White America has always been a nation of serial killers.
The hair, scalps, ears, skulls, fingers, toes, skin, genitals, and photographs of its Black and Indigenous victims have been hoarded in private basements and attics, archives, and museums, and passed down like heirlooms of racial violence for centuries. After 175 years, Harvard University finally gave up photos of enslaved people they clung to like necrophiliacs with a fetish for Black death.
News came earlier this week that Harvard has finally stopped fighting to hold onto photographs of Renty and Delia, a father and daughter stripped naked in front of a camera by Louis Agassiz, a 19th-century racist biologist who used their images to peddle his theories of Black inferiority to justify slavery. For 175 years, Harvard treated these photos that were taken to dehumanize and degrade as its property, circulating and republishing them for a fee, even as the university praised itself for studying its own …