WASHINGTON, D.C. Nov. 23 (DPI) – The latest campus row – this time over the use of Woodrow Wilson’s name at Princeton – set off a now-familiar online stream of criticism, with more and more readers saying the “or else” tactics of the protesters will only backfire – and worsen race relations. A NY Times report on the Princeton protests – in which a group of about 20 students are staging a sit-in until the school removes the 28th president’s name from a building – spurred thousands of reader comments, nearly all sympathetic to genuine victims of racism but most seeing the protesters’ demands as unreasonable, unrealistic, and even anti-democratic.
“Where does this end?” asked one poster. “FDR interned the Japanese during WWII, and Kennedy was a philanderer. Why not erase their names was every building?”
Another asked: “Why are we digging up the past and judging it by the societal norms that we live with today? It makes no sense to me. These is a large strand of the young Democrat ideal that is worryingly draconian and intolerant of other views.” Among the most popular today:
When is Franklin Roosevelt going to be purged from the national archives for sending Japanese Americans to internment camps? When is Harry Truman going to be ostracized for using the H bomb to end the war with Japan? What about Dwight Eisenhower and Operation Wetback which deported tens of thousands of illegal aliens back to Mexico. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. Are you going to take their names off the Washington Monument and tear down the Jefferson Memorial? Political correctness today fails to recognize the racial discrimination that was accepted as the norm in the past. Stop this ridiculous trend now or it will cause a reactionary wave and really tear us apart.
I am sympathetic with these students. I remember as a student myself recoiling the first time I watched Birth of a Nation in which Wilson, who showed the movie in the White House, is interviewed at the end, chuckling and approving of the movie. But as a historian, I have to say the way to deal with racism is not to “disappear” people from our past. We wouldn’t have much past left if we eliminated from our history and the halls of our universities all the Wilsons and Jeffersons and Jacksons or even FDR, who interned American citizens during the war. Racism is woven into the fabric of our past. We cannot understand who we are as a people if we do not from where we came.
The students protesting are the privileged of the privileged. Instead of taking advantage of their opportunities, they are looking for excuses for not succeeding. One Princeton student whined that Wilson didn’t build the university for her. News flash: they didn’t build it for most people: Catholics, Italians, poor, … Removing Wilson’s name from a building or forcing students and faculty in re-education programs reminiscent of the purges in Asia will only make the school a worse place for learning.
Even as a fairly liberal person I am getting pretty sick and tired of these illiberal and intolerant student social justice warriors and their idiotic protests. Why are we digging up the past and judging it by the societal norms that we live with today? It makes no sense to me. These is a large strand of the young Democrat ideal that is worryingly draconian and intolerant of other views. Let us hope they grow out of it – or we may need a – safe space – from them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/23/nyregion/at-princeton-addressing-a-racist-legacy-and-seeking-to-remove-woodrow-wilsons-name.html
Some of the most interesting exchanges were found on the Daily Princetonian’s site: