After a swelling tide of protests, the president of Yale announced on Saturday that the university would change the name of a residential college commemorating John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century white supremacist statesman from South Carolina. The college will be renamed for Grace Murray Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Yale.
(New York Times, February 11, 2017)
Right, so these safe-space-seeking students couldn’t abide attending a university with a college that commemorates a white supremacist. Do these cloistered nincompoops know they’re living in a country with a capital that commemorates a slave owner?
Oh, right, these twitter-brained kids are Ivy League. Therefore, they must be executing a brilliant master plan to whitewash second-rate historic figures like Calhoun first; then they’ll start scrubbing away big-wigs like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
Except that what makes this country “America the Beautiful” is that blacks can live and thrive in places named for whites who once treated them as subhuman. More to the point, whitewashing the names off those places robs blacks not only of the pride of overcoming so much, but also of the knowledge that they will have those white namesakes rolling over in their graves for eternity.
But who needs President Trump to undermine the integrity of America’s hallowed institutions (warts and all) when they are doing that themselves. And don’t kid yourself, the witch-hunting sanctimony of political correctness on the left can turn a liberal democracy into an Orwellian police state as readily as the mind-controlling ideology of alternative facts on the right can.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Sunday, at 10:10 p.m.