Should Duke Restore Its Robert E. Lee Statue?

We should talk about the racial whiplash, 2020-26

Note: This essay does not represent the views of Duke University, but are instead my views offered under academic freedom. Apologies for inadvertently leaving this out of the original post.

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In August, 2017 shortly after I became the elected chair of the Academic Council (Duke’s Faculty Governance Body) President Vince Price made the decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from the nave in front of the Chapel on campus after it had been defaced. He was reasonably worried that the violence that had been visited upon Charlottesville, Va. a few days before might come to Duke University and so he acted.

I think he made the correct choice, and then he set up a process to not only discuss what the University might do with the statue of Lee, but how the community would deal with requests about renaming, removal and the like.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on locales putting statues of General Lee, other Confederate icons and Christopher Columbus back up to their positions of prominence, from which many were removed during the Summer of 2020 when COVID collided with a seemingly new conversation/reckoning with America’s legacy of race and racism. The WSJ quotes a plaintiff in a case that got a statue of Christopher Columbus restored in Ohio:

“The silent majority is becoming vocal,” said Jack Conte, 67 years old, the lawsuit’s organizer. “You reach a point where this stuff is shoved down your throat, and you can only take so much of it.”

The exact same sentiment, if not quote, could have framed various decisions to remove Confederate statues and the like in 2020. Back and forth we go. 13th Amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1866, Black codes of 1866 that applied many aspects of Slavery to being Black. Election of numerous Black leaders in 1870s-90s North Carolina, to the amendment of the State Constitution in 1900 in a way that disenfranchised many Blacks, while expanding the franchise of poor Whites.

And on and on to 2020 to 2026. What should the University do next?

I would like to make one assertion, and then one suggestion. The assertion is that Slavery is not the Original Sin of the United States, because it is not a particularly original sin even while the American version of institution was fully economic-in-inspiration. Our original sin is the idea of Race, that is the notion that some people are worth more than others. I am puzzled when folks say they wonder why we just cannot have a Race free society, when they say they do not see Race at all. I confess that I do not think this is possible, or at least not for me to not ‘see’ Race given how deep the groves are worn into my brain. However, it is a beautiful idea, and a destination to be strived for to not see divisions by Race, but do people not realize who made this impossible?

It was not Kimberle Crenshaw or Derrick Bell.

It was the First Congress of the United States, who in 1790 passed the Census Act of 1790 that was signed into law by President George Washington. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the ratified Constitution required that free persons be distinguished from those who were enslaved in order to implement the three-fifths compromise. Race is not mentioned in the Constitution [edit/correction: this is incorrect; the Constitution uses the phrase ‘Indians not taxed’], but it was legislated in the Census Act of 1790, and followed up in the Naturalization Act of 1790 that made clear only White persons could become citizens. I agree that the United States is obsessed with Race, I just date the official beginning of that to be 236 years ago, not the creation of the field of critical race theory in the 1970s, or the woke summer of 2020.

A suggestion. Universities should talk about the whiplash of Race that we have seen on campus since 2020. I believe that we can productively learn more about our history (1790 and even before) as we learn and understand more about ourselves and our fellow citizens and neighbors. I think that it is quite possible, perhaps probable, that we over-cooked some of what we did in 2020. That some was virtue signaling, that we had no idea what we were practically saying when we declared as an institution (in the case of Duke) that we would commit to being an anti-racist institution. Now that phrase cannot be found in any of our materials online. What happened? Why did we do that? What did we get wrong? What did we get right? How do we try and make it less likely for us to over-react in the future?

Duke University needs to have this conversation. And UNC, and every other campus. And there is certainly a national conversation that reckons with the whiplash that we have seen, but I think it will be most productive to bubble it up from the ground up. I have written a memoir of the period 2017-25 that is filled with mistakes that I made, so please do not hear me as saying we would have been fine if we had just followed me. When I read this article that I wrote in the Duke Chronicle in August 2019, I cringe at how I used the phrase white supremacy, which drips of performance wrapped around heartfelt self-learning and an attempt at being a campus leader.

Similarly, I would like to posit that we have swung back too far in the other direction today. That we on campus have over-interpreted the meaning of the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) 2023 Supreme Court case that made the use of Race unconstitutional for use in undergraduate admissions for public and private universities. It did not say that we could not have a Black cultural center. It did not suspend the First Amendment prohibition against government making laws to ban speech or the right to peaceably assemble on campus. The Trump Administration did say that it meant these things and more in its February 14, 2025 Dear Colleague letter that was halted by the courts, and the federal government has since given up defending it. It has no force in law today.

Maybe some of the ideas of that letter should have some force in how we structure campus. Just as Duke’s commitment to being anti racist in 2020 may have contained some ideas worth clinging to, even as the overall language did not survive more than 2 or 3 years. We should talk about this openly, often, with people free to share what they will, and with all of us bringing our best efforts to forebear with one another. If a university cannot manage to have this conversation, then who can?