For all the excesses of the protests that rocked so many college campuses last fall, there were issues on their slates of demands that made some sense. Questioning the appropriateness of having to walk by a Calhoun College every day was one of them.
Make no mistake: things named after George Washington and Thomas Jefferson occasion in me no pious "considerations" that the men were, amidst all else that they accomplished, slaveholders. My life ticks along just fine despite things named after Robert E. Lee. That Yale has decided to name a new building after Benjamin Franklin rankles me not despite that Franklin, as a white man of his time, had some slaves for a while. Most will agree that the volume of the man's accomplishments dwarfs the blight of his slaveowning stint.
Certainly we should know about the injustices of the past -- but this need not require the open-ended shaming of individuals themselves. I do not think, for example, that Lin-Manuel Miranda was remiss in leaving slavery in the background in his musical "Hamilton," contrary to some critics.
A great many people would find it hard to get through dinner with most people now dead, given the seismic and welcome changes in how racism and sexism were treated starting in the 1960s. Few people are able to see beyond the boundaries of their time. In our times, with changing ideas about homosexuality, many people of a certain age are feeling somewhat queasy about attitudes they harbored quite recently but couldn't have helped because it was all they knew. In the future, we may be looked back upon as barbaric in how we treat animals.
We would blanch at the idea of people considered heroes today having their names pulled off buildings 200 years from now because they farmed livestock. "They didn't know any better," we would object, or at least, they didn't realize how important the issue was. My take on people before us is equivalent. Plus, with all that ails us in the present, I'm not sure what more useful purpose rooting around for malevolence in the past to "think about" serves us.
That said, there are times when it can be argued that people indeed could have known better, to an extent that justifies not erasing them from history, but denying them the dignity of ongoing commemoration.
For example, Woodrow Wilson was not just a Southern racist, but an especially bigoted one who presided over casting blacks out of government positions. Wilson endlessly charged that black people were an "ignorant and inferior race," ardently supported -- in professorial writings -- the reversal of black gains in Reconstruction, and emblazoned his racist views on title cards of the film "Birth of a Nation."
Other presidents of the era naturally displayed occasional signs of the racism accepted in their lifetimes, but Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Warren Harding seemed like African-American studies department professors compared to Wilson.
Princeton has refused to remove Wilson's name and visage from its property, but I would have been on the students' side on that one: I have always been chilled by the very thought of Woodrow Wilson.