[X] High School

Friends,

If you were in a relationship with someone you really cared about—a partner, a parent, a child, a friend—and they said to you, calmly and clearly, “When you say [X], it hurts me.” What would you do? Would you push back, dismiss their feelings and their words, keep doing the thing that hurt your loved one? Or would you say, “I’m sorry that hurts you. Out of respect for your feelings, I will try to choose less hurtful words in the future.”

What if your friend said this?: “When you say [X], it hurts me. And, [X] is bound up in our country’s racist past. It reminds me of numerous other ways that my family and I are devalued because of how other people perceive us, a devaluation whose effects are too legion and devastating for me to recount for you now—and whose effects you are already aware of. When you keep saying [X] despite the fact that I have told you how it hurts me, it tells me that saying [X] is more important to you than our relationship.” Would you persist in saying [X] because your need to say [X] was more important than you need to heal your relationship?

If you went to high school with me, you probably see where this is going. It hurts me—and it hurts you, and it hurts us—that our high school was named after a man who gave his life to keep African Americans enslaved, subject to brutality, families broken, women subjected to unpunishable rape. Why is it more important to you to honor the name of a man who died a century before you were born than it is to heal your relationship with your friends, your classmates, your teachers, and the future students in that school?

JEB Stuart High School

            For the past several years, the Fairfax County School board has been enmeshed in a debate about what to do about the name of my alma mater: J.E.B. Stuart High School. General J.E.B. Stuart was a dashing cavalry officer who died in service of the Confederate army. Since the 1980s, when I attended, the high school has been one of the most ethnically diverse and stably racially integrated in the United States. Not only are there white and black students in significant numbers, but many students with family backgrounds in Asia and a majority from Latino heritage and origin. Photos suggest that the school continues also to have a significant Muslim population whose presence is not reflected in demographic data.

The arguments for dropping or retaining the school’s name are heated. Two of the most common reasons cited for keeping Stuart’s name on the school are that we cannot change history and the costs associated with the change.

It is true that we cannot change the past. But place, institutional, and personal names do change. Think about the name of the place where you live. Is the word for your city or neighborhood indigenous? The city where I work now does have an Ojibwe name that reflects the prevalence of Anishinaabemowin speakers in this area in the 19^th century. But would the earlier Woodland people who built Wisconsin’s effigy mounds have recognized “Milwaukee” as a meaningful name? The airport now named after Ronald Reagan replaced ones named for Herbert Hoover and the place named for George Washington. In the United States, women who marry and divorce routinely change their names, updating their identities to reflect changes in their personal histories. In all of these cases, people have chosen to update names, not to deny history but to reflect what is most meaningful to them in the present.

We do not have to be ruled by decisions made in the past. J.E.B. Stuart High School was named in 1959, as the “massive resistance” strategy came peaked in Virginia. Massive resistance was a political response to the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board decision ordering racial desegregation of public schools. Rather than comply, whites in Virginia shut down public schools. White children could attend private academies. Black families made the wrenching decision to send their children to other states in order to get their educations. The story was different in Northern Virginia, where the postwar population had boomed. In contrast to the rest of the state, the Fairfax County School Board opened new schools. But no one could mistake the insult to African Americans intended by choosing to name a school after a Confederate hero. Black students might get a public education at J.E.B. Stuart High School, but for years afterwards they also carried on their résumés the name of a man who died for the principle that states could decide whether their ancestors were property or were included in the fundamental American value of liberty. The choice of school name was probably also a thumb in the eye of thousands of white “carpetbaggers” who had come south to work in the booming postwar federal government.

The second reason given against the name change is the cost, which would allegedly eat up funds better spent counteracting cuts to important school programs. The Fairfax County School Board website lists $678,000 in projected costs associated with new signage, in-school branding, athletic and band uniforms, and logo-bearing items. This argument is more compelling but still not persuasive. As the site also notes, items such as uniforms normally wear out and are replaced on a regular basis, and other items fall under the purview of the work of the booster club. The difficulty is coming up with all that money at once rather than amortizing it over multiple budget years. Replacing signage is a one-time cost that could potentially be covered by engaging the community and alumni in fundraising. Further, development professionals know how to turn a crisis into a fundraising opportunity. The school district could take advantage of the heightened interest of alumni in this issue to send out an appeal for the funds needed for special education, parental support, and smaller class sizes to raise private money.

            The naming of local institutions like schools, parks, and streets reflects local values. It is up to the Fairfax County School board to decide what it values more right now: retaining a local heritage name that branded the school as one where black students were second-class citizens or finding a new, less divisive name that students and alumni can carry with pride and help them want to give back to the school for generations to come.

Dear Students from Iran

Dear students from Iran:

It appears that the time has come to say this: I love you.

Iran has been in my consciousness for most of my life. As I child in the United States in the 1970s, I heard often about the Shah on the news. The day the Shah died is burned in my memory. I was packing up my bedroom to move to a new life in the Washington DC suburbs. Because it did not occur to me to retune the little radio that was keeping me company, I listened over and over again to reports about men chanting in the streets of Tehran, “The earthworm of the century is dead.”

Then of course there were the American hostages held at the embassy, who seemed to be the lead story every day for more than a year. I cannot forget the day the hostages flew home, just as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. The tension and excitement that day were so intense that my younger brother had a meltdown my whole family still remembers.

The public schools I attended in Northern Virginia were full of children from around the world. I had no idea who was an economic migrant, who was a political refugee, whose heart was in the United States and whose was still abroad. I had friends from Iran, from Libya, from Vietnam, from Korea. The hallways were full of Spanish. All the kids were cooler than I was, and many were kind and friendly and smart. All that mattered more than where they had been born. We were classmates, not enemies.

So I watched with a full heart when Iranian students took to the streets in 2009. Soon after, applications from students Iran started flowing into graduate program I was directing. It has been my privilege to teach and learn from several of you. I am proud of the work we have done together. I have been silently gratified by the notion that we have built personal ties that transcend our national differences. I have not asked you much about Iran not from lack of interest, but because I try not to intrude in my students’ personal lives. You have been kind and friendly and smart, and all of you are cooler than I am.

I do not know how much longer you will be in the United States. I know that some of you are planning on returning home soon. Please take this message to your friends and families in Iran or elsewhere: It is evident that both authoritarian governments and democratic ones are capable of inhumanity and wickedness. The foolishness of our governments does not mean that there must be enmity between our people.

I am not tagging any of you because I do not know what Magnus Frater is watching. I never knew what was safe for you, and I no longer know what is safe for me. But I love you, and I trust that you know who you are.