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Should Calhoun College (christened in honor of pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun) be renamed?
Yale adopts a new approach to decide whether university properties need new names. Some favor a rule of no renaming at all, some are worried about the excessive 'PC'.
On Friday, a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, convened earlier this semester at Yale University, issued its final report. This group was not charged with deciding whether or not to rename Calhoun College, the residential unit christened in 1933 in honor of the influential pro-slavery politician John C. Calhoun, which has been a focus of renewed public controversy in the past year. Instead, the committee produced a framework for any and all future renaming decisions. The Yale Corporation has adopted the principles that the committee put forth, and the university's president, Peter Salovey, has appointed a smaller committee to reconsider the Calhoun case in light of this group's recommendations.
Procedure for Consideration of Renaming Requests
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:34AM
It's not a fucking culture, it's slavery. To say it's a cultural issue is to vastly understate the evils of slavery.
Actually, no -- it WAS a different culture from today. It's not understating it, because there were vast other differences in cultures too. I think it only seems to be an "understatement" if you view "culture" through the modern lens of "multiculturalism," whose primary tenet often seems to be, "We must respect other cultures which may be different from ours."
If you remove that element of assumed "respect," then saying it's part of a different "culture" doesn't minimize it at all... it's a simply statement of fact.
I guess WWII and fighting the Nazi's was about a cultural difference?
Yes, it was. Nazi-era Germany had a different set of cultural standards which would be unacceptable to most people today. But part of the reason they got away with their anti-Semitic policies at the beginning was because most of Europe (and Americans) were somewhat anti-Semitic at the time. Obviously most of these people wouldn't necessary have approved of extermination of Jews, but Hitler's rhetoric was not THAT shocking to many at the time. Why? Because the culture WAS different at that time.
We shouldn't have reviled them killing millions of Jews, because that would have been a cultural judgement on our part?
Yes, and there's the slip in argumentation was a statement of fact -- these WERE different cultures -- to a modern "multiculturalist" assumption of "culture," i.e., we must "respect" anything called a "cultural difference."
Same thing with racism and slavery. Most people tend to forget that even most abolitionists at the time of the Civil War would likely be viewed as holding horribly racist views by today's standards. Many of those who were against slavery still viewed Blacks as an inferior race (and were often quite ambivalent about "equal standing" in society) -- they just didn't think it justified slavery. I'm always rather amused when this fact is rediscovered again and again, particularly by liberal-leaning folks who project their modern views back in time and assume "If you were anti-slavery, you must be like a modern 'liberal' with respect for all races." That was FAR from the case. And many if not most other Northerners at the time of the Civil War were rather ambivalent about slavery, preferring more of a "NIMBY" approach to the issue -- it's okay if the South keeps doing it, just "not in my backyard." And even those who weren't rabid racists against Blacks by today's standards often had very derogatory perspectives on Asians, supported official U.S. policies against Native Americans that basically committed genocide, etc.
I think of this as the To Kill a Mockingbird effect. Most people who read that book apparently assumed Atticus Finch was some nice modern liberal, even though there were clear statements in the original book that he was nothing of the sort. (At a few points in the original book he excuses racism and even tells his son that the KKK was merely "a political organization" that basically just needed a good "talking to" by a neighbor to get 'em to go home. I distinctly remember having a discussion about these moments in my high-school English class where we read the book -- my teacher clearly realized Atticus had a complicated set of political views.) Anyhow, when Harper Lee's other book came out recently, suddenly all these people were up in arms about how "OMG -- Atticus was NOT a racist!" Heck yeah, he was. Like most Southerners of his generation. However, he believed that Blacks still deserved fair protection under the law. That's a sort of nuance most people can't seem to make sense of today, but it was actually a dominant historical position.
Thus, returning to the question at hand, we have to realize that America was positively steeped in a profoundly racist culture in its early days, by today's standards. It was a MAJOR cultural difference -- not a reason to "excuse" actions, but something to keep in mind. If we remove Calhoun's name, do we remove Washington's or Jefferson's or other slave-holding "Founding Fathers"? They were lucky enough to be spared the indignity of having to "choose a side" in the Civil War, unlike later generations, and I think we might be really disappointed in which one of them some of them may have chosen.
And what about the profoundly racist actions of U.S. policy against Native Americans, Asians, etc. even well after slavery was abolished? Shall we tear down every statute named after a U.S. leader who was around and didn't object strongly during the "forced relocation" of Native American and the later "Indian Wars" that often included what would clearly be called massacres, if not outright genocide today?
Well, what we tend to do is acknowledge that "those were different times" and yes, that was a "different culture" that accepted different moral premises, and we thus ignore most of the everyday folks who were involved in supporting what would be summarily decried as "evil actions" today.
None of this is an argument IN FAVOR of keeping Calhoun's name on a building today. Obviously there are lots of arguments to be had on what the policy should be for historical naming, monuments, etc. But if we're going to summarily just start declaring entire segments of history were just "evil" (and thus cannot be understood as part of the predominant assumptions of culture at the time?), we should probably be prepared to tear down a LOT of monuments and rename just about everything.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday December 04 2016, @08:56AM
By the way, just note that I AM aware that Calhoun was also not technically "forced to choose a side" in the Civil War, because he died before it began. My point was that he lived into the era of sectionalism in the U.S. where it became about "choosing sides," and indeed he was one of the main instigators of that sort of rhetoric. If anything, I think THAT might be a stronger historical case for removing his name from a building: his rhetoric was instrumental in setting the U.S. on the course toward a civil war that tore the country apart. Pro-slavery folks were a "dime a dozen" in those days and white supremacy was basically the assumption even among most Northerners... but leaders who essentially spearheaded the initial justification for secession? Calhoun's name was basically at the top of that list. (And even that's a problematic question historically: there were plenty of learned folks in both the North and the South before the Civil War who considered the potential legality of secession.)
In the end though, this is NOT a historical question. It is a modern political one, whether we like it or not.