Recent News - Simkins, Sherrod, and Kosovo

A few weeks ago there was a news item about a school I once attend, the University of Texas at Austin. It seems that a historian published some research he had done about William Simkins, a former law professor at UT that a dormitory near the law school had been named after. Not only had Simkins been a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 19th century, but the dorm named after him had been opened just as the nation's courts were ruling against segregation in schools. It appears that the university consciously chose to name the dorm after a known racist and KKK leader in an attempt to intimidate any blacks who might contemplate applying for UT. This research has led UT to consider renaming the dorm.

Naturally there was debate at UT and elsewhere about whether renaming the dorm was the right thing to do, and some journalists and commentators also discussed the more general issue of whether other buildings, streets, and other such things that were named after people whose views we might now question should likewise be renamed. Of course, as some pointed out, it would be difficult to rename every building in the South that is named after a Confederate leader or known member of the KKK, as there are huge numbers of them. But also, not every Confederate leader or even everyone who was at some time a member of the KKK was really reprehensible in their views and character. Robert E. Lee was certainly no worse a person, and probably better in many ways, than Union generals like William Sherman, Philip Sheridan (who was guilty of particularly bloodthirsty actions against the Native Americans after the Civil War), or even Ulysses Grant. For that matter, some prominent Southerners who were at least for a time members of the KKK were actually fairly progressive, including Bibb Graves and Hugo Black of Alabama and the recently deceased Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Also, every public figure in history did or said at least a few things that would be seen as bad today, if not in their own times. But equally obviously, someone who was guilty of egregiously terrible acts or who held particularly reprehensible opinions should not have buildings and streets named after them. Of course the most sensible approach in naming such things is to not name them after people at all (the proposed new name for Simkins dorm at UT, for instance, is Creekside).

There is, of course, a lot more to be said about this issue of names and renaming, and it is a topic of particular interest in countries like Taiwan, where large numbers of streets, districts, and even towns were renamed for political reasons by the KMT government in the mid 20th century, and in some cases by previous governments such as the Qing. But for now I'll leave the topic of Simkins, except to note that in the course of reading about it, I looked up information about UT dorms and learned that several new ones have been built since I was at school there, and many dorms that were once single sex are now co-ed. In fact, Simkins, a dorm which I remembered the name of but virtually nothing else about (I'm sure I was never inside it, and I don't think I even noticed it much when I passed by it), is now the only male-only dorm left.

Related in a way to the Simkins issue, in that it involved the reputation of an individual and a gap between perception and reality, was the Shirley Sherrod story. This one has pretty much been rehashed to death in the American media, so I'll only say that this started out as an unfortunate example of something I've touched on earlier, namely that if you try to make an overall judgment about a person (or even about a particular comment they made) based on incomplete or even biased evidence, your conclusion will be suspect, to say the least. Regrettably, the high speed, low content nature of today's media makes it easier for this sort of thing to happen. Of course it doesn't help if you have right-wing bloggers, media figures and politicians who deliberately twist and take things out of context in order to support their warped thinking. That's not to say that liberals aren't sometimes guilty of taking things out of context, or blowing slips of the tongue by politicians on the right completely out of proportion. But it seems to me (and I'll grant that this may be at least partly due to my own biases) that extremists on the right are worse in this regard (the nonexistent "death panels" and the manufactured controversy over climate scientists' private emails are just two examples that come to mind). Still, I'll give credit to the conservatives who apologized or said positive things about Shirley Sherrod and her speech -- they at least proved they could be objective about some things.

Another recent news item was the International Court of Justice ruling that Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia was not in violation of international law. This ruling is generally seen as positive for independence movements around the world and negative for governments trying to suppress them. I agree with the ruling in principle; after all, if Kosovo's declaration of independence was illegal simply because Serbia didn't approve, then the United States' declaration of independence from the United Kingdom in 1776 was similarly "illegal". But I would say that what really counts is reality. If there is a functioning independent state, than it is a country regardless of any declarations, recognition, or court rulings. So Taiwan is a country, though not widely recognized as such, and North (Turkish) Cyprus should probably be considered one too. Places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia are more questionable, as they are highly dependent on Russia (most of their citizens have Russian passport) and so they don't function like truly independent states (North Cyprus also depends fairly heavily on Turkey, but not quite to such an extent). Even Kosovo is not quite a functioning independent state, as it is still to some degree dependent on the UN and the EU.

Of course the whole issue of what sort of grouping can or should constitute a nation is complex, and worthy of a lengthier discussion. Briefly put, while I in principle support the right of regions to declare independence from larger nations, the issue is more complicated when the independence movement is ethnically based, as so many of them are, as then the issue of whether even smaller groups within the independence-seeking region should then be allowed to become independent (as is indeed an issue in Kosovo, with a Serb-majority part of Kosovo now essentially separated from the rest). Ideally, the rights of the minorities in a country should be well enough protected that they don't feel compelled to seek independence. Also, of course, below a certain minimum size it's difficult to have a truly viable state. In some ways, I'd be in favor of abolishing nation-states altogether, but then we'd have the issue of what to replace them with. Optionally, if all nations were of roughly the same size in terms of population and resources, there would be fewer instances of strong nations (e.g., China, the US, Russia, etc.) bullying the weak. But again that would take a drastic redrawing of the world's boundaries. Again, this is a topic for another day. For now, I'll simply restate my support in principle for the right to self-determination, as long as the rights of minority groups receive sufficient protection.

On a final note, here's a very interesting article by the most prominent scientist of the 20th century, talking about capitalism, socialism, and democracy:
http://monthlyreview.org/598einstein.phpo