You Don’t Get Applause for Doing The Bare Minimum

Princeton University announced today that they will be removing the name of former President Woodrow Wilson from it’s public policy school and residential college, citing his racist policies and ideologies, which included his time as the school’s president. At first glance, this step forward can be seen as a very good news from the university; Wilson’s segregationist policies not only at Princeton, but on a national level as Governor of New Jersey and as President of the United States, were ultimately detrimental to the fight toward racial equality in this country. He supported segregation and imposed it on several federal agencies, as well as openly approved of the Ku Klux Klan; so it only makes sense that such a figure’s name gets removed from awnings at a university, just passing a century following his reprehensible ways.

However, this move of “taking a moral high-ground” in the face of racism comes into question when you take into account that this ruling was not made in 2016, when the very same decision that has now been approved in 2020 was being considered just four years ago. Despite student activists at Princeton occupying the office of the university president in the Fall of 2015, directly protesting to have Woodrow Wilson’s “racist legacy” acknowledged and his name removed from all buildings, Princeton’s board of trustees still decided to keep Wilson’s name up. The board’s vice-chairman, Brent Henry, said that even though Wilson was clearly a racist and segregationist, which made him a flawed person, “…on balance, we thought that his contributions were significant enough that it didn’t warrant eliminating his name”; even going on to say that they found it more important for people to “understand the full story of him as a person.”

Princeton had thus prioritized Woodrow Wilson’s legacy at the university over his clear racist practices that set back African-Americans not only at Princeton, but throughout this entire nation for decades to come. So when the University makes this move now in 2020 to remove his name, I refuse to commend this clearly overdue decision. This is simply expected.

Now that systemic racism is no longer a taboo topic to address in this country, and institutions feel that they are now faced with social pressure to make a grand statement to show their allied stance with the Black Lives Matter movement, I refuse to applaud their new-found common decency.

It’s one thing for these companies and organizations to see the public unrest in the aftermath of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd’s innocent murders, and for these entities to feel the need to address racial issues in their own establishments and accommodate for their own diversity. But with an institution like Princeton, Woodrow Wilson’s racist legacy is not only nothing new, but it was clearly disregarded. The idea that the same president who is quoted in the infamous Ku Klux Klan propaganda film “Birth of a Nation”, and even screened it at the White House while he was in office, was still being commemorated at Princeton is utterly disappointing. 

It’s also not like Princeton is alone in these convenient publicized changes that show solidarity to this movement, one can easily look at Quaker Oats changing the name of its pancake syrup brand “Aunt Jemima”. It’s not as if the name had only recently been deemed to be perpetuating the racist stereotype of a “mammy” (a cheerful subservient black woman), it had been doing so since 1889 when the brand was established. 

Or even NASCAR finally banning the confederate flag from races as if it has only become a symbol of hate in this country in 2020, not for over a century prior. As a business, their position was clearly stated every year, with every race that the flag was brandished at; they stood complicit to the destructive behavior that it enabled.

So I won’t laud Princeton University’s “progressive move in the face of racism”, because in my eyes, it is really just convenient pandering to improve their reputation, during a time where every establishment is looking to capitalize and look like a hero in the face of a movement calling attention to systemic racism against black people in this country. These are still very necessary steps to be taken in an overwhelmingly long list of efforts needed to end systemic racism, stop the appraisal of historical figures who only furthered these issues, enlighten people on black history, and so many more things. 

But I just won’t say good job for these entities doing the bare minimum. 

Rather, I say: “Good. Now what else?”