Stream: Renaming Our Past To Avoid Senator Feinstein’s Feared Dogma
You might have missed the news, but last year Cornell University renamed its Cornell Plantations, a lovely garden spot set amid campus, to “Cornell Botanic Gardens.”
Why?
Because a group of outraged kiddies calling themselves Black Students United demanded it. They didn’t like the word “Plantations”.
Well, so what, you might think. Cornell has a rich history of asking, “How high?!” when agitated students order “Jump!” Recall that in 1969 well armed black students occupied Cornell’s administration building, threatening violence unless their demands were met.
The punishment these students received for these illegal acts was to have all their demands met. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind cited the cowardice of the university’s leadership as his reason to flee Cornell.
The problem now, of course, is that there are few places left to flee to. And even if you can find sanctuary, you might discover the name of the place you’ve fled to has changed.
Yale buckled under the oh-so-slight pressure of students to rename Calhoun College. Calhoun was a Vice President of these once United States, but some progressive developed the idea that Calhoun was a “white supremacist”, or somehow had “ties” to “white supremacists”, and so his name had to be sent down the memory hole.
Everybody knows about the statuary being removed everywhere. Anything that reminds the easily triggered that history was not the utopia they demand it to be has to go, they say, lest some poor soul glance upon the sad face of Robert E Lee and decide to re-implement slavery. It could happen.
He who controls the past, controls you, to modify a phrase.
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Students, who are by definition uneducated, didn’t like “plantations” because some slaves, not all of them black, at some time in the past were made to work on them. Slaves were also made to work on farms, which means the classic song Old MacDonald is in grave danger. Look for the Slate article, “E-I-E-I-O is the Secret Call of White Supremacists”. A certain cookie company will have to look for a new name. Perhaps Pepperidge Growing Land?
Plantation, Florida, a town of some 90,000 souls, will have to go. I suggest it is rechristened Progress, Florida.
Rechristened is itself a difficult word. Why? We have seen this week that Senator and secular Jew Diane Feinstein questioned the faith of Catholic judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett, saying “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.”
It is required that you click here to read the rest.
I tried searching for Slate article, “E-I-E-I-O is the Secret Call of White Supremacists” and this post was on the top of the list. In fact, it was the only post in the list. Google has yet to catch on to your political views and drop you down the censorship hole.
Cornell tells a different story about the name change: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/08/rebranding-cornell-plantations-better-reflect-mission-vision
How much SJ pressure was applied and when is up for debate.
It’s like the late great USSR where they were continually rewriting history. They joked that the future was always certain but the past was always changing.
Matt’s phrase “slaves, not all of them black,” by itself unmasks another now-ancient retconning of ‘history’. Author James LaFond has located and published many newspaper advertisements of a certain vintage that have made it abundantly clear that so-called “indentured servants,” numbering in the hundreds of thousands and almost all of whom were white (English and Irish prominently) were nothing but time-limited slaves.
For example:
LaFond also makes suggestive, possibly even convincing, case that the word “plantation” in the English New World principally referred to the keeping of people, not the keeping of crops, and he calls that world “Plantation America.”
Here is Lafond on the notorious “Three-Fifts Rule” in the Constitution. It ought to be a revelation to innocent readers:
And then LaFond notes: