#CancelYale is just a dangerous distraction
“Rename Yale Now.”
It was an attention-grabbing headline. The full-page advertisement, paid for by the Center for American Greatness, appeared in The New York Times July 2. In it, right-wing social commentator Roger Kimball argues that Yale should replace its slave trader name with a more honorable one.
But wait. Beware of anti-justice trolls who seek to undermine efforts to root out the systemic racism that pervades American society.
A Greenwich friend emailed me over the July 4 weekend, asking my thoughts about the “Rename Yale” advertisement. This is my response.
Yale, founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, was renamed Yale College in 1718 after receiving donations from Elihu Yale, a British merchant, slave trader, and official of the East
India Company. In
1745 it became Yale University.
Kimball is clear about his opposition to the so-called canceling of culture. The advertisement mocks
“the Left” to which he attributes a “dream of destroying every reminder of our past it doesn’t like ...”
Renaming Yale is a logical extension of efforts to erase the past, in Kimball’s view.
“Besides, if the Left can deface or destroy statutes of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and countless others,” he says, “Shouldn’t we insist that they live up to their own ideals and cancel racially tainted liberal institutions like Yale?”
Kimball ridicules this “Left” with the suggestion that Yale be renamed after Jeremiah Dummer, who secured funding for Yale during its financially shaky early years, soliciting donations from Elihu Yale, among others.
“By all means, cancel Yale. Remove the horrid name from clothing and other merchandise. But replace it with a more honorable name: Dummer. Dummer University. The Dummer School of Law. The Dummer School of Art. A Dummer degree.”
And of course, here in Greenwich we’d have a Dummer hospital. Greenwich Hospital would be part of the Dummer New Haven Health System, as would numerous other Dummer Connecticut health care facilities.
This trolling is a demeaning, yet dangerous, distraction. It both vilifies and trivializes serious efforts to engage in a much-needed national reckoning and to effect genuine systemic change. It exalts white privilege and serves the status quo. We must not take this bait, not jump onto the #CancelYale bandwagon, as some on the left have unfortunately done.
The #CancelYale that’s been trending on social media is a rightwing trolling initiative that originated with a June 10 post on 4chan, subsequently seized upon by Ann Coulter in her June 17 Breitbart op-ed: “Yale has to go!“
Ann Coulter’s June 19 tweet: “202 years of celebrating a racist, genocidal slave trader is enough. YALE. MUST. CHANGE. ITS. NAME.” (My note: it’s actually 302 years since 1718.)
To take the bait and beat the drums for “Rename Yale Now” is to forsake the pursuit of justice and to abandon the chants of “Black Lives Matter.” It’s surrender to the status quo.
And of course, here in Greenwich we’d have a Dummer hospital. Greenwich Hospital would be part of the Dummer New Haven Health System, as would numerous other Dummer Connecticut health care facilities.
Instead, we must push back against the narrative in which activists engaged in peaceful demonstrations to bring about genuine change in the best of America’s First Amendment traditions are portrayed as anti-American vandals intent on destroying monuments and erasing history.
Monuments and flags glorifying the Confederacy and its heroes also glorify a history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the racial injustice that’s still with us. Fortunately, there seems to be a growing national consensus that these symbols of injustice must go, that they have no place in the public squares and capitol buildings of the United States of America.
We must also push back against the slippery slope argument that’s inherent in #CancelYale trolling. Once we remove Confederate symbols, do we stop there, or do we go on to remove all associations with slavery. What about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? What about the treatment of indigenous people at the hands of Christopher Columbus, or Andrew Jackson?
This slippery slope should not discredit the justice seekers. Rather, it provides an opportunity to acknowledge an ugly past, a nation built on injustice, its racist stains still visible. But in this confrontation with an ugly past, we also have an opportunity for effective action in service of the beauty of our founders’ original vision: a nation with liberty and justice for all.
Renaming Yale won’t do this.