Ask African-American students about their experiences in Ames and Iowa State. It's not usually a very positive experience.
Bingo. I've seen a lot of this "patting ourselves on the backs" lately from folks around CF because of the name of Jack Trice Stadium and some other slightly more progressive things for those times, but let's not pretend Ames, IA is a utopia for all races and cultures. Be careful what you criticize as there are undoubtedly racists and other skeletons in the closet at ISU from long ago and they may appear someday. Would you then think its fair if some administrator's horrendous comments from the 1950s were used by opponents to call Iowa State a racist place? It's not and that's what many are insinuating by saying UT is wrong to allow DKR stadium to be named after him.
This gets at one thing I don't like about the modern day outrage culture which is whipped up by social media: for stuff that's so removed - literally 60 plus years ago when nobody who's in charge today was around - why do people pull these events out of history and act like its somehow crucially important and reflects on the modern day institution? In this case UT is under the lense, but we could be talking about lots of different universities. Are we really surprised there were lots of bigots back then and particularly in the south?
Come on. The poster saying "he's surprised Disney will associate with them." Seriously? It's just getting ridiculous how people will draw from someone's or some institution's past to "character assassinate" when it may be 20 to 30 years or more removed. There's a reason courts of law exclude irrelevant information from evidence. A court of law is the most deliberative venue we have and the rules of evidence and civil procedure are designed to seek out truth and carefully and deliberately weigh facts. I wish the court of public opinion was more deliberative, but it just is a cesspool of this crap all the time.
People need to be smarter and not give a lot of these old stories, whose relevance is dubious in some cases or completely irrelevant in others, weight and make a big deal out of it, yet they aren't. The media / social media just keeps drudging stuff up and now an outrage posse will be whipped up over a name when there's so many bigger issues to confront and real change to try and make.
P.S. I'm not saying symbolism doesn't matter, and maybe this will lead to renaming of DKR (UT's stadium). That's fine with me to rename if he did espouse those views. I just tire of the constant game that's played these days of outrage and a person who was deemed notable for something he or she did (say athletic achievement, scholarly achievement, etc.) gets doxxed by something totally unrelated or irrelevant to the achievement which is whipped up on social media years or even decades after the totally unrelated event. People aren't perfect - NO person - can't we just accept the imperfections and move on with life?
/end late night middle-aged man rant.
