SUNY New Paltz needs historical perspective

Dear Editor: The SUNY New Paltz report on renaming dorms, because the local Huguenot families whose names they bear were slaveholders, raises a few concerns.

In particular, dismissing the honoring of European pioneer settlers as a mere artifact of 20th-century, Cold War boosterism aimed at contrasting us with “the purportedly enslaved Soviet masses” is a little too easy.

Just as the intellectual, moral and cultural product of the nation’s Founders and the Enlightenment behind them is not invalidated by the fact that they were slaveholders, the honoring of New Paltz’s founding families is more than some fleeting propagandistic impulse of cheerfully Eurocentric postwar liberalism.

People who themselves were religious refugees expelled from one country after another before finally coming to the New World, and who there made a community and built themselves a measure of freedom, albeit within the moral limitations of their time, deserve respect in any time as our fellow humans.

We sit in the comfort they built and provided; we can only hope to one day achieve as much, with as few resources.

We can’t dispose of the Founders or the Enlightenment just because they were morally incomplete; they were humans as fallible as we are. That the ethics they formulated did not lead them to break through the social framework of their time, which asserted a biological hierarchy among the races of man, does not invalidate those ethics; it reflects that their proponents were not as morally strong as they needed to be.

We can only hope that we do not fail a similar test. We cannot just make episodes of our own past, or the hurt they carry, go away by writing our own new history and leaving their names out. That is the refuge of children, and while it can be excused as ignorance in the young, the rest of us can’t afford that false escape, lest the demons of the past fester and regain strength in a dark place where we do not name them and pretend we have therefore conquered them.