By Peter VAN BUREN
Happy Fourth of July! Falls Church in Northern Virginia just renamed two public schools, George Mason High School and Thomas Jefferson Elementary, to cancel the men who gave us this day.
The namesake George Mason was a Founder, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the basis for the Bill of Rights. Nearby George Mason University is still named after him, but Falls Church is stripping his name from its schools because in addition to all he did to create the United States, he was a slaveholder. Same for Thomas Jefferson, Founder, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, first secretary of State, third president of the United States, and famously, rapist and slaveholder, Joker without the makeup.
The people of Falls Church who made these changes probably mean well in a 2021-ish kind of way. The city is 72 percent white (and only 4.5 percent black.) An amazing 78 percent of adults in Falls Church have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and most work for the Federal government in nearby Washington, D.C. (George Washington and six other presidents held slaves.) The city has an energetic farmer’s market with a proposal pending to add an “informational booth about how communities of color have less access to healthy foods” and votes solidly Democrat.
The process of canceling the Founders was deliberate, with 13 meetings stretching over a year to come up with final school name candidates. For the high school, only one name candidate related to history at all, a local spot where the first rural branch of the NAACP was located. The other choices were could-be-anywhere Meridian (the eventual winner), Metropolitan High School, Metro View, and West End.
Same for deleting Jefferson. The same local historical site came up, as did the name of a local white historical figure who started a special needs school. The winner, Oak Street Elementary, “recognizes how trees are important natural elements.”
What stands out is a devotion to keeping the point out of the renaming. As political as the motivation was, no one wanted an MLK high school, or a Rosa Parks elementary. Sally Hemmings, Jefferson’s rape victim and slave, did not make the cut. Truth and Justice Elementary School was seen as a “nod” to Jefferson and thus truth and justice were rejected.
Left undiscussed is how the renamed Thomas Jefferson Elementary School still abuts George Mason Road. The renamed George Mason High School itself is located on Leesburg Pike, near Custis Parkway, named for the slave owning daughter of George Washington’s adopted son and the wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It is hard to get away from history.
At this point it is tempting to drive over to Whole Foods, park among the herd of Priuses and smite the too-earnest people of Falls Church with their own PBS tote bags. A wealthy, nearly all white community making a splash about renaming two schools to cancel a couple of Founding Fathers while carefully avoiding any teachable moment. Everyone’s white liberal guilt is assuaged with few feathers ruffled. And did you see the new artisanal cheeses in aisle eleven? Carol sent another $50 to the ACLU for us after George Floyd, you know.
The thing is as hard as it is to take these people seriously, it is equally hard to not take them seriously. They really believe themselves. And that poses 2021’s question.
America did not invent slavery, racism, or discrimination. We can point to a moral struggle hundreds of years in process including a civil war that remains the most costly conflict to Americans in body count and brutality. The Founders struggled over how to deal with a system most knew was unsustainable, Jefferson among them.
Yet alone in history we haven’t figured this out. South Africa, with an apartheid system designed to be as plainly racist as possible, found a way to untangle itself. The ancient world was built on slave labor and made the transition. The Germans dealt with their relatively recent attempt not just at enslavement but industrial scale genocide.
We fail because we refuse to admit crying racism, and making faux-fixes as in Falls Church, is as profitable politically as doing racist things is. Getting yourself elected calling out racism with manufactured rage is not far away from using racist voting laws to get yourself elected. There is too much to gain by maintaining and then exploiting a racist system. If you heal the patient, what’s left for the doctors to do?
There is also what we’ll now call the Falls Church myth, this near-idiotic belief insignificant changes add up to something. Changing the name of a school, or tearing down a statue, does not change history. That is why everyone is still “raising awareness” about the same problems after decades. It feels good, though.
Same for the “first…” people, the ones who celebrate the first black this or the first woman that. That we chased that idea all the way into the Oval Office and two consecutive black attorneys general and a black V.P. to see nothing much come of it answers the question of what it is worth as a change tool.
We thrive on polarization, thinking somehow calling someone a white supremacist based on little more than his skin color or political party is going to…help? The critical catechism of MLK and the civil rights movement—that race should not matter—is turned on itself to humiliate those who struggled. Sorry folks, it turns out it is all about the color after all, except that we mean black people should get stuff for being black.
Alongside are the scorekeepers. These people point out since about 13 percent of us are black, anything that has less than that (colleges, jobs) or more than that (prisons, poverty) is racist. The simplicity is attractive but the reality of ignoring the complexity of every other factor is where the argument fails hard. At the risk of offense, it is not just black and white out there.
I used to walk past the statue of Marion Sims in Central Park. When I first looked him up in 2012, he was the father of modern gynecology, the founder of New York’s first women’s hospital, the 19th century surgeon who perfected a technique that today still saves the lives of third-world women.
When I checked his biography again in 2018, he had become a racist misogynist who conducted medical experiments without anesthesia on enslaved women. His statue was removed from Central Park while protesters chanted their “ancestors can rest” and “believe black women.” I’m glad they just got rid of the statue instead of putting up a modern plaque “explaining” it in woke-talk.
The thing is Sims did all that he was said to have done. He developed surgical tools and techniques still used today. He did surgeries on both free white women and enslaved black women, mostly without anesthesia in part because anesthesia was not in wide use at the time and in part because he subscribed to the racist theory of his time that blacks did not suffer pain the same way whites did. His often life-saving surgeries (on blacks) have been relabeled “medical experiments” to connect them to Nazi horrors, purposefully ignoring the difference between non-therapeutic and therapeutic procedure and leaving his white patients who died out of the story altogether. Easier that way.
Also left out of the ranting is primary documentation suggesting Sims’ original patients—black and white—were willing participants in his attempts to cure vesicovaginal fistula, a condition for which no other viable therapy existed until Sims invented it. That meant they would have died without his surgery.
I’ll confess there are times that I, too, struggle with Jefferson. No one is anyone but a beginner on the road to Galilee, but Jefferson’s gifts contrasted with his cruelty make him among the hardest to understand. Yet Jefferson the slave owner did not pass that portion of his ideas to our future. He, Mason, and the other Founders created a system which would eventually correct itself and eliminate slavery. Evil was defeated at great cost but we seem unable to let it die.
We crave simplicity in our history when there is only complexity. It is ridiculous to ignore world-changing accomplishments thinking that will somehow fix our racial problems. We just don’t want to grapple with the questions of personal responsibility and the problem of inter-generational lifestyle victimhood.
We instead want the simplicity of reparations, imagining we can buy our way out of racial troubles. We do not question the value of changing a school’s name or knocking down a statue because that promises a simplistic fix that protects us from hard questions. We like it that way and it is unlikely anything that needs fixing will get fixed until that changes.
