of Yale University to a slave descendant? Not in a decade when he reaches retirement, but right now. Let him resign and demonstrate his commitment to “facing” our past by installing a slave descendant in his place.

Dr. Salovey can return to his tenured teaching position—not exactly a huge sacrifice, is it? That’s certainly not the same as subjecting himself to Confederate sharpshooters while marching through Georgia with Sherman’s army, freeing slaves at every plantation he encounters, is it?

In the end, Dr. Salovey is the one “refusing” to do something . . . something that actually impacts him.