Dear all,
As a white young scholar, let me add what I take it 'it might be good for white people to keep silent' means. It simply means 'listen'. Talking without listening is empty. (And, I might add, a poor kind of freedom of speech.) Systematically talking without listening to groups of people is harmful.
Excited to see that most people, and many white people, have endorsed the invitation to do exactly that.
Best wishes, Marina
>-------- Оригинално писмо --------
>От: Stefan Kolev [log in to unmask]
>Относно: Re: [SHOE] HES executive committee statement against systematic racism
>До: [log in to unmask]
>Изпратено на: 10.07.2020 22:25
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Dear colleagues,
while I do not mind our Executive Committee's statement, and while I do not agree with every word in Steve's email (especially "culture war"), some of the reactions to his note struck me as disconcerting. The statement of Dr. Kılınçoğlu that "[i]t may be the time for the white people to keep silent" felt particularly unsettling: Making
anyone "keep silent" appears to me to be the very opposite of what we need in the HES and in our community - regardless of how heated the times may be which we are living through. So let me thank Steve for the openness in expressing his position, whether you agree with him or not.
Best regards,
Stefan Kolev
---
Prof. Dr. Stefan Kolev
Professor of Political Economy, University of Applied Sciences Zwickau
Deputy Director, Wilhelm Röpke Institute Erfurt
Advisory Board Member, Alliance for the Social Market Economy ASM
Research Fellow, Hamburg Institute of International Economics HWWI
http://www.hwwi.org/ueber-uns/team/autor/stefan-kolev.html
Von: Societies for the History of Economics im Auftrag von Stephen Meardon
Gesendet: Freitag, 10. Juli 2020 05:20
An: [log in to unmask]
Betreff: Re: [SHOE] HES executive committee statement against systematic racism
I am sure the HES Executive Committee makes this statement with no
intention of taking a side in the US culture war.
But that is what it
does.
And it does no good for the HES.
People have been killed in the custody of US police, some of them
egregiously.
What the killings signify in some cases is not largely
contested.
In others it is.
What they signify on the whole is
contested very much.
Systemic racism?
One can make an argument.
I can see it.
Why is the
History of Economics Society, whose mission is to advance inquiry into
the named subject, advancing this extraneous and contested argument?
We have a good thing going in our society.
An uncommon thing. Scholars
with different ideological, methodological, and other convictions
communicate openly, learn from one another, and take pleasure in each
other's company and conversation despite their disagreements. Indeed
because of them.
It works because the HES does not suffer from the we-
all-agree syndrome that plagues other scholarly societies and US
academia at large.
Which happens in good part because the HES sticks
to its mission.
You and I just might have an interesting conversation about systemic
racism in the United States -- why you think it is the salient problem,
why I think not.
The kind of conversation that has been commonplace in
HES coffee breaks and serendipitous hallway encounters for the couple
decades and more that I've been involved.
That conversation will be
less common after the HES has decided which of us is right.
Try
thinking how frequently and freely you've heard such a conversation on
any US university campus of late.
The scope of permissible conversation in US academic life is narrowing.
If there is a salient social problem in the United States that relates
to the mission of the HES, that's it.
The HES has been an academic oasis where the range of values and scope
of conversation is great.
I hope the HES Exec. will take care in the
future to preserve it.
Stephen Meardon
Bowdoin College
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