UT's racist past

Music: A Sunny Day in Glasgow: Ashes Grammar (2009)

In my film class this week I am screening Berry Gordy's Mahogany (1975), which stars one-time girlfriend (and unwilling pawn) Diana Ross. We're watching the film to illustrate Jane Gaine's critique of Laura Mulvey's conception of the gaze. Gaine's critique of Mulvey centers on psychoanalysis, which she argues misdirects attention from what she calls "the right to look": the "gaze" of the film is raced, and an overly narrow focus on the gender of gazing fails to properly reckon with the way in which the film constructs the "right to look" as "white." What Gaines helps us to see is how the film is very much a Berry Gordy manifesto for how to make it in the white world of Hollywood (a model built on his formula for making it in the white world of music): see like white people do. Despite the film's (and Gordy's) best intentions, the film ends up capitulating to the hegemonic aesthetic it aims to critique; the critique of sexism is something of a smoke-screen for reestablishing white supremacy.

Jung be praised (think "synchronicity" here), our classroom discussion about "white ways of seeing" is happening at the same time that a controversy on my campus is breaking: there is a push to rename an all-male dormitory on campus because its namesake was a ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. According to a well-documented paper by former UT law professor Thomas Russell that came to light last March, Simkins Hall Dormitory is named after William Steward Simkins, a Klan organizer and Civil War veteran who taught at UT for some thirty years. He "rode" with the KKK, participated in violence against freed slaves, and apparently gave speeches lauding this fact until his death in 1929. There's no doubt he was a white supremacist. Long after his death, the dormitory was graced with his name in 1954, a rhetorical gesture to be sure (this was the same year of the Brown vs. Board of education ruling).

Until Russell's paper, Simkins' memory seemed to fade from the radar. Today it was the top story on a number of the newscasts. What's so odd about this is that, apparently, there is resistance to changing the name of the dorm!

Given the left-leaning habits of most readers of this blog, I don't need to rehearse the reasons for renaming the dorm. The reasons for not doing so are the following:

• "To rename the building would set a huge precedent---one that could end up costing a great deal of money and time," says Leslie Blair, an Associate Director of Communications with UT's Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. "We feel that a better use of our time and money would be to continue to recruit and to provide programs that support more students, faculty, and staff from populations underrepresented at the University and to further a climate of inclusiveness and cultural diversity that looks to the future instead of dwelling on the past."
• It will be a "moot issue," at some point, says the director of DDCE Gregory Vincent, since the dorm will be torn down at some point in the future (though no one knows when that point is).
• We just erected a statue of Barbara Jordan.
• Erasing Simkin's name erases his racism, and it is therefore better to leave it.
• We need to preserve the memory of the fight for state's rights and the war of northern aggression.
• THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN!

The last two reasons, of course, are unstated in the press, but I assure you they inform the resistance to any name change. Such was the ideology informing the gifts of one of the earliest regents and most generous benefactors to the university, George W. Littlefield. Littlefield was responsible for creating the Littlefield Memorial Gateway on the UT quad, a beautiful stretch of south campus lined with statues of confederate leaders (helmed by none other than Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and George Washington).

What's astonishing to me is that this is even an issue. Apparently the Board of Regents put together a committee to mull it over and advance a recommendation at some future date, and the University President called for two "public forums" to discuss it. Of course, at the first public forum the overwhelming message from speakers was that the name should go; even so, there's another "public forum" scheduled for the issue on June 28th.

The argument offered by the university division of diversity against renaming the building seems to be about expenses. This is also surprising. UT routinely renames buildings for the right price (the "C" building in my complex was just renamed), so I cannot imagine why this is financial issue. Now, I admit I don't understand what financial issues such these pragmatics really entail, but one has to ask: what "financial" price does the university risk defending Simpkins' name? Indeed, given just about any controversial issue this is often a good question, since it shifts the ground of value back from the dollar to the symbolic; money is often a smokescreen in public discussions of symbolic controversy.

That said, the pragmatic argument in this case is morally abhorrent.

Changing the name doesn't "erase" history; rather, it forces the university administration (and the rest of us) to face the very material ways in which racism is institutionally built-into the very edifice of the university grounds. Littlefield's vision of the university was that it should be the intellectual legacy of the confederacy; defeated, he reasoned the supremacist legacy of the South would nevertheless be safeguarded by Texas' première ivory (or limestone) tower (and, yup, we got a tower: "two turntables and a microphone!").

I confess I am largely ignorant of my employer's racist past, although I am aware of it. When I screened Birth of a Nation to my class, I mentioned Littlefield's Memorial Gateway was a concrete embodiment of the film's ideology; many of my students seemed surprised. Rarely have they taken the time to read the plaques affixed to the statues on campus. I'm glad the controversy over Simkins Hall is bringing all of this to light---to the consciousness of students, faculty, staff, and alumni. That said, I'm just slack jawed: does it really take an advisory council and public forums to conclude the obvious? I daresay more money has been spent staging a dialogue on the gesture than simply changing the name. Perhaps, in the end, the dialogue is good and productive; perhaps the silver lining in all of this is the awareness the controversy is causing.