Why I Vote to Keep Thomas Jefferson and George Mason as School Names

A community I cover in my reporting is holding a public forum and a school board meeting to consider the name changes to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason on their schools.

I wrote a letter opposing this measure:

To explain where I am coming from, I have always voted for every Democrat and attended the University of Mary Washington which was home to the James Farmer Multicultural Institution. James Farmer’s endowment added critical race approaches to courses such as my English literacy, urban geography and film studies courses. It was at Mary Washington, I heard Roger Wilkins (a Civil Rights activist who was an Assistant Attorney General under LBJ) speak and read his book Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism in which he speaks of the very dilemma that is being debated now. He was a man who suffered the wounds of the Civil Rights era in full and yet he wrote a book capable of subtlety and nuance:

“He gets inside the “addictive” naturalness of privilege that slaveowners enjoyed via his own draft-deferred student experience during the Korean War, but without forgetting his ancestors’ suffering as slaves. Indeed, reflections on his family history ground Wilkin sand allow him to develop enormous sympathy for and insight into his subjects without losing balance or excusing the inexcusable. His insight recalls James Baldwin, arguably the best we’ve ever had for appreciating the humanity of even the most flawed among us without yielding an inch of moral principle” reads one review.

In the last five or six years or so, a movement has come about, often called “wokeness” or “cancel culture”, to strip such conversations of nuance, to suggest policy decisions must be made via damage control on human sensitivity, and to substitute symbolic gestures for meaningful action.

I believe that’s what is at play here. If there is much documented racism within the city limits, I suggest the school board approach that rather than attempt to impose a Draconian solution that’s intended to limit the appropriate amount of cultural dissection that’s needed with complicated historical figures.

The fact of the matter is that you can’t separate the definition of what America is without mentioning those figures. That is the case with Civil War soldiers who are defined historically by the protection of slavery but if the sole linkage students…