Symbolism important in fighting legacy of injustice
By Tom Reifer | 3 p.m. Dec. 12, 2015
... with the passage of the shoals of time, social change, however unevenly, towards a more inclusive multicultural society has changed our views of President Wilson. For example, while calling for a crusade to make the world safe for democracy abroad, Wilson initiated a wave of repression at home, deporting immigrant citizens such as the anarchist Emma Goldman under the Alien Act and jailing working class Socialist Party leader and five-time U.S. presidential candidate Eugene Debs under the Espionage Act for questioning the Wall Street origins of U.S. intervention in World War I.
... President Wilson’s racism and intolerance for dissent at home was accompanied by interventions tinged with racism abroad. For despite the lofty rhetoric, under Wilson, the U.S. invaded Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, abolishing Haiti’s parliament, restoring near slavery and setting up the repressive National Guard in those Caribbean states, while destroying the very Central American Court of Justice that the U.S. had helped create, for daring to rule against the U.S. in the case of Nicaragua. Revealed here too, as with the allied invasion of Russia, were the limits of Wilson “self-determination,” really only meant to apply primarily to white Europeans, and not to persons of color in European or U.S. colonies the world over.
... when the legacies of racial injustice and colonial rule still reverberate throughout our world, symbols are important. For the past is never past, but always refracted through the present. Some traditionalists have been bothered by the Princeton protests, seeing the students as disturbers of the peace, and as disrupting traditional symbols. If fact, though, as revolutionary Christian pacifist A.J. Muste noted, “human beings acquiesce too easily in evil conditions; they rebel far too little and too seldom.” And as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., argued, “Peace is not merely the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice” ...
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/dec/12/wilson-princeton-racism-protests/