Back to back: on Woodrow Wilson

We owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed.

With this statement in mind, we, the Black Justice League, chose to start a discussion on campus that administrators and students alike have skirted around, a discussion about the presence of legacies on our campus and the glorification of prominent and problematic individuals. By resurfacing controversies of the University’s beloved figures and questioning their impact on this institution and the society they inhabited, we hope to get the campus to think more about the implications of blindly and selectively glorifying people on the values of the University and on the well-being of the student body.

Since this is a discussion we want to sustain, we want to take the time to respond to some of the more verbose,uncritical and less nuancedopposition voiced by the University community in order to dispel any fallacies concerning our campaign and position.

The first argumentative fallacy we want to address is the overbearing presence of tone policing when addressing our arguments and claims. We have been described as “angry,” “arrogant,” “smug” and “inflammatory,” all for voicing valid concerns about the values of the University. Words like these are wielded in a way that derails focus from actually addressing an individual or group’s grievances. Instead, such words unjustly overanalyze the emotional response of the oppressed individuals in order to invalidate their claims. They arise out of the assumption that oppression — such as the glorification of individuals who have caused intentional harm to a group of people — is not an act of aggression, and therefore anger and distress are not appropriate responses. The importance of what is being said is not changed by how it is said.

Some seem to believe that we are “creating false equivalences and asserting modern-day genocides”; however we use the term “genocide” to describe state-sanctioned violence against Black people that has proliferated over the course of 400 years and has resulted in steady, aggressive deaths. In 1951,the town ofPrinceton’svery own Paul Robeson brought the petition “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” before the United Nations under the definition of genocide as acts committed with “intent to destroy” a group, “in whole or in part.” The petition cited lynching, legal discrimination and disenfranchisement as evidence of the genocidal nature of white supremacist institutions that govern the United States. So when the term genocide is used, it is not lightly or without careful evaluation of our historical and present circumstances.

Many have brought up the concern of hindsight judgment and how we cannot evaluate past figures for actions committed under “normative beliefs.” We are obligated to reexamine what were considered a period’s norms and who held these beliefs.

However, “norms” — like systemic racism — were not beliefs held by everyone during that time and those pervading ideas are not in fact temporally constrained. By continuing this conversation about the overbearing presence of racism, we are not contributing to our own victimization or keeping racism alive; white supremacy has achieved that without our compliance.

Coming back to the quote, “We owe nothing to people who are deeply flawed,” there is an impulsive reaction to want to ignore uncomfortable or questionable legacies. However, what does it say about our society if we continue to glorify legacies without acknowledging — and at the very least caring about — the continuous promotion of unrectified inequalities and injustices?

We cannot passively recognize Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, and other individuals’ problematic legacies and change the school’s name. We, as an institution of higher learning, must think critically about our role in history and how it has shaped the present. By not recognizing the importance of this discourse, the University is telling its marginalized community and the outside worldthat it values its bleached-clean version of history over the prolonged discomfort and alienation of students of color. This erasure is especially dangerous in the present context of state-sanctioned violence against Black people that prolongs this genocide.

Esther Maddox ’17 wrote this op-ed on behalf of Black Justice League and can be reached atemaddox@princeton.edu. Edited by Yoselin Gramajo ’16, Destiny Crockett ’17 and Asanni York ’17.