An Alumna's Perspective on the Reagan Namesake Decision

Graphic by James Gocke

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

On April 27, The King’s College announced their decision to keep Ronald Reagan as a House Namesake, despite his racist comments referring to Tanzanian U.N. delegates as “monkeys” in a leaked phone conversation with Richard Nixon. The decision came after a newly formed Namesake Review Committee (NRC) deliberated from October 2019 to March 2020. 

Since my homeschooling, work-from-home and mother-of-five duties prevented me from weighing in before the decision was made, I was excited for the chance to have my voice heard via the Alumni Town Hall on April 30. Imagine my dismay upon realizing that the live chat feature and the ability to view fellow participants was disabled. I entered the Town Hall expecting a place to have a candid, respectful discussion as a community like the good old days of Interregnum in the windowless classrooms of the Empire State Building. What I experienced was a sanitized public relations announcement that seemed to be deflecting the deeper issue at hand. 

Yes, I understand that a new process has been created by the NRC in which current and incoming students within a house may opt to change houses. Regardless, the college administration’s choice to not remove Reagan as a House Namesake is at best, a wasted opportunity, and at worst, a cowardly decision. While Reagan is not the only problematic namesake worth reevaluating, Reagan's recorded, explicit statement should have been enough to warrant Reagan's removal as a role model to the King's community. 

This is not about being politically correct. This is not about who is a “racist” and who isn’t. No, this is not even about being “liberal” or “conservative”. Rather, this is about the battle between truth and lies. 

The idea of “racial hierarchy”,(a term borrowed from the Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson–the subject of the recent film “Just Mercy”), states that human value is based on where a person falls on the hierarchy of the man-made concept of race. This is completely at odds with the Judeo-Christian idea of imago dei, the idea that God is the author and source of human value, and that all human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 2). 

Jesus Christ, the reason this college even exists, referred to Himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6). If we call ourselves Christ-followers, we need to recognize that any distortion of truth is a direct affront to the person of Jesus Christ, and we have the duty as Christ-followers to dismantle it. 

This may be news to some of us, but the concept of race did not always exist. It has only been around for about five hundred years. 

Historian, Anthony Parent, Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University, notes that the first Africans who arrived in Jamestown were not initially or uniformly perceived as slaves. Instead, they assimilated in the Virginian colony under varying contracts like those of Europeans. In fact, numerous court records provide clear evidence that these 17th-century Africans did not act differently from whites of the same social class. They participated in governing, voting and serving on juries. They socialized and even intermarried with their white counterparts. 

The term “white” was used for the first time in a public record in 1691, when a law prohibited the marriage of Europeans with “Negroes, Indians and mulattoes,” according to Audrey Smedley, social anthropist and author of the Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. It was the beginning of the process of homogenizing all Europeans, thereby creating a separate category of “Negroes.” In this way, Historian Theodore Allen explains, colony leaders purposefully contrived a social control mechanism to keep colonists of African descent in the lowest tier of society. From then on, more laws were passed offering material advantages and social privileges to poor whites to incentivize their identification to the newly-created concept of “whiteness.” 

Race is a man-made social category that was used to attach the sense of human superiority to “whiteness,” and an inferiority to “blackness.” 

The idea of racial hierarchy is a poisonous well that we, as Americans, continue to drink deeply from, and unfortunately, this lie has since seeped into many churches in America and our college as well. 

During the Alumni Town Hall, President Tim Gibson was asked, “How are you addressing racism?” Gibson responded by saying that students learn about racism in Statesmanship and the school celebrates Black History Month. David Leedy, Dean of Students, chimed in and  referenced certain cases where incidents of racism on campus resulted in the expulsion of a student as an appropriate consequence. Why, then, is racism not similarly expelled when explicit in our namesakes’ history?

As members of the TKC community, we need to grasp that racism is not an intellectual or sociological concept, which President Gibson’s simplistic answer made it out to be. We can’t study or debate the falsity of race away. Racism, at its core, is a deeply spiritual issue. As believers in Christ, we must open our eyes and hearts to realize that race is an affront to God’s design for humans to be made in His image. When we remain silent about this fact, we give way for sin and lies to take root in our hearts. 

Like the yeast of Pharisaic legalism (Mark 8) or the sin of Achan (Joshua 7), the lie of racial hierarchy is the “hidden” sin of our college. If we as an institution continue to stay silent against racial injustice, we will compromise our ability to accurately represent Christ as an institution and a community. 

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. exhorted his readers to see that the “great stumbling block” to freedom is not the extremist, but the “white moderate” whose “shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

Some of you may have gotten to this point of this article assuming that I may be harboring some resentment toward the college. Far from it. The old adage rings true here: “the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.” As an alumnus who is ten years removed from the college, I’ve had every opportunity to disengage, yet I’ve worked hard to stay in touch with the community because of the lasting impact it has left on my friendships, intellectual habits and spiritual life.  

As full-time missionaries of Cru, my husband Moses (Class of 2008) and I raise our salary from individual contributors, many of which are King’s alumni who, like several staff members and faculty, have become lifelong friends. Dean Leedy is a mentor to us and even did our premarital counseling. My love for TKC runs deep, and I’m only writing this because I care. 

I will never learn how to completely eradicate racism, but I am committed to the ongoing process of learning about lesser-known African American history and the realities of systematic injustice that continue to plague our country. I can’t prevent the lie of racial hierarchy from rearing its ugly head every time, but I can take a hard look at my own biases and privileges as a working-class first generation Asian-American immigrant.

My family hails from the Philippines, and I grew up in New Jersey suburbia in which most classrooms, mine was the only brown face in a sea of white. I have witnessed my parents, who speak and understand English fluently, be patronized and wrongly labeled as uneducated because of their strong filipino accent. Despite the racial trauma my family and I have experienced, I realize on the mythical racial hierarchy, I retain a privilege and platform as an Asian due to my proximity to “whiteness”--whether it is having a lighter skin tone than my black brothers and sisters, or having straight hair. It would be easier and more convenient for me to stay silent, but my Christian faith compels me to speak up against the ways that systems and institutions continue to suppress and limit fellow image-bearers from reaching their full potential. 

Friends, like King David in the Psalms, let’s pray the brave prayer to our heavenly Father, and pray expectantly for Him to answer: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.”