"You can't take any of it with you."

That’s what I keep telling my mom about my dad’s stuff and all of hers. “It’s just stuff, I don’t need or want any of it,” I’ll say.

“But it’s my stuff,” she’ll respond in anger at my between-the-lines dismissal of her assets, and therefore, her life of hard work spent accumulating and caring about them. 

The single biggest asset my dad left behind was his home, where my mom will likely continue to live until her death. It’s a great house, technically made of brick, but not my home and never will be again. Going through his things, it feels like the items with the most real financial worth often have the least actual value to me, which is exactly the way I want it. I want the broken-down 2003 Impala because of the possibility. I want his 2008 pickup truck out of reverence, nostalgia, and utility—almost nothing else.

Every item provokes profound but ultimately useless questions.

Will we ever build the lake house he wanted? What are we supposed to do with his fishing rods? Does it even matter what he would have wanted? His body has been incinerated. What will I leave behind for my daughter? Is “leaving things behind” something I’m even concerned with? Isn’t what I leave to the rest of humanity more important than worldly assets left for the sole benefit of one child? Why am I so fixated on the fact that the only thing I really care about is my dad’s pickup truck?

My dad isn’t someone I think of as a bad person, which is another way of saying his money didn’t feel especially ill-gotten to me—at least not any more unethical than the rest of capitalism. He worked, he went without, he saved, he invested. And he left behind a somewhat considerable financial life, especially for a person with no durable college education. Property investments, vehicles, homes, cash assets, and annuities—mostly accumulated passively through the natural course of a solidly responsible middle-class life built on the general and mostly forgettable acts of work and enabled by taking advantage of every tax loophole and long-term investment opportunity he could find.

My dad wasn’t a person who needed or wanted a lot.

On a given day, the most extravagant thing about him was that he wasn’t shy about spending money to make sure he always had the perfect jacket to match the exact weather.

He labored, always tending to his house and largely keeping to himself. I’ve often wondered if my parents had lived in the 19th century if they and many of their upper-middle-class white neighbors would have been enslavers—not prolific, but participant racists. My response to the thought experiment isn’t definitively no, which says everything for now.

Most days, my mom says she’s willing her house to my daughter. On especially bad days, ones where she’s filled with enough trauma-fueled venom toward me to say something like, “It won’t go to you, you’ll see when I die,” she’s responding to a question she alone has asked. I genuinely believe she pictures us all huddled around her kitchen table after she dies, opening an Academy Awards-style envelope to see who gets her house—perhaps not noticing we’ve all built real homes of our own and nobody wants hers.

Her house is among the many “things” that she thinks other people are after. When I think of her in the worst way I know how to, I believe she’s a willing participant in the torture of stuff and methodically fantasizes about willing this item or that item upon her death on one of the lists she keeps—most of which I’ve been told I’m not on—each full of people she will try to continue to control via the punishment of ongoing responsibility and turmoil or diamond-studded treats for past good behavior, legally awarded at the time of her death.

She’s a planner, always has been.

And that’s what makes me think about Dr. William Jewell. He too must have been an incredible planner. We’re still talking about him, aren’t we? Since my dad died, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what it would be like to settle an enslaver’s estate. Because that’s all William Jewell College really is when you think about it—it’s one man’s living will for there to be a college in his name, in perpetuity.

Calling it an “institution” gives it too much implied value that it doesn’t actually hold. It’s a will that enrolled employees in a retirement plan. It’s an estate that also collects student loans. It’s a charitable trust invested separately in oil and natural gas. It’s a financial exigency in its own right. And upon his death, he willed enslaved people as casually as my mom wills her house.

If you perform a basic Google search on the founders of William Jewell College, you can plainly see undeniable historic documents that clearly show Dr. William Jewell forcibly enslaved at least seven people over the course of his lifetime:

Ellen
Emanuel
Henry
Mandy

Phillis

 Ralph

 Stephen

These names are self-evident proof that William Jewell College is a present-day monument to human enslavement, little else. And there’s no path to institutional redemption or minimization when you take into account additional acts of indecency etched into the bedrock of the “College on The Hill” and the ideas held by a majority of its founders:

William Jewell is an enslaver’s college. It was Dr. William Jewell’s life’s work that William Jewell College would continue on as a whites-only Baptist school in Liberty, Missouri—perpetually, they believed—thanks to gifts of land from Jewell himself and other prominent Clay County enslavers like Alexander Doniphan and James “T.V.” Thompson.

What did he truly want his legacy to be at the time of his death in 1852? How did he think he’d be remembered? Did he die with hatred in his heart toward Black Americans? Did he even see them as human? What actions did the early leaders of the college take to ensure that William Jewell would remain a segregationist institution until it could no longer fight the social context of the Civil Rights Movement? What actions did college leadership take throughout the life of the college to ensure that the “reluctant slave-holder with a heart of gold” narrative would be believed by history? Most importantly—why would you continue to honor this man as the namesake of a college where you’re trying to recruit Black students at an unprecedented rate?

Beyond the land, William Jewell College is a struggling idea. The current idea being pursued is for “the critical thinking college” to serve as a modern-day white supremacist finishing school where, for around $32,000 annually, an almost exclusively white faculty teaches students what it means to live a meaningful and good life and embrace polite racism, 2025-Liberty-edition.

How can such an institution ever come to grips with the sheer amount of ill-gotten land wealth it holds? Is there any way that sort of origin story doesn’t fully compromise the soul of the institution? Because I submit that no matter how many investment accounts or annuities you attempt to fence these ill-gotten spoils through, or how many times you try to rebrand or reinvent what it is… William Jewell College will always have the blood of slavery on its balance sheet.

It’s not an institution worth saving, simply because the estate and ideas of Dr. William Jewell are no longer worth preserving. The only people interested in continuing William Jewell’s colonial project are the racist white Baptist profiteers currently at the head of Jewell’s leadership cabinet and Board of Trustees. And the only way for them to act ethically today would be to shut it down and return all land resources to a land trust controlled by the residents of Clay County, specifically to the ancestors of enslaved people held by the founders of William Jewell College from 1849-1865.