Thank you for your intellectual sanity.
@Ohiodad51 Calhoun’s place in history is assured.
In the meantime, in light of how very important and instrumental Yale’s residential college house system is to student identity while at Yale it is clearly offensive, demeaning, de-humanizing, and downright inhumane to subject black students to bear the name of Calhoun while at Yale… live at Calhoun College become a house “Hounie”, wear Calhoun rah rah T-shirts and possibly become Calhoun fellows in light of his over the top and lead our country into civil war so blacks could be enslaved ideology.
We are talking here about Yale and specifically Yale’s Calhoun college name. Let’s not try an cloak this in hypotheticals.
His name on this residential building at Yale has to go. Your justifications are moot.
And yet, nobody is willing to use that same logic to rename Yale itself, named after a slave trader. Yes, some people have said that people don’t associate the Yale name primarily with slavery, but that is circular logic. The name Calhoun obviously wasn’t associated first and foremost with slavery when the college was named.
“If newly published history books no longer mention Calhoun, it will still be possible to successfully research him for anyone interested. Erasing history is different than interpreting history. imho.”
Whoa. Why would newly published history books no longer mention Calhoun?
The civil war was about slavery…
The argument that the civil war was about something else is revisionist history.
I completely agree, dstark.
Post #564 is the reason why many SJWs should not be allowed to teach history because they focus on what they want, thus making students ignorant, perhaps deliberately, to everything else that was part of the slavery issue.
Worse, students are often taught to focus on the wrong things, as to overriding importance. I can tell you one thing, even if people think controversial - it was was much more important to fully establish the United States of America and keep slavery for a few years after the passage of the Constitution (Constitution set up process of abolishment for 1803) than to never have the States come to together in the first place because no compromise was made on slavery. This is a hard fact of history for many to swallow, but it is an undeniable fact that allows the US to be here as a country today.
Too many are imposing their concept of immediate gratification and expectations onto government processes and “big ships,” as if these entities function like their own lives.
Specifically, it is an unrealistic concept that in a developing country with a new government structure for everything to be immediately set up as people would ultimately like/want. Try merging two companies and see how that works even among only a few thousand people and two governing structures - it takes sometime 5 years to get systems the way one wants - and sometimes the merger on such a small scale never comes together properly. Now try that with millions of people, multiple state governments, thousands of town councils - all functioning with a healthy distrust of government itself, given the experience of a tyrannical England. Difficult is an understatement here.
It took a while, but we (the US) got most of it correct. And this idea some, if not many, instrumental people did not get it correct fast enough or upset because there were instrumental people who supported institutions we do not accept today is looking at history too jaded and not understanding the big picture and what it took to get here circa 2016.
I think you are working from an outdated narrative. There is actually a slave museum in Medford, Mass (maybe a half a mile from Tufts). It has been around for awhile, but it has recently drawn more attention because it is the property of the slave owner who gave the large gift to Harvard’s law school. This link fueled the recent controversy over changing Harvard’s seal and it is all happening within a few miles of Harvard, many, many miles from the Mason Dixon line. I am a pretty old geezer, but I was lucky enough to be exposed to this museum many years ago and it changed my worldview from the one you describe to “wealthy/elitest= more likely to be slave holder” somewhat independent of geography. The correlation with geography is explained by the fact that slavery tended to be tied to agriculture more than industry. In this narrative, slavery starts in the North, but then shifts southward as it is displaced by the industrial revolution in the north. The primary port for the slave trade was Rhode Island, and money from the slave trade funded
Brown University. They did a pretty good job of coming to grips with this fact and documented their history.
Here is the website for the museum, it has lots of interesting information.
You can’t fight every battle at once. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
That’s how some of us feel about fighting the renaming battle versus other ills befalling the black community.
That’s not what my kids were taught at a highly-ranked public HS in the Golden State…(they were taught that slavery was “only part of it…”)
That’s a shame.
So which of those battles are you fighting? Do you have skin in the game or are you just an armchair critic?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/slavery-made-america/373288/
At the end of the essay is a bibliography.
Why don’t we teach this history from the point of view of those enslaved?
Accidentally posted this on the wrong thread. Am surprised it hasn’t been posted here. http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2016/07/07/calhoun-to-rename-dining-hall-after-thompson/
Ah I see you saw my post I accidentally posted in the “fallacies” thread about 20 minutes ago, @marvin100 . It was obviously intended for this thread. I wondered where it went, LOL. Oops.
A logical, cold-hearted, Social Darwinist who was trained by one of Yale’s elitest eugenics professors would have no problem shutting Yale down, never mind just renaming it. They would also think that anybody who was concerned about the feelings of the Yale community was just being an oversensitive SJW.
As far as me personally, I have this really bad habit of trying to understand things before I formulate my opinions.
This is the part I don’t understand either. When your entire institution is named after a slave trader, you’re in sort of a bad position to start with. You could name the place “David Duke University”, and it would be a step in the right direction - Duke is a scumbag, but as far as I know he never bought or sold anybody.
When someone writes something like Professor Jacobsen wrote above, I wonder: “Is he just not that bright, or is he simply hoping those that read it are not that bright?”
The entire premise is faulty, because no college would be named for Goebbels in the first place. Is he just hoping we wouldn’t notice this defect in his argument?
To recap, Calhoun College was named after someone whose history was known, and whose considerable achievements were considered to have overshadowed his flaws. Those achievements include strengthening the defense of the country, serving as Vice President under two administrations, Secretary of State, and being “one of the five greatest senators of all time.”