Monday, September 18, 2017

School Name Audit Steps on Toes in Right Direction


Last week we pondered the city's removal of a Robert E.Lee statue from a park in a predominantly white neighborhood in Dallas, Texas.

Now comes word that the board for the Dallas public school system has drafted a list of schools named after historic notables connected in some way with the Confederacy specifically, or slavery in general.  The schools on this list may soon get new names, if the district can agree on how to process the logistics for doing so.

Four elementary schools will be renamed as soon as possible, since they're currently named for Confederacy generals Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and William L. Cabell.

An additional twenty schools are on another list being audited for future name changes by the school board, but curiously, no major local media outlets have published that list.  It took a Facebook post by a white board member, Dustin Marshall, to get that listing circulating within the public.  And those schools are these:

1. Roger Q. Mills Elementary School
2. W. H. Gaston Middle School
3. Wilmer-Hutchins High School
4. James Bowie Elementary School
5. James S. Hogg Elementary School
6. John F. Peeler Elementary School
7. John H. Reagan Elementary School
8. Wilmer-Hutchins Elementary School
9. James Madison High School
10. Benjamin Franklin Middle School
11. Thomas Jefferson High School
12. David G. Burnet Elementary School
13. Stephen C. Foster Elementary School
14. Nancy J. Cochran Elementary School
15. Sam Houston Elementary School
16. Sidney Lanier Elementary School
17. John Ireland Elementary School
18. Kleberg Elementary School
19. William B. Travis Elementary/Middle School
20. William Brown Miller Elementary School

Of course, some of these people are relatively obscure by today's historical standards.  Have you ever heard of Roger Mills, for example?  Turns out, Mills was a Kentucky-born lawyer who served as an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and then, later, as a Texas senator to Washington, after apparently deciding that serving the Union was a worthwhile endeavor after all.

Some of these notables are more familiar to Texans than they are folks in other parts of the United States.  James Bowie, for instance, was a legendary revolutionary for the Republic of Texas, along with William B. Travis, both of whom later died at the Alamo.  Bowie is famous as the inventor of the Bowie knife, and was briefly a citizen of Mexico, but for a while, he also worked as a slave trader.

Nancy J. Cochran is reputed to have been a proud mother of Confederate soldiers.  Sam Houston defeated Mexico to secure independence for the republic of Texas, and later served as a senator after Texas became a state.  He was pro-slavery but also pro-Union, and refused to serve in the Confederacy.

We could go on and on about who these people were as individuals, but what makes them all the same in the eyes of many Dallas school board members is their affiliation in some form or fashion with slavery or the Confederacy.  That's why Benjamin Franklin is on this list.  For most of his life, Franklin owned slaves and believed blacks were inferior to whites.  However, later in his life, Franklin became an abolitionist.  In 1790, he petitioned Congress to legally end slavery and "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

So, if anything, Franklin represents the hope that people can change for the better.  And perhaps this significant turn in Franklin's personal perspective will eventually cause the Dallas school board to keep his name attached to one of their schools.

Indeed, it is the often-complex backstory behind many of these historical figures that contributes to the controversy around such calls for culling the national historic roster of American notables.  Which, basically, is what Dallas' school leaders - along with similar governing bodies across the country - are doing with these re-naming exercises.  For centuries, leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been venerated for the overwhelming balance of their contributions to America's founding, even at the expense of their support (to various degrees) of slavery.  Yet now, political correctness has limited the only publicly respectable scope for viewing these personages as being the lens through which their acceptance of slavery is evaluated.

On the one hand, it seems frustrating to some white Americans - even ludicrous to other whites - that the sum total of America's history and the leaders we venerate should be reduced to their perspective(s) on slavery.  Isn't there more by which we should value a person, many ask?  If we're all to be judged by our sins alone, who among us would have any credibility?

And those are fair questions, regardless of our skin color, aren't they?  Especially considering that in America, slavery existed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, and that racism and bigotry have existed even without the presence of institutionalized slavery.  So, utilizing slavery as a metric for determining heroic validity immediately culls the herd quite a bit.

Which, for many politically-correct folks, would be the price we pay for finally admitting once and for all that the ownership of human beings was and remains patently wrong.  Period.

It's a jarring rationale for many whites.  For centuries, Americans have taught its schoolchildren that, sure, slavery may have been kinda bad, but that even though some "good" people didn't get the slavery issue entirely right, their contributions to our country's history mitigate that slavery thing.  After all, it was so long ago.  It was a different time and a different place.  Yadda, yadda, yadda...

Can't you see how, with a predominantly white-centric view towards exonerating national heroes, with an "ends justify the means" mentality, we also risk minimizing something that our black brothers and sisters still find eminently reprehensible?

And that whites should as well?

After all, were there white slaves in the United States?  (And no, the myths about "Irish slaves" don't count, since even though some Irish immigrants were considered chattel, they were not re-sold, they were eligible for freedom after their repayment of any debts, and whatever indentured servitude they endured was not conferred to their spouses or children.)

Couldn't a white willingness to ignore or dismiss the ownership, by other long-dead whites, of black human beings be kind of offensive to many modern blacks?  After all, how many blacks can ignore however much history of slavery exists in their personal families?  Remember, even though slavery affects both whites and blacks, there was only one race that clearly benefited from slavery.  It's convenient for whites to minimize that, and to see little problem with letting bygones by bygones, burying the hatchet, and moving on in harmony.

After all, it was those old, long-ago, dead people who owned slaves.  I don't own slaves, and I think slavery was and is wrong.

So what's wrong with proving our resolve against slavery by taking a harder line against honoring figures in our history who didn't take as hard line against it as we like to think we do today?

Not that we can erase history by changing the names of some schools, or removing some monuments.  And frankly, not every school name should be changed, or every monument removed, since each of these names in question represents a human being whose views towards slavery, during the course of their life, could have evolved from one end of the spectrum to the other, such as with Benjamin Franklin.

Some whites protest that there are too many names to change, and these names are too prominent.  Which, actually, serves to illustrate the argument for why these names may need to change.  Slavery was so widespread, and so integral a part of the American reality, that our lip service today can ring hollow when it comes to disavowing slavery.

Hey, let's face it:  Whites tend to enjoy going through life with slavery being an issue that impacts somebody else from another time.  We tend to forget that blacks generally don't go through life with the same perspective, at least as far as history is concerned.  And for those blacks who don't let America's history with slavery define their own individuality, we witness an enormous generosity of spirit on their part.

So why not return the favor?


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