July 12, Lolita Buckner Inniss, SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law professor, for a piece pointing out that Princeton University has much work to do to own up to and rid the university of anti-Black racism. Published in NJ.com and a network of affiliates in New Jersey Advance Media: https://bit.ly/32dbJTN
Princeton University’s recent decision to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its famed School of Public and International Affairs, and from its first residential college, is important because iconography matters.
Wilson, a celebrated student (he was Princeton class of 1879), scholar (he was a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and politics), university leader (he served as president of Princeton), governor, and U.S. president, was also a virulent racist whose policies resulted in great economic harm to Black communities. The removal of Wilson’s name does not alter history, nor does it promote erasure. Rather, the removal visibly dismantles the uncritical assertion of Wilson’s historical and cultural authority. It also deals a blow to the institutional embrace of anti-Black racism. . .
By Lolita Buckner Inniss
Princeton University’s recent decision to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its famed School of Public and International Affairs, and from its first residential college, is important because iconography matters.
Wilson, a celebrated student (he was Princeton class of 1879), scholar (he was a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and politics), university leader (he served as president of Princeton), governor, and U.S. president, was also a virulent racist whose policies resulted in great economic harm to Black communities. The removal of Wilson’s name does not alter history, nor does it promote erasure. Rather, the removal visibly dismantles the uncritical assertion of Wilson’s historical and cultural authority. It also deals a blow to the institutional embrace of anti-Black racism.
The removal of Wilson’s name has, moreover, caused Princeton to enter the conversation about the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that seeks to address and redress the centuries of oppression that Black people in the United States have suffered. While some of the movement’s key concerns have been with state and non-state violence wielded against Blacks, less attention has been given to the broader institutional and intellectual underpinnings of anti-Black racism.
It is important to recall that the genteel, life-of-the-mind atmospheres that are the hallmarks of elite colleges and universities like Princeton are buttressed by the profits from centuries of slavery and generations of Black oppression. Moreover, Woodrow Wilson is but a single figure among many whose actions, words, and most pointedly, whose philosophies and ideas helped to create and sustain anti-Black racism. Princeton, where I am a graduate, and other elite colleges and universities have long and deep histories of nurturing the intellectual foundations of racist, and specifically, anti-Black thought.
One significant example is seen in the work of Carl Campbell Brigham. Brigham, like Wilson, was a true son of Princeton, having obtained an AB in 1912, followed soon after by an AM and a Ph.D. Shortly after earning his doctorate, he joined the school’s fledgling psychology department. Brigham collaborated on what was known as the Army Alpha test, an assessment meant to sort recruits by intelligence.
Brigham concluded that the Nordic race was superior and that other races, especially Blacks, were markedly inferior. His work was one of the major foundations of the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited non-white immigrants. Such tests, Brigham wrote, would prove the racial superiority of white Americans and prevent “the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population.” Brigham was concerned with what he described as the “infiltration of white blood into the Negro.” Writing in the early 1920s, Brigham asserted, “We must face a possibility of racial admixture here that is infinitely worse than that feared by any European country today, for we are incorporating the negro into our racial stock, while all of Europe is comparatively free from this taint.”
Even more crucially, Brigham was the creator of the SAT, an examination that purported to measure candidates’ aptitude for higher education. While the SAT has long been touted as a neutral means of assessing the qualifications of entering college students, its creation was framed by specious claims about biological hierarchies and the limited abilities of Black people. These are ideas that had existed at Princeton and other elite colleges and universities since the late 18th century. At Brigham’s death in 1943, he was lauded in a Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary as “a gifted and loyal son of Princeton” and a “devoted servant of the truth.” But indeed, whose truth?
Few people today remember Carl Brigham. But the admissions test he created while serving as a Princeton professor, and that was steeped in a witches’ brew of racist ideologies, persists as a means of measuring students at many colleges. Use of the SAT continues despite growing cries that it is biased against Black and some other students of color.
It is noteworthy that even in this time of pandemic and widespread urban upheaval Princeton was the last of the Ivy League schools to make SAT scores optional for students in the high school graduating class of 2021. Just as Princeton examined the fuller life and works of Woodrow Wilson, one of its better-known offspring, so, too, must it examine the lives and legacies of many lesser-known but influential figures in its history. Princeton must also closely interrogate the practices that stem from those legacies.
Who we honor with our public statues, edifices and other memorial renderings speak volumes about what is pivotal among our values. Princeton’s decentering of Wilson’s hagiographic biography is a first step in the journey to a much wider acknowledgment of Princeton’s role in fostering anti-Black racism.
Lolita Buckner Inniss is the senior associate dean for academic affairs and a professor of law at SMU Dallas Dedman School of Law. She is a graduate of Princeton University, and is the author of “The Princeton Fugitive Slave: The Trials of James Collins Johnson.”