What can we do to help this campus, and our country move beyond the legacy of slavery and the endemic racism that remains our present-day reality.
"Failure to remember, collectively, triumphs and accomplishments diminishes us. But failure to remember, collectively, injustice and cruelty is an ethical breach. It implies no responsibility and no commitment to prevent inhumanity in the future. Even worse, failures of collective memory stoke fires of resentment and revenge."
This fall, the SUNY New Paltz Diversity and Inclusion Council submitted its report on the renaming of the Hasbrouck Dormitory Complex. The council took a clear position: to rename the buildings that, at one time, honored the “founding” Huguenot families in New Paltz — Bevier, Deyo, Du Bois, Le Fevre, Crispell, and Hasbrouck. Like other European settlers in New Paltz — Dutch, English and French Huguenot — these families owned slaves. Not surprisingly, many of the African-American students who have lived in the dorms over the years found these “monuments” to French Huguenot slave owners insulting and enraging. Finally, the heated national discourse about monuments in the South, and the struggle of other universities to address their questionable monuments, brought the dormitory re-naming controversy on the SUNY campus to a head. A special committee was formed, testimony taken, and a report generated.
I became a citizen of New Paltz in March 2018, in the midst of the turmoil. During the first week I was here I met a Huguenot descendant in the locker room at the gym. We talked about lap swimming, our children, climate change and the re-naming controversy. She’d submitted a letter to the committee and sent a copy to me on email. It was eloquent, poignant and slightly defensive. The past is past, it said. The Huguenots were fleeing from persecution. There were also some good Huguenots — abolitionists, in fact. I was captivated by these specious arguments, and began to read avidly the history of the town.
They are also missing from the town itself. They are gone, expunged, fled, decimated by disease, warfare, enslavement and poverty. All that remains are Esopus names —everywhere — a Sojourner Truth library on the campus, and slave dwellings in the stone houses at the Huguenot Historic Site.
I am a child of Holocaust survivors; my extended family was murdered in the camps or by death squads on the streets of Vienna and Prague. For a long time, into my middle-age, I could not tolerate the sound of German, or contemplate befriending a German, even a young German born after the war. There is an analogy to my new Huguenot-descended friend’s experience of shunning and shame. She is the “German” in the eyes of the student protesters. One day, as we were walking on the rail trail with her two young children, she asked me what I thought she should tell them about their ancestors. That troubling question is the foundation of raised awareness and reconciliation.
I wrote a book about my mother’s family that required research in Austria and Czechoslovakia; there I confronted, for the first time, an attempt to memorialize the Nazi atrocity in cities cleansed of original Jewish families. The city officials who “handled” my press tours usually began with the sentence: “There is nothing we can do to make up for the horrors of the Holocaust. We are so sorry.” At the time, I did not know how to respond to these anodyne, formulaic apologies. Only later, when the post-apartheid South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work, did I realize what I required: a process of re-education that we now call “restorative” justice or “transitional” justice, whereby the whole community comes together, with trained facilitators, to talk openly about their shared history, to resolve complex emotions, and to find ways to heal.
My daughter and son-in-law settled in the mountains overlooking New Paltz more than a decade ago, and I thought I knew it well. Monthly visits were enjoyable, of course, but living here is different. As a born and bred New Yorker, the homogeneous demographics of the town — except for the university — startled me. How has this happened? Why has it happened? These, too, are important questions to ask at this time in American history.
I speak as a descendant of genocide and an educator. The renaming of the dormitories on the SUNY New Paltz campus is an educational opportunity that could benefit the entire community — beyond the campus, beyond any one Huguenot family, or slave descendant, or citizen of the Hudson Valley where the institution of slavery was established by the first Dutch inhabitants and passed on, without question, to the British and French Huguenot immigrants. Renaming the dormitories is not enough. Even apologies are not enough. We all must ask what we can do to help this campus, this particular town, and our country as a whole to move beyond the legacy of slavery and the endemic racism that remains our present-day reality.
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