Cultural changes
Ohhhh the hell with it, let’s put the Confederate names back.
After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.
With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.
The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. At a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it deemed incompatible with a recently passed resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View.
Because it’s not altogether benign to name schools after military officers who officered on the side of a lethal centuries-long human rights violation on a massive scale. Ok? It’s not.
But a fury had been unleashed in the rural county in the mountains of Virginia. People crowded into school board meetings, denouncing the naming process as secretive and rushed, and voicing deeper resentments about cultural changes they saw as being foisted upon them.
What “cultural changes”? You mean attempts to get rid of baked-in racism rooted in centuries of injustice? Diddums.
After a re-vote ended in a tie in 2022, the name changes stood. But opponents swore that Stonewall Jackson would be revived. And on Friday, he was.
“When you read about this man — who he was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how Godly a man he was — those standards that he had were much higher than any leadership of the school system in 2020,” said Tom Streett, one the board members. Then he and four of his five colleagues voted to bring Jackson and the other names back.
What he stood for, eh? Well that would be the system of slavery. His loyalty was to the system of slavery. His leadership was of soldiers fighting to maintain a system of slavery. How “Godly” he was must have been consistent with his military defense of slavery, which should tell you all you need to know about this “God” fella.
Cultural changes plural. It’s all become conceptually linked, and the negative parts are far more salient. Now we’re getting what looks somewhat like a backfire effect. Sort of like what the TQ+ is doing to attitudes regarding the LGB. I wouldn’t be surprised to see elements of LGB progress rolled back, too.
Also, there’s the minor matter of committing treason along with the rest of the Confederacy.
I think I would rather go to a school named Mountain View than one named Stonewall Jackson. One is poetic and sounds pretty; the other? I think OB said all that needs to be said about him…for now, anyway. At least the person they named my elementary school after had long faded into obscurity; no one in the school knew – or cared – who she was.
@Nullius in Verba:
I’d argue that the treason element is the more important element even though slavery was the reason for the takedown of the names. You don’t get to use the names of enemies of the nation for public buildings… May as well have Osama Bin Laden High School or the Klaus Fuchs Memorial Library.
Southerners were and continue to be given far too much leeway in their misbehaviour.
Even here in one of the most liberal counties of Virginia, until recently we had a school partially named after Lee, a highway named after him, and another named after Jeff Davis. And of course when they were finally renamed, some people complained about “woke culture” and “erasing history”* and, of course, all the terrible expense involved in making those changes.
Jackson is practically a demigod in much of Virginia, in part because he was one of the few competent generals on either side (his death was a turning point in the war; Lee’s reputation rests largely on Jackson’s competence and the incompetence of most of the Union generals he faced). That he died defending an indefensible cause barely registers.
*Look at how the lack of statues and schools and highways named after Benedict Arnold led to his complete erasure from our collective memory, right?
BKiSA: I agree. My comment was a bit of ironic understatement.
Well, we don’t name places after traitors. But we do have a Prime Minister, Harold Holt, who drowned while swimming in the surf. He is memorialised by The Harold Holt Swim Centre.
We Skippies love our irony.
https://www.stonnington.vic.gov.au/active/Swim/Harold-Holt-Swim-Centre
Mountain View is a fine name for a school. But Honey Run Elementary? The jokes write themselves.
Awww it’s just one of those nice rural type names. I grew up in a big ol farmhouse on Bedensbrook Road.