Painting a False Picture of the Past

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In reading “The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble,” I was struck by this quote in particular: “Yet if Woodrow Wilson College simply becomes Bloomberg College, Princeton will have lost an opportunity to talk about what kind of college it wishes to be.” This sentiment seems further reflected in an article I found linked in one of the comments on the site, which I think adds an interesting perspective to the debate (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/names-in-the-ivy-league).

When colleges rechristen buildings named for those who held racist beliefs, they are in a sense sugar-coating the past. How would new names be chosen for these buildings? A college may be able to identify a figure innocuous enough so as not to offend anyone; however, this would be projecting a false version of history. It would, albeit unintentionally, be denying the fact that some of the most influential figures in the development of the college believed people of different races were not entitled to the same treatment as those of their own. Consciously or unconsciously, this worldview undoubtedly affected how figures such as Woodrow Wilson shaped and influenced the schools in which they were invested. We have discussed the tendency of some historical exhibits to avoid the controversial aspects of their subject matter, and it is worth acknowledging that this avoidance is not always performed by those who stand to benefit from believing the injustices never happened. Eradicating the evidence of unpleasant histories because they make us feel hurt and outraged is just as much an act of avoidance as pretending they do not exist.

Of course we should not ignore that certain prominent figures were racist, precisely because they were so prominent and their influence was and is felt so strongly. At the same time, human beings are neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil; one has to acknowledge that the same individuals who nursed such prejudices also made important and notable contributions to their schools. Rechristening buildings with the names of those who are less controversial and/or were not as instrumental in the development of a college denies enormous parts of that college’s history. It dismisses significant steps made in the development of the school, while simultaneously pretending that this development was not tainted by the racist ideas of the time. College buildings are not named indiscriminately. The names of specific people were selected for specific purposes, and these selections and the reasons behind them shed light on the climate in which they were chosen. The controversies surrounding these names should be revealed and will rightfully cause outrage; at the same time, letting this outrage lead to the destruction of evidence will only cause more facets of history to be swept under the rug.

Still not a fan of M. Carey Thomas

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I had a conversation about M. Carey Thomas last week (or several conversations, which isn’t surprising), about the name change of TGH and the fact that all we do is talk about M Carey Thomas! So I wanted to acknowledge that some people, and I to a certain extent, think that the M. Carey Thomas example is often overused and sometimes seems to be something that people can talk about to seem radical and cool without truly engaging in what it means to be oppressive. But not all conversations about her are like that. And I also think she’s just a perfect example for what I’m thinking!

 

After reading everything for this week, and also reading through everyone’s posts, my feelings about changing the name of TGH have shifted. As recent as early this semester, I did not know how I felt about the issue. I could no confidently support nor object to the idea that the name of TGH should be changed. Most of the reasons for changing it was because M. Carey Thomas was extremely racist, which I of course don’t like. But a lot of the reasons that I heard about not changing it was that it would erase the memory of racism on our campus and we wouldn’t think about it as much. Which I could also see happening.

 

However, a couple of weeks ago a friend came up to me and shared an idea that she heard. In an effort to subvert the space, we could have a memorial of sorts to honor the women of color who have made lasting impacts on our campus, or who went off and did great things in the world. Perfect! I thought. Especially because one of this student’s concerns was that if we changed the name of TGH we would lose a lot of funding. Which I think is valid. But going back to Sofi’s question of, who are these memorials for? and the question of, what is an institutions values? I am not sure that we could justify glorifying the oppressive mindset of a woman just because we want another old white woman’s money. Are we glorifying this old white woman’s racism too? Though I still want scholarship money for students, so I’m not fully convinced that that is the most important point for myself.

 

But to the other point about losing our campus history, Gwendolyn’s post got me thinking. We are arguing that it is important to commemorate this woman because it highlights all the injustices of this campus’ past. But couldn’t we achieve the same thing through commemorating a person who actively fought to change the policies and the structures that M. Carey Thomas put in place? I’m not sure if this is a novel idea but I feel like I haven’t heard it a lot! We can have multiple histories, and the only way to learn about oppression doesn’t have to be through the lens of the oppressor! I am quite distressed that this is the current model that we fall back on. I am also upset that money controls so many of our decisions, but I suppose that could be a whole other post.

Context in the Comments

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I made the mistake that I normally do and I read the comment section of the article The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble. I thought the article was really interesting, and I had time to burn so I just kept scrolling. Shifting through the comments which were targeted towards everyone and everything, I picked up on a trend of people talking about context; in that people thought the author was not giving enough room to the historical characters being represented in the arguments to be seen in the times and circumstances that they lived. While their were many, many comments made about this topic I choose a couple of my ‘favorites’ to use as examples. *Note: These are not necessarily comments I agree with but rather they made either a statement that was agree with by other commenters or I think it added something to the argument that was already going on*

Kilpatrick Kirksimmons said : People must be judged in context. Are there moral absolutes? Of course. Should we ignore the bad (or at least what we today feel to be bad)? Absolutely. But to judge someone out of context is as naïve as it is unfair. Imagine your own great grandchildren doing the same thing to you. After all, you do not fancy yourself to be the last generation, do you?

Zen Galacticore said: Judging our fellow contemporaries is bad enough, but to judge our forebears, our antecedents, by our own 21st century moral and ethical standards is the height of self-righteousness

PurpleJello said: Where do young people and minorities draw the line in judging history. Because if you naively believe any man or woman is without sin, look at yourself?

Liars N. Fools said: Our history — and for that matter that of the west in general — has been shaped for better or worse by white men. Only recently — last century — have non-white-men come into their own in fundamentally shaping the country. It is anti-intellectual and ahistorical to deny this. The best thing to do is to study the “better or worse” aspects of the shapers of our nation rather than living in a world of atemporal and ahistorical virtual reality of political correctness.

William Bergmann said: We’re exiting the ‘Age of Marble’ because we’ve finally realized that even the saints aren’t actually saints.

I would first like to point out the obvious that this argument is in a comments section, and is mostly devoted to arguing that you can(’t) separate the sins/morals of individual in the past from the sins/morals of the present. The majority of comments seemed to side with the idea that it was unfair to judge people of the past based on the modern idea of what was ‘right’. Their were a lot of comment that blamed this whole idea of questioning the past on the college age generation, saying it was because we are to PC, and that we are just trying to create a false history. What I feel these people are missing is what was said by Liars N. Fools, that the older generation feels by creating -what I think most of our class would call more correct- a history which includes women and minorities that we are literally creating stories, that this history wasn’t real because it wasn’t what they learned in school. I think that, they really think this generation is attempting to erase white males from the narrative of history. Because to them the breaking down of this privileged single white washed narrative feels like oppression, in the same way that their loss of privilege in other areas feel like oppression to them. To them if they aren’t on the top their are on the bottom, because that is where they viewed everyone else who wasn’t on the top. So it is easier for Liars N. Fools and other to think that everything in history was made about white men, they just like to forget it was the white men who made it all about them.

Memorials as Public Displays of Affection (read: who are we loving?)

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First I want to say that I only have the horizontal lines because formatting is hard and I really wanted paragraph breaks. Oh, WordPress…

In Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Doss does important work in articulating how history is emotional and human, it is not unfeeling or unbiased. I appreciate that she takes time to point out that creating memorials and monuments are uniquely human processes; they are rituals. The notion of memorials as sites of national honor, grief, and religious experiences made me think about how important memorials are for framing social worth. In other words, how do memorials demonstrate who we mourn and miss?

Memorials are far more political than simply remembering someone or something. It’s a question of whose loss do we miss or notice? Another way of saying this to me is, who do we love?

This made me think of a speech by activist Mia Mingus, a disabled queer transnational adoptee who’s work focuses on social justice for survivors of sexual abuse. She gave a speech called, “Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability” for the Femmes of Color Symposium in 2011, where she talks about embracing the Ugly as magnificent.

Doss writes a lot about how historically monuments honor “great men.” Further, Doss writes about how monuments and memorials enact “a living memory” (Doss 38). To me, monuments and memorials are spaces and objects that signal and structure our constructions of social worth. Therefore, if we are a culture that celebrates cisgender, white, heterosexual, able-bodied men in our statues and memorials–physical spaces that register important temporal moments–then we are a culture that continues to assert that man as the only human that we love, protect, preserve, and imagine as part of our nation’s future. In her talk, Mingus asks us to celebrate the ugly, to see the ugly in us–what society sees as freakish, unacceptable, or wrong–and not run away from it. She asks us to see the ugly as magnificent. I wonder what would happen if we memorialized disabled queer bodies of color? What happens when you assert the life and permanence of a specific community?

This is what I believe Doss gestures towards when she discusses the shift towards a “memorial mania,” and the increase in remembering more specific communities and acknowledging that we are a fragmented nation with many “publics.” However, I have some reservations about the new “experience”-based museums (Doss 51-52). Of course, I believe that restructuring memorials and the hierarchy of mourning and grief can greatly affect who we see as a citizen, and as a human worthy of protection. However, when Doss writes of museums like the Holocaust museum, which give each museum-goer an identification number, I wonder who their audience is. Museums assume that everyone who attends is going to learn about someone else’s experience, in which case it is helpful to try to access someone else’s lived experience. However, I wonder in what ways memorials and museums can help serve a specific community, and help that community grieve and heal. In other words, I wonder about the balanced between the internal and external when it comes to the civic duty of memorials and museums. Which population do these spaces serve, and in what ways does serving the white, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied public prevent the grief and healing process for the rest of the public?

The monument and the passerby

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When reading the articles for this week, I immediately thought of an article I read for another class, Patricidal Memory and the Passerby. The article is long and has a very complex argument I won’t try to reiterate here, but one aspect of it is that we ought to focus on is that we should look at the monumental, in this case the memories of great dead men and legacies of slavery and patriarchy, as it works through and around the movement of the small details that make up daily life. By refocusing our energy on the banal details of life we understand better how systems like white supremacy and patriarchy function. This could be easily applied to monuments like the slave table, which dehumanizes enslaved peoples by making them into symbols. A better monument might be enslaved families, or enslaved people performing daily tasks they would have at the college, except without the opportunity to literally use them as a table. As Mason B. Williams says in “The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble”, “Discussing individuals and (where warranted) removing names is good—but it is just a start. The crucial next step is to rethink and reinvent the ways the nation commemorates.” I think this new commemoration must also deal with the problem of the monument itself, and how it is inherently a structure meant to deal with “great men” and “great events” instead of the equally important events which take place in our daily lives. Maybe Bryn Mawr could use a statue of servants in the dorms, with notes from the archives about their lives.

http://sfonline.barnard.edu/ps/schneide.htm

 

Representation Isn’t Radical, But It Matters

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While I agreed with much of Erika Doss’ “Memorial Mania”, I was frustrated at her discussion of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument, specifically her dismissal of disability activists’ demands that the monument publicly acknowledge Roosevelt’s disability by showing him using a wheelchair. Although Doss seemed, in other sections, sensitive to reasons why different marginalized groups might demand representation, she seemed outright dismissive of the disability activists who advocated for a statue of Roosevelt using a wheelchair, saying things like, “disability activists… insisted that Roosevelt’s memorial more blatantly commemorate their own interests” (35-36), and quoting another scholar as saying, “Yet, Schudson cautions, rights consciousness also “legitimates individual and group egoism and emphasizes at every turn the individual, self-gratification over self-discipline, the economic over the moral, the short term over the long term, the personal over the social”” (37). I agree that demands for representation of individuals from different groups are rooted in identity politics and fail to address structural discrimination or create radical change–as Mason B. Williams says in “The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble”, “Discussing individuals and (where warranted) removing names is good—but it is just a start. The crucial next step is to rethink and reinvent the ways the nation commemorates.” However, being so completely dismissive of a marginalized group’s demand for representation, and going so far as to imply that it’s self-gratifying, ignores the importance of representation for communities so often denied it. Representation is a form of individual empowerment for those who need to be able to look at the world and see people like them represented and celebrated, and a way of challenging larger discourses that invisibilize the experiences of marginalized peoples. In some cases, representation, by raising awareness of a marginalized group’s existence and breaking down stereotypes about them, can even start conversations that lead to more radical change in the future. Of course how representation is done matters, and representation alone is not the answer. But dismissing representation of marginalized groups as a form of self-gratification looks quite similar to arguing that only the voices and narratives of the privileged and powerful deserve to be heard, and I can’t see how that’s a way toward radical change at all.

Historical Commemoration and the Present

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“Its [the Age of Marble’s focus on statues of prominent politicians] key concerns lay elsewhere: in asserting shared values at a moment when the United States was torn by the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction” — Mason B. Williams, The Crumbling Monuments of the Age of Marble for The Atlantic.

This particular line got me thinking about the place that such monuments hold in society: Are they physical structures meant to commemorate past achievements, honor historical moments, as one would think? Or do they hold a far more present purpose?

Here, Williams argues that the purpose of statues, plaques, and structures named in honor of historical actors (almost exclusively old white politicians) were not entirely, if at all, meant to earmark the past. Public history has a reason for being that is intrinsically rooted in the present. Such structures can be used to remind warring groups of a shared goal, to honor values that are lacking in the present, to draw communities together, or to champion a moral, ethical, social, or other such cause. The naming of the Enid Cook dorm building can be seen in this same light: The Bryn Mawr community was (and still is) reeling from various attacks on the campus’ black community. Most disturbingly, at least to me, were the administrative movements to close down, change, and redesignate spaces reserved for the use of, and cherished by, the PoC community at Bryn Mawr. While many other measures were taken to rectify this issue and resolve the matter, the naming of the Enid Cook Center can be seen as a part of this resolution. It honors the black history at Bryn Mawr in a very public and very traditional way. It serves the purposes of preserving and honoring history, often seen as the reason for such monuments and dedications, while also serving the public (read: campus) need for resolution, rectification, and remembrance.

Similarly, the destruction of such monuments and the rededication of buildings to remove the reference to a now-unacceptable practice or worldview serves much the same purpose: championing the causes and healing the wounds of the present. Wiping Wilson’s name from Princeton’s systems and buildings would not change the historical record. It would not make his stance, so widely accepted in his time and so vilified in the present, any different. It does, however, make a statement about what is acceptable today, in modern society. Public history is not, at heart, a historical venue; it is a modern venue that deals with modern issues by referencing, resurrecting, and dismantling the past as necessary.

Hope and Fear in History

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“‘Hope’ struck me an overrated force in human history. ‘Fear’ did not.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hope and the Historian, for The Atlantic.

I wholeheartedly agree with Coates on this topic. Many of the historical works that I have read focus around some manner of hopeful conclusion. Even the book on the slave rebellion, which I mentioned in my last post, resolved the ramifications of the conflict in a positive way, despite the rebellion being put down quickly, violently, and with little semblance of justice. It ended on a “sure, everyone died, but things in Parliament got better eventually!” note.

On the other hand, it is rare to see a historical investigation into a topic where things don’t “get better” and the matter is not resolved. One wonders what happens to all of those topics, the ones in which the heroes lose, in which no hope is found. I feel that it is just as important, if not moreso, to search out those histories. Yes, it is important — nay, vital — to the overall historical narrative to resurrect those stories to which history has turned a blind eye. I would argue that it is just as vital to learn from them. What went wrong? Why did this situation go so badly, when others were successful? What does it tell us about the world then, as well as the world now?

Everyone wants a hero. Everyone roots for the underdog to win. Having your protagonist (for retelling history has much in common with literature) lose a hopeless fight is not marketable and, often, one then wonders what impact the losers could have had. Why read about people who failed to make their desired impact? Because their story is part of history, just the same as everyone else. A vital part. A piece of the puzzle. They acted, and were acted upon, within the historical frame. Neglecting them leaves a hole in the image, a silhouette of void that cannot be understood or explained, a forgotten variable in the equation that changes the answer unpredictably. Without understanding this story of hopelessness, one which is arguably far more prevalent than that of hope and successful heroes, one cannot understand the historical narrative or how it led to our current situations. How can one understand, as far as one could, the fear underlying and driving a successful slave rebellion if one does not know the stories of the failed rebellions preceding it?

Unsung Founders Memorial

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I really enjoyed reading Remembering Forgetting: A Monument to Erasure at the University of North Carolina by Timothy J. McMillan. I found parts of the section be eerily parallel to that of Bryn Mawr, and our numerous monuments around campus that go without true public explanation of their pasts (for example; Thomas Great Hall, the now-removed bust in Canaday, the coffin in the cloisters). Although the article did include some photographs of the memorial, I thought it would be interesting to dig up some other ones to share with everyone.

 

Taken from: http://imgur.com/dNlKL8U

Taken From:
http://imgur.com/dNlKL8U

Taken From: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j9Wtx0M0L9Y/maxresdefault.jpg

Taken From: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j9Wtx0M0L9Y/maxresdefault.jpg

Taken From: http://www.unc.edu/files/2012/08/ccm1_032465.jpg

Taken From: http://www.unc.edu/files/2012/08/ccm1_032465.jpg

The article did mention that due to people sitting on, or near, the monument, they would have a tendency to brush their feet up against the people figurines below the table. You can see the wear in the first and third photographs, and you can see how people sit around the table in the second photograph.

 

I found this interesting, but also heavily symbolic. One of the main purposes of erecting this monument was to give a voice to the silenced peoples of the past, specifically black enslaved individuals upon who’s labor the university was created. Interestingly enough, in present times, the symbolic figures are being worn back down into featureless, indistinguishable, masses. Timothy J. McMillan already addressed the three kinds of figures depicted in the memorial, but the physical wearing down of the statues, I think, is painfully ironic. Yet again, you have people of color, specifically black people, who are being broken down by the casual use of white people.

 

I think this points us, once again, to much larger issues. Although this memorial was intended to create a physical space where people could meet and talk about racial issues that stem from a problematic past, instead we have a table that goes without proper recognition, and is used, and worn down, until the faceless masses blur together once again, putting us in exactly the same position in which we began- oppression and silencing of the past.

Living History

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I really enjoyed reading Ebony & Ivy and I really liked how at the forefront slave narratives and indigenous narratives were in this book. This may seem very obvious, but I feel like often these stories are told only to ‘check the box’ so to speak and it was very refreshing to study these stories so directly. I think that Wilder really challenges the typical way that the West defines itself, namely without regard for racism, slavery and colonialism and how these practices have defined (and continue to define) and shaped many institutions (including those of higher education) (Trouillot 98).

Many of the arguments brought up in Ebony & Ivy build on the themes that we have been discussing in class this semester. The history of oppression of indigenous peoples in this volume is incredibly important to the narrative that Wilder constructs and throws Dean Spade’s comments at the beginning of the talk we watched last week into sharper relief.  The question of native peoples is one that Wilder addresses throughout Ebony & Ivy which I think is incredibly important because many of those stories are silenced or told in such a way as to make natives passive subjects.  The very human framing of this volume I think is revolutionary in many ways because it does not hold slavery or racial oppression at a clinical arm’s reach (typical of many high school textbook, etc.) and instead engages with the horror in a productive way.  One of the things that Wilder does is list the slaves of the people he introduces by name even when they do not ‘directly’ figure into the events he is examining, which I honestly found very moving.

Issues of marketing and funding, as we discussed on the first day of class, are not only interesting topics of discussion in the present day, but also I think important areas of historical analysis. Funding of early American institutions was of paramount importance to early college trustees and presidents and often depended directly on slavery and the profits of it. In Ebony & Ivy, Wilder discusses the funding of Dartmouth and William and Mary and how their “Indian colleges” were eventually closed because of lack of funding because of rising tensions between the colonists and Britain, a lucrative source of funding (Wilder 168).  As we have discussed, Bryn Mawr and other similar institutions engage in active marketing which does not always reflect the values of the students or the current climate on campus.