Black students at the University of Missouri “set it off” recently with their demand that the university’s president step down over the university’s less than stellar responses to racial hostility on campus. What began as a solidarity action with the #Mizzou students has now become a new student movement with demands specific to each campus. At Princeton in New Jersey, one of those demands from student protestors is “the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from anything named after him at the university.”
That’s a pretty tall order.
Jamil Smith, writing in the New Republic, says Princeton students are attacking “a silent bigotry” that can be just as harmful as the racist slurs that are yelled at them. Indeed, microaggressions can affect the sense of well-being needed to successfully navigate something as already stressful as a college existence.
Richard Cohen, opinion writer for the Washington Post, says “Woodrow Wilson was racist, but he deserves our understanding.” Cohen makes Wilson’s racism sound benign, saying he was a man of his time, a product of his environment. Which is true, so, no argument there.
But the 28th president of the United States didn’t have to invite friends over to the White House to watch one of the worst pieces of “falsified white supremacist propaganda” ever created. He didn’t have to do that, thereby giving a legitimacy to one of the most heinous terrorist organizations ever to spring from U.S. soil. Nah. He didn’t have to do that. Something else he didn’t have to do was dismiss the legitimate racial concerns of a group of Black leaders at the White House because he didn’t like their tone.
He didn’t have to do that either. He didn’t have to do it because it’s a hallmark of white supremacist privilege, and he didn’t have to do it because it wasn’t like the dude he was dealing with had just been born. He had been around the block a few times.
We could say that one of the reasons that Wilson does not deserve some understanding because, as the Black students at Princeton know all too well; similar to what Black folks who don’t go to Princeton or any school also know all too well, is that the same understanding never seems to be readily forthcoming to Black people. Characterizations of the numerous victims of police violence, as well as the communities—and families—these individuals come from rarely, if ever, contain the empathy and compassion that is given to others.
Perhaps the main reason why Wilson is underserving of such forgiveness and redemption is because “he believed in white supremacy as government policy, so much so that he reversed decades of racial progress,” as Gordon Davis eloquently laid out in Tuesday’s New York Times. The students at Princeton who have made this demand know this. And they aren’t the only ones.