States affect our position on issues of current importance. The core assumption — that it is even possible to “get over it” — reflects a linear way of thinking, an understanding of history as something that can be divided into “now” and “then,” separate and discrete entities with no relationship to each other.

A “now” and “then” way of thinking — which, ironically enough, is reflected in some of Carrie Chapman Catt’s texts — is based on the belief that history is moving “forward,” as in the statement, “time marches on.” In this way of thinking, the biological evolutionary model is used to explain human cultures, with the implicit assumption that, as we evolve we somehow “improve.” Survival of the fittest ensures that our cultures will always be “better” than they once were.

Such a way of thinking imagines some utopian future, when all the current divisions and petty squabbles of our culture will be “behind” us; we will have “risen above” our current status. It imagines history and culture as progressing in one direction, much like the time lines so popular in history texts.

But such a way of thinking about history — particularly when applied to a figure such as Carrie Chapman Catt, who is held up as an example to which we should aspire by many administrators at this university — makes it possible for us to separate ourselves, our current beliefs and values, from what we perceive as “the past.”

We become convinced that what Catt said and did, when looked at in the context of her times, is removed from us somehow, that it is possible to separate “then” and “now” in such a way that we can claim hero status for Catt based on some of her activities and writings, while ignoring, silencing, and forgetting other activities and writings.

Using such a view of history and its relationship to our lives, some would defend Catt by making the claim that she was no worse than any of her contemporaries, but that it all happened a long time ago and no one behaves like that any more.

This claim can be answered by challenging the core assumption: history is not “what’s over and done with,” to be looked back upon with either pride or shame; as the critic and scholar Louis Montrose notes, students (and, I would add, all the rest of us as well) must “understand that they live in history, and that they live history” (“Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” In The New Historicism Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989, 15-36, 25).

Once we surrender the idea that history is synchronic — moving forward with past and present always separateÿ— and begin to accept a diachronic understanding of history, one in which our perceptions of the past alter and construct our perceptions of the present, it is no longer possible to excuse racism and xenophobia because “everyone did it then.” The past cannot be left behind.

Carrie Chapman Catt’s racist and xenophobic public statements (which she never repudiated) are not something that we can put away from us as old and irrelevant because she is part of our present. The decision to honor her accomplishments in the acquisition of suffrage for White women of privilege through the passage of the l9th Amendment requires that we face squarely the consequences of her consistently elitist attitude toward the Other — consequences that, in terms of racial and cultural divisions and tensions are finding fulfillment on I.S.U.’s campus right now.

Kel Munger is a graduate student in English and a member of The September 29th Movement’s central committee. This is the first part of a two-part letter.