"Not all landmarks that echo [Junipero] Serra’s name will be re-christened," The Stanford Daily reports in
"University to rename Serra House, Serra Mall following two years of controversy."
Serra Street, which stretches from the end of Serra Mall to El Camino Real, will retain its name. The dorm Junipero — named for the juniper tree rather than Serra, despite popular misconceptions — will remain unchanged.
The disparagement of very real feelings as "misconceptions" is microaggression. Why should the viewpoint of those who did the naming take precedence over the effect the name has on the students whose day to day lives go on under the burden of that name? If there were a dorm called Hitler that happened to be named after an obscure donor, would you shrug it off?
“We hope that renaming the two Serra houses and Serra Mall will remove a significant hurt to Native Americans, other members of the Stanford community and the larger diverse world that Stanford seeks to embrace,” [says the report of the Advisory Committee on Renaming Junipero Serra Features]. “We also acknowledge that respect for historic continuity with Stanford’s founding reflected in our recommendation to maintain the names of other features named for Spanish missionaries and settlers may continue to cause concern for some.”
Why should the committee's "hope" inspire Native Americans to stand down after this victory? How has
their hope fared in the scheme of "respect for historic continuity"?
“For many of the participants, Serra’s name evokes the entire history of oppression of Native Americans,” the committee wrote....
But other interest groups on campus sought to curb efforts at renaming. The issue is of special relevance to the Roman Catholic community, since Serra was canonized as a saint in 2015.... Catholic stakeholders also said the committee should not attribute all problematic components of the mission system to Serra, as some factors were beyond his individual knowledge and power.
That argument is reminding me of the current image problem of Pope Francis, so I'm wondering how it feels to students at Stanford. It seems tone deaf, but I'm also concerned that this entire campaign against Serra is being experienced as anti-Catholic.
The committee summarized the Catholic community’s viewpoint with the statement of one individual, who said they would be “disappointed but not angry,” if features honoring Serra were renamed. As a result, the committee determined that “the harms avoided by renaming outweigh the harms of renaming,” and thus, renaming is “not disrespectful,” according to the report.
So the offense to Catholics was considered but minimized and rejected as outbalanced.
“Whenever you are trying to accommodate or balance competing interests, the chances are that you are going to reach an accommodation that is not completely on one side or another of what people would like,” [Committee chair and former Stanford Law Dean Paul] Brest said. “That’s the nature of accommodating different interests. The hope is that this is a balance that both significantly reduces the negative experience of members of the community and preserves the history at the same time.”
There's that "hope" again! God help them, I do believe they are trying, but from what wellspring does this hope arise?
Posts
92 comments:
Let’s get real. Name the streets and buildings after rich and famous Stanford alums and local Silicon Valley CEO’s.
The Google Guys. Steve Jobs. Dave Packard. Marissa Meyers. Meg Whitman. Senator Spartacus.
Que Serra sera.
I worked on the Apache reservation for three years. I learned the history of the Apaches before the white man arrived. They were horrible to The Pueblos and to their women. They viewed Mexicans like cattle.
The Comanches had similar disdain for the Apache.
The local university has a women's dorm named Beaver Hall, which I assume was the name of the donor.
"The bottom line is that the human mind is prepared for tribalism. Human evolution is not just the story of individuals competing with other individuals within each group; it’s also the story of groups competing with other groups—sometimes violently. We are all descended from people who belonged to groups that were consistently better at winning that competition. Tribalism is our evolutionary endowment for banding together to prepare for intergroup conflict.29 When the “tribe switch”30 is activated, we bind ourselves more tightly to the group, we embrace and defend the group’s moral matrix, and we stop thinking for ourselves. A basic principle of moral psychology is that “morality binds and blinds,”31 which is a useful trick for a group gearing up for a battle between “us” and “them.” In tribal mode, we seem to go blind to arguments and information that challenge our team’s narrative. Merging with the group in this way is deeply pleasurable—as you can see from the pseudotribal antics that accompany college football games."
Lukianoff, Greg. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (p. 58). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The Comanches had similar disdain for the Apache.
One engine good, two engines bad.
Sera was the emissary of the Pope who had given the New World ( other than Brazil by accident) to The King of Spain for a cut of the loot. The hill and bay next to Sera's Mission in Carmel was the Spanish Military headquarters named Mount of the King ( Monterey) But if all that needs memory holling , than all the Spanish named cities for saints in California need to be changed too.
We are all descended from people who
"We" always means pop psychology. Replace them all with "I" and reread.
The hand-wringing by nice administrators who feel caught in the middle is always a bit misleading. Progressives used to think all cultures were equal. The old white male culture could "stay," as long as it didn't grow (there was probably always a hope that it was on the decline), and resources had to be put into the new, diverse cultures. Now, perhaps partly because budgets can't grow the way they used to, something has to give, and progressives are approaching a clear and consistent view that only one culture is evil--the old white male one in the West. In principle, no statue or name on a building is safe. Of course, the progressives may not launch an attack on all of them at once. There is more likely to be a somewhat arbitrary, even desultory effort to pick off one at a time, in response to this or that deserving group. It is progressives educated in the West, often white progressives, who are in the driver's seat. I like quoting Sarah Jeong: intersectionality means that white women get to speak for everyone.
Set aside wampum way for native American brothel and firewater establishments.
All cultures are not equal. If we don't recognize that fairly soon, the cultures that say all cultures are equal are going to be overwhelmed by the cultures that realize all cultures are not equal.
Had trouble following this stuff. The man became a saint? Was he a good person, kind to the natives around him? If so, why should anyone think of him with bitterness? Would the natives have been better off with a different person in charge?
If he was a bad person, abusing the natives, how did he become a saint in the first place?
Instead of renaming buildings, why not just deed the Stanford campus to a local tribe so they can open a casino? Then send all the snow flakes home.
"the Clayman Institute for Gender Studies".
No need to say anymore...........
Does Stanford have blue-eyed blond Injuns like Harvard does?
Universities admit too many students who cannot or will not read at the university level. Most of those students fail academically.
Such students are disproportionately racial or ethnic minorities who are admitted -- despite being inadequate readers -- because they are racial or ethnic minorities.
The university bureaucrats who are paid to foster minorities guide and encourage them to blame their academic failures on trivial stuff like statues, building names, Halloween costumes, graffiti, and sombreros at fraternity parties. Supposedly, the minorities are so insulted by this stuff that they cannot concentrate on their studies.
Supposedly, after all this bothersome stuff is removed from the university, then the non-reading minorities will become capable students.
In fact, though, even after all that stuff is removed from the university, the students who cannot or will not read at the university level will continue to fail academically.
If Catholics had suicide bombers they'd get more deference.
Simple solution:
Auction off the naming rights to all buildings, roads, spaces, etc. on campus. Got a problem with the name of your dorm? Fine, raise enough money an rename it.
Capitalism- It's the American way!
Go Daddy™ is Bliss
The committee summarized the Catholic community’s viewpoint with the statement of one individual, who said they would be “disappointed but not angry,” if features honoring Serra were renamed.
So by virtue of being the adults in the room they lost. Here's another example:
Rick Mehta
All you have to do is be willing to say obviously stupid shit - for example that disagreeing with someone puts them "at risk" - and the adult is fired.
If they really want to cleanse themselves of their hegemonic and genocidal past they should abandon the place altogether. Renaming is no more than a superficial feel good move.
-sw
Is La Raza allied with Native American groups or against them?
I hope the incongruity the obvious.
Charles Murray wrote a book titled Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality.
There he presented a series of passages from high-school textbooks and then a series of passages from university textbooks. The comparison demonstrates clearly that there is a big difference in difficulty.
Students who barely read their high-school textbooks will not be able to raise their reading skills up to university level. They will fail academically in their first year or two at the university.
They read too slowly, and they do not want to even try to read such textbooks. It's torture for them.
And so, instead, they spend their time protesting the names of buildings on the campus.
The left constantly claimed that the contributions of non-westerners were "erased" Western culture but that, once again, was just projection of what they want to do to western civilization.
"It seems tone deaf, but I'm also concerned that this entire campaign against Serra is being experienced as anti-Catholic."
It's not anti-Catholic, it's anti-European. This silliness is the predictable consequence of several generations of "elites" believing their own bullshit. (An elite that isn't on the downslide maintains a detached, if respectful, stance toward the necessary mythos of the society it presumes to rule. Ours, in full decay, gutted that mythos and replaced it with a simple-minded, dysfunctional fundamentalist creed from which they keep no distance at all.)
The "problem" is that everything there - the city, the streets, the institutions, the nation and culture itself, are things built by the European conquerors. The natives lost their fight to hold their territory, a fight that was just one among the endless instances of tribal warfare and conquest that have gone on since before we were even home sapiens.
Americans used to be a lot more clear-sighted and honest about this, and understood what conquest meant and what had to follow from it. What the goodthinkers label "denial about what horrible, horrible people your ancestors were, and your shameful, shameful history" was actually understanding (and pride in being the winners in the fight for territory, like human being everywhere).
If those among the oh-so-sensitive with European ancestors (just about all of 'em, I'm betting) believed in the moral narratives they use for the bullshit games they play, they'd clear out of North America entirely.
"The Comanches had similar disdain for the Apache."
More than disdain. Apaches used to reside in west Texas until liquidated by
the Comanche. The Apache were reduced to begging for sanctuary in the Spanish missions
of New Mexico.
“Whenever you are trying to accommodate or balance competing interests, the chances are that you are going to reach an accommodation that is not completely on one side or another of what people would like,” [Committee chair and former Stanford Law Dean Paul] Brest said. “That’s the nature of accommodating different interests.
This, in a nutshell, shows the lie behind the "diversity is strength" religion sweeping (away) this country.
Why should the viewpoint of those who did the naming take precedence over the effect the name has...
Because it is wrong to celebrate, honor, and *actively create* ignorance. Yes, it is possible to make intellectual entropy go both ways. These are indeed strange times.
If he was a bad person, abusing the natives, how did he become a saint in the first place?
In 1960, a(n) hysterical woman imagined that Serra cured her lupus, and Pope John Paul George and Ringo thought it was magical.
Wasn't Serra an undocumented non-citizen from what is now Mexico?
Enjoy Serra x Woodblock Chocolate 20mg CBD Relief Squares for $5 until 9/19
Mike Sylwester: "They read too slowly, and they do not want to even try to read such textbooks. It's torture for them.
And so, instead, they spend their time protesting the names of buildings on the campus."
I wonder what percentage of these woke young people understand their lack of preparation and/or ability with any clarity. They've been fed external-actor "explanations" - racism, sexism, somebody else's "privilege", "micro-aggressions", "stereotype threat", etc., etc., etc. - for their own shortcomings all of their lives.
So I doubt, at that age, that the protesting is the product of cynicism or any kind of realistic appraisal (for most of them). They are, however, easily manipulated by the more clear-sighted, who can see profitable career opportunities in the ecosystem they find themselves in.
Serra cured her lupus
The link translates to "thickened poop".
you'll be Very hard pressed to find an Indian people (or, ANY tribe of ANY people), who didn't get their land the old fashioned way that GOD intended: Killing and/or enslaving the current inhabitants and moving on in.
in other news: IF we're going to stop stuff (like naming houses) 'cause it upsets some people; what about actions (that we mean well by doing), that some other people find terribly disrespectful (like, i don't know: maybe kneeling during our National Anthem)?
If we should Stop naming houses after pine trees, 'cause it hurts people's feeling; should we find some other way to show our concern with the large number of killings in the Chicago area?
Oh, sorry; I was just being rhetorical
the students who cannot or will not read at the university level will continue to fail academically.
The solution, of course, is to get rid of the successful students who embarrass the minorities so that they will now succeed in the new curriculum that they can master. Then the tech industry can completely replace the white, European descended employees with more imports from India and China. Since these new employees will all be using H1B visas there will be no problem of the occasional conservative leaking secret videos.
See how that works ?
"The offense to Catholics was considered but minimized and rejected as outbalanced."
So what else is new?
A straight-up power play: Go find a target that you think you can destroy, then do so. Maybe align with some other power group. Catholic church is pretty much de-fanged, so they get a lot of this grief.
The only way to defeat this is to stand up and fight back. Sometimes, if the target shows enough spine, tooth, and claw, the attackers will fight among themselves. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Vienna, the commander Kara Mustafa Pasha was strangled by his own troops.
(That last reference courtesy of WierdDave at ace.mu.nu, and Wikipedia. I'm not that great of a military historian)
Catholics, take note. Being “disappointed but not angry” weakens your position. Next time be angry and throw a fit because that’s what gets rewarded nowadays.
In fact, though, even after all that stuff is removed from the university, the students who cannot or will not read at the university level will continue to fail academically.
...but the administrators who woke up and did all this fashionable academic bullshit will still be doing their big-bucks fake jobs.
The Leftist Collectivist desire for power cannot be sated.
Anybody who gives into them is either a co-conspirator or is hoping the alligator eats them last.
But Leftism consumes everything if we let it.
"Why should the viewpoint of those who did the naming take precedence over the effect the name has on the students whose day to day lives go on under the burden of that name?"
Why shouldn't it? Or rather, why do you automatically assume that the latter rightly takes precedence over the former? Examine the assumptions you make in the way you formulate the question: it's an issue of dead people (whose feelings don't matter) vs. living people (whose feelings do matter).
A model which hardly begins to explain what's going on. You may find some insight into the real nature of the issue in that bit on tribalism you quoted, above. (Hey, if the conquered natives or newcomers don't like what the people they consider their enemies and oppressors built and honor, why don't they fight them and take their land, destroy their works, and build up towns and institutions to their own liking on the razed ground? Or don't raze it, but at least have the manners to conquer it fair and square before presuming to waltz right in and measure for new drapes.)
This is not a matter of "accommodating the different (but ultimately compatible) interests" of people who share a culture, a view of the civic order. There is no pony at the bottom of this enormous and ever-growing pile of offenses and demanded accommodations, no matter how frantically you shovel.
"If there were a dorm called Hitler that happened to be named after an obscure donor, would you shrug it off?"
If good faith can't make a pony materialize at the bottom of that pile of shit, why the hell would anyone think Godwinizing could?
Total failure. What they need to do is outlaw the use of Spanish names, period. There should be no Spanish names for places, roads, or buildings. The Feather Indians will understand, they hated the Spanish far more than they hated the Anglos.
Ann Althouse said...the disparagement of very real feelings as "misconceptions" is microaggression.
This is tendentious framing.
The question is how do we calculate psychic harm & whose feelings matter.
Some people want the names changed. Some people don't. There are feelings involved on both sides of the issue. How do you assess which side is correct?
The standard method is to simply decide that some people's feelings (and beliefs) matter and some people's don't (or, at best, matter much less). It just so happens that the people whose feelings matter are the good people--those who agree with whatever today's Leftist/Progressive line is, and the people whose feelings don't matter are the bad people--those who disagree with Progressives.
In other words, it's bullshit. Pretending to care about "feelings" in that sense--disconnected from political beliefs and evaluated without reference to those political beliefs--is always and everywhere fake. No one cares about the feelings of the people who dislike seeing statues memorializing Confederate dead torn down--people expressing such feelings are mocked and condemned (since those feelings can only spring from racist/white supremacists beliefs, naturally).
Claiming to make a decision based on feelings and/or an evaluation of the feelings involved on both sides of an issue is a form of civility bullshit, Professor. It's cover for an attempt to use a metric that by definition cannot be accurately measured and provide justification for taking an action you want to take anyway...and those actions will always just HAPPEN to align with the Progressive political demand.
I thought you opposed such bullshit Professor.
"Golly we really were fair and stacked the feelings of one side on one end of the scale and the feelings of the other side on the other end and wouldn't you know it, the feelings of the side pursuing the Progressive policy just happened to be much heavier! It's just science, you know, and complaining just means you don't care about people's very real feelings."
Yeah...that's bullshit.
If everything offends someone and history remains a continuing butthurt to the losers, perhaps Stanford could follow luxury-car makers, and just use letters?
For example, Lincolns used to be name "Mark (this or that)" but now they have names like MKZ, MKX, MKC, MKT instead.
And then there's Cadillac's ATS, CTS, XTS, CT6 (etc.)
BMW offers the X1, X3, X4, i8.
So, let the streets be ST1, ST2, ST3. Dorms can be SD1, SD2, SD3.
Trash the past, let everything begin anew, it's Year Zero!
(Which didn't work so well last time, but, this time will be different. Won't it?)
I'll wager $100 that Serra Street will also be renamed within the next 5 years. Any takers?
The is just the Left-wing destroying anything they think is "Christian" or "White".
It has zero to do with real-life people "Caring" about others "feeling bad".
But who cares? The Left runs 90% of the Universities and everyone else seems to be fine with it. And this the kind of thing, you get when Leftists run things.
They're natural born censors and tyrants.
If the Catholics are upset, let them form their own universities.
Oh, wait...
All the Left-wing victimhood and the fight over who's the biggest victim gets hilarious and weird at times.
The Irish-American Pols, for example, are always trying to muscle into the "We were victims too" by talking about "No Irish need apply" signs 150 years ago - but their black/Brown voters don't seem impressed.
Why not just rename it "Redskin" street and the building "Honky-ville"?
Leland Stanford wasn’t a saint. So they should run that “balancing of hurt feelings” methodology and rename the University. Maybe something like the Bullied and Underrepresented Local Latinos School for Healthy Indigenous’ Treatment.
I’m sure BULLSHIT Univerisrty won’t offend anyone and it has a ring of honesty to it....
Ann Althouse said...
"The disparagement of very real feelings as "misconceptions" is microaggression."
Microaggression n.: 1. A term used to shut down logical discourse. 2.Civility bullshit.
gilbar said...IF we're going to stop stuff (like naming houses) 'cause it upsets some people; what about actions (that we mean well by doing), that some other people find terribly disrespectful (like, i don't know: maybe kneeling during our National Anthem)?
Yes; good example. Seeing players kneeling during the anthem harms the FEELINGS of many Americans (millions, possibly). Are their FEELINGS accorded any respect or moral weight by the nice smart people like Professor Althouse?
No, of course not: at best they're told they are wrong to be offended (because the kneelers don't intend disrespect to good cause X, only to bring attention to good cause Y) and that's just a form of the microaggression of disparaging those very real feelings as "misconceptions" that Professor Althouse objected to in the instant case. More typically people expressing those feelings are accused of being racists. Which, you know, I would imagine hurts their feelings too...
Anyway it's bullshit--as gilbar's example shows there is never a good-faith examination or evaluation of feelings on all sides of these kinds of issues. The feelings of one side are used as evidence of a need for change/action and the feelings of the other side are either dismissed or used as evidence that anyone on that side is a bad person (racist, sexist, homophobic, etc).
An appeal to feelings in this manner is always and everywhere bullshit--a tactic to silence opponents and obfuscate the reason for taking some action.
Not too long ago we used to laugh at/mock the Helen Lovejoy-esque hysterical appeals to "think of the children!" Today we're supposed to consider everyone as mental/psychological children.
It's bullshit.
Yes, I saw that HoodlumDoodlum and perhaps a couple others had said the same thing...I had to add my lepton to the pot.
I look forward to the day Mexico, Central and South America stop speaking the language of their European oppressors and return to Qhucheua, Cakchiquel, Kekchi and Mam.
Stanford is populated by wannabes who Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rejected.
But their girls sports teams are good.
No self/respecting guy goes to a college named after a guy named Leland.
Wasn't Serra an undocumented non-citizen from what is now Mexico?
I would be all for that kind of rule as long as we are not collectively responsible to dole out benefits to the ones who don’t want to work, like in those days. You can’t have a welfare state and open borders.
Stanford is not a Catholic institution, and naming things after St. Junipero Serra were not meant as religious acts. Rather, these were a bit of California nationalism, Serra and the missions being such a large part of the Californian heritage. There isn't much else that California can count as heritage after all.
You see this striving for heritage in Stanfords architecture.
It comes from when Stanford had a concern for institutional credibility. In the Spanish sense they needed to be born of something, an hijo de algo (hidalgo). Hence the borrowed symbolism. A rather strained borrowing, but there was at the time a need for cultural roots, even if they had to make them up.
From a Catholic point of view they can rename what they like, being that the institution itself is entirely profane and its connection with anything Catholic is and has always been ersatz.
From a Californian point of view this is as a matter of the heritage of Stanford proper, which is by now a matter of Californias heritage, of which Stanford has a part. But the value of heritage is going away. Stanford is at the cutting edge of cultural dissasociation and the expunging of all cultural roots. The modern ideal is of persons with no attachments, no family or clan, no continuity and no need to create a patrimony.
The architectural heritage of Californias Indians amounts to some holes in rocks where the Miwok ground pine nuts.
The literary heritage of Californias Indians are transcribed statements of late survivors.
The genetic heritage of Californias Indians is preserved in that of the rather few genuine Californio families, which still exist. But they were fully hispanicised in their day, and fully anglicised since.
I'm quite thankful that people came to England and converted my ancestors.
"Stanford is populated by wannabes who Harvard, Yale, and Princeton rejected."
Stanford's acceptance rate is lower.
Thankful for the Romans too who probably weren't very nice to them.
Just to be clear, Mexico stole California from Spain who stole it from the Indians.
North American tribes and nations lost because of inter and intra-tribal conflict, including genocide and slavery. Very similar to what happened in Africa. Native Americans will lose our country with the establishment of the Pro-Choice Church and progress of internal divisions, ideological nihilism, diversity (i.e. color judgments including racism, sexism), political congruence ("="), and the elective Planned Parenthood genocide (i.e. selective and recycled-child) and dodo dynasties. Americans to embrace their Constitutional and Christian principles, stand strong, and stand their ground.
Nuclear weapons and military might will only prevent an external power from invading and opening abortion fields as was done in South Africa, Libya, Serbia, Ukraine, etc.
"very real feelings"? What a load of fucking bullshit! NO ONE'S FEELINGS ARE HURT BY THE NAMES ON THE FUCKING BUILDING! IT'S A SHAM! THEY'RE LYING! It's about power and the school has decided to abdicate it to a bunch of fucking crazies. Disgraceful.
Next, they will ban fourth-graders from building macaroni missions as part of their California History project. Who Nipper Oh is how you pronounce his first name.
If there were a dorm called Hitler that happened to be named after an obscure donor, would you shrug it off?
Yes, because I'm a grown-ass adult who isn't terrified by the existence of names that are shared with Bad Stuff?
If we let the sort of facile "optics" that freshmen and activists hypersalivate* over run our lives, we should just give up on civilization.
(As Eric Raymond just put it, Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing. Never listen to such people when they demand you obey them.)
(* I like it, it's a great coinage.)
(Also, Stanford needs better students, who aren't Consumed With The Feels over ancient names of buildings Because Someone Was Awful.
Microaggressions? Tell me when they've got a thousand of them and it's risen to a milliaggression, okay?
And then eventually it might manage, with three more orders of magnitude, to be an aggression against them.)
My personal impression is that the degree of Native American offense is inversely proportional to the percentage of Native American genes. Trigger sensitivity approaches approaches infinity as actual genetic material approaches zero. Using that calculus, this could merely be Stanford offering the peace pipe to Fauxahontas protecting against her becoming the Great White Mother.
The left will never be satisfied until you are dead.
"The disparagement of very real feelings as "misconceptions" is microaggression."
No, it is a sign of respect: don't rely on your "feelings," think and rethink.
"Why should the viewpoint of those who did the naming take precedence over the effect the name has on the students whose day to day lives go on under the burden of that name?"
Because the many of us among the living want parts of our shared past to be respected and because the claim to be burdened is phony.
"If there were a dorm called Hitler that happened to be named after an obscure donor, would you shrug it off?"
If it were so named before Adolf's rise to power, of course I'd shrug it off.
“We hope that renaming the two Serra houses and Serra Mall will remove a significant hurt to Native Americans, other members of the Stanford community and the larger diverse world that Stanford seeks to embrace,”"
Diversity bullshit: claiming to promote diversity in the act of suppressing actual diversity, scorching the earth to make it safe for prog feelings only. Of course, the only "hurt" "Native Americans" can legitimately claim is the one cause by mean whiteys: no fair pointing out that Native Americans used to kill Native Americans, with tools provided by whitey, eagerly sought by native Americans.
"The committee summarized the Catholic community’s viewpoint with the statement of one individual, who said they would be “disappointed but not angry,”"
It helps to have experience in bending over and taking it.
"outbalanced"
Who would have predicted it?
"I do believe they are trying, but from what wellspring does this hope arise?"
They are indeed trying, to make the world safe for progressivism ueber allies. Hope is a tool in their power play: hope bullshit.
The taliban is alive and well in the democrat party.
The HORROR!! The horror...
Serra was actually rather protective of the indigenous peoples against the harsh treatment of the Spanish military/political authorities.
In addition to traversing the California wild, about 900 miles on foot, and establishing missions that later became many of today's cities of California, to help the native populations, Junipero Serra introduced agriculture and irrigation systems and helped create a system of roads, and he had frequent disputes with the Spanish military over their treatment.
In time, he walked to Mexico City to meet with the government and there he pressed for a system of law to protect the native people against the abuses of the Spanish - what he obtained was basically a bill of rights for these native people. Those indigenous who converted, Serra kept segregated to protect them from corruption, abuse or exploitation by the Spanish.
Leland U should give the land back to the Natives and convert itself to an online institution. Or just dissolve. Maybe mass suicide by the administration and board of trustees. A blood self sacrifice for the Natives.
Anything less is just bullshit. But the Natives are easily placated. Their Chiefs are White Guys who keep selling them out. At a certain point, they deserve what they get. Such is the fate of conquered people
Stalingrad.
Stanford was better when they were still the Indians.
And as the descendant of Huguenots, when do I get to cry victim for stuff that happened centuries ago?
Actually, some College should name one of their dorm buildings "Hitler" and another "Stalin"
And see who complains about what.
"And as the descendant of Huguenots, when do I get to cry victim for stuff that happened centuries ago?"
Talk to the Irish. They've made an art of it.
Cromwell anyone?
Talk to the Irish. They've made an art of it.
You need an Oppressor with deep pockets if you want to make money from your Victimhood. The Irish only have the Brits, who are just about broke. The Huguenots have the French, who are notoriously tight, or the Church of Rome . Good luck with that bunch.
A story, perhaps apocryphal, concerns a prominent New England family, the Hoars. Supposedly they were going to donate a dormitory to Harvard, when someone realized that they did not want a dorm called "Hoar House."
As a descendant of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and a little Basque, I have grievances galore!!
I'm also extremely grieved by Direct TV and AT&T.
Since there is nothing I can do about those first categories of long long ago wrongs which were done to long dead people and about which there is nothing to be done..... I'm concentrating on Direct TV and AT&T with my grievous wrath. I'll probably fail there too, but...heck....at least they are in this century.
"To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. Large numbers of this class are already here; and, unless we do something early to check their immigration, the question, which of the two tides of immigration, meeting upon the shores of the Pacific, shall be turned back, will be forced upon our consideration, when far more difficult than now of disposal. There can be no doubt but that the presence among us of numbers of degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration."
- Leland Stanford, the eventually former christener of Stanford University.
Stanford supported the Chinese Exclusion act.
Get rid of his name on the University.
I suggest renaming Stanford, Bezos U. - or maybe Fuc Yu University.
Junipero Serra introduced agriculture and irrigation systems and helped create a system of roads, and he had frequent disputes with the Spanish military over their treatment.
Before Serra, California Indians subsisted on fish and acorns. As our pharmacology professor, in non-PC days, explained, acorns are very constipating. The Indians discovered that certain bark worked well as a laxative and called it "Cascara Sagrada," sacred bark, as a result.
Of course this is of no interest to the "Cardinal" Stanford privileged.
sia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population.
Ah yes, the “yellow peril,” kind of like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.
maybe Fuc Yu University.
Sorry that has been taken by FUCLA.
In addition to traversing the California wild, about 900 miles on foot,
Serra, or the Spanish, cast mustard seeds as they trekked north in the Spring. It helped to find their way the following Spring.
In Spring, mustard blossoms show the path of the Spanish/Serra trek. All the way to San Francisco.
Stanford’s acceptance rate is lower.
While I agree with you that Stanford is a fine university, a lot of stuff goes into “acceptance rates.” I remember Keith Olberman using that line to defend his Kow Kollege degree from Cornell.
I recommend Elias Castillo's book, A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California's Indians by the Spanish Missions, which includes Serra's letters and contemporary accounts by traveler who were shocked at the treatment of Mission Indians. (The author is a friend of mine.)
Serra traveled 900 miles on foot to help the California Indians.
But still a white racist.
I think the Pope would agree. After all, we need more Muslims in Europe. Per the Vatican.
BTW, as someone who visits the Bay Area regularly, the number of Asians v. Native Americans in Palo Alto is about 150 to 1. But I'm so glad, Stanford is changing the name.
There was a Knights of Columbus building in my neighborhood that is now called the Catholic Multicultural Center. They are defeating themselves.
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