Saturday, June 27, 2020

Follow-Up: "Princeton Dumps Woodrow Wilson’s Name Over ‘Racist Thinking’"

Following up on last Sunday's International Affairs: "Panopticons and Chokepoints":
Woodrow Wilson was a racist.
So, I've been wondering if I should link to anything from The Wilson Quarterly.
But this piece is pretty good, mores and morals are flexible and, as the saying goes: "If it wasn't for double standards he'd have no standards at all", so this time I will. Next time, who knows?
Woke me up before you go-go.....
From Bloomberg via Yahoo:
Princeton University is removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school and one of its residential colleges after trustees concluded that the 28th U.S. president’s “racist thinking and policies” made him “an inappropriate namesake.”

The Ivy League school’s trustees made the decision Friday, according to a statement released on Saturday.

It comes at a time of widespread rethinking of America’s racial legacy. The Black Lives Matter movement, energized by a series of high-profile deaths of Black Americans, have resulted in the removal of Confederate monuments, flags, and symbols of racism across the U.S.
Deleting Wilson’s name at Princeton may be the most high-profile act to date. The policy school will now be known as “The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.” Wilson was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 and, as a Democrat, served as governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election.

“Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential, even by the standards of his own time,” Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber said in the statement.

Civil Service
“He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice,” he added. “He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today.”
Chartered in 1746, Princeton is the fourth-oldest college in the U.S. and has been led by only 20 presidents, dating back to Colonial times. It is among the richest colleges.

As one of America’s oldest universities, Princeton has a fraught history with race and gender. It admitted its first black undergraduates in 1945, decades after other Ivy League schools. It didn’t accept women as undergrads until 1969 -- and even then, did so over opposition from some alumni.
The university had discussed removing Wilson’s name before, following student protests at the New Jersey school in November 2015. A committee that studied Wilson’s legacy at Princeton decided to retain the name....
....MUCH MORE

Next up, racist Franklin Roosevelt with the turning-away of a ship full of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany resulting in the deaths of hundreds in the death camps. And Roosevelt's roundup and incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent. And his exclusion of American Blacks from New Deal relief programs.
And then there is Roosevelt's last vice-President, Harry Truman, who, despite the desegregation of the armed forces on his watch was personally a hardcore Missouri racist.

And then there are all the buildings named for KKK member Robert Byrd of West Virginia (via Wikipedia):
And of course Elihu Yale, all those degrees will have to be cancelled and re-written as New Haven University.
And, well, let's just say I have a naughty or nice list and there are a lot of names on it.
Ho, ho, ho.