Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America's Campuses by Lawrence C. Ross

Author:Lawrence C. Ross [Ross, Lawrence C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, Student Life & Student Affairs, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Discrimination
ISBN: 9781466891746
Google: QDMoCgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1466891742
Goodreads: 25900115
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

6

Honoring the Dishonorable

“Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?”

—Marguerite Gardiner

Imagine a world where Jewish college students in the United States had to walk into campus buildings bearing the name of a Nazi who not only advocated for the mass slaughter of Jews, but also participated in their killing. Or perhaps they were taught in a building named after a German who helped pass the Racial Purity Act of 1924, an act that would drive Jews from schools, and place many into institutions where they’d be forcibly sterilized. Or maybe there was a school where Jews and Aryans weren’t allowed to date. And another school where Jewish students were taught history in a building that honored a local Nazi gauleiter.

The world would be rightly repelled.

Now replace “Jew” with “African American,” and you’ve entered the reality of thousands of African American college students throughout the United States. A reality where African American students not only deal with the legacy of white supremacy on a daily basis, but also are told that things can’t change, so just deal with it. And these legacies, these overt manifestations of a white racist past, help create the hostile campus environment of racial microaggressions and stereotypes that plague colleges and universities today.

African Americans are asked to deal with the microaggressions of race, the little reminders of degradation that we’re supposed to simply transcend under the rubric of seeing the bigger picture. Millions of African American elementary and high school students attend schools named after slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and despite the fact that these men owned human beings, we’re taught that you can’t judge their greatness by the standards of today. Their great contribution to the American ideal supposedly transcends their ownership of black students’ ancestors in the system of chattel slavery.

And perhaps that’s true. Perhaps African Americans can’t escape the fact that nation building is messy, full of imperfect people who can’t be judged by modern standards of morality, even though we consistently point toward them as examples of American exceptionalism.

So these are the Founding Fathers, we’ll give them a pass.

But what isn’t justifiable is the fact that millions of African American students also attend schools that glorify the treasonous Confederate slaveholders who tore this country apart in order to maintain an economic system of chattel slavery. The naming of the Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee high schools is justified under the Lost Clause myth that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery but, rather, about some more noble principle like states’ rights. And that these men, these treacherous men who fought and killed to keep black people in bondage, should continue to be looked upon as honorable men and women is perverse.

And the perversity doesn’t end with Confederates’ being honored. On college campuses throughout the country, there are hundreds of buildings, plazas, flags, and plaques honoring the contributions of white supremacists and racists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.