Georgetown University’s veneration of Madeleine Albright endangers the Arab community

I, like many Arab students, came to Georgetown University hoping to receive an education that would enhance my participation in the struggle for our people’s freedom. We have in the meantime found ourselves fighting to be included and valued at the university itself.

Georgetown is an elite, predominantly-white institution where casual racism is to be expected. However, we recently received word of an internal proposal to rename our School of Foreign Service (SFS) in former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s honour. While on the surface it may seem harmless, this move is at best a slap in the face and at worst dangerous to the Arab community.

It appears that the school’s administration wanted this proposal to go unnoticed. They have yet to publicly announce it, and they are taking this action during the summer when most students are away from campus. Many of us in the Georgetown community only found out about the proposal through an online statement denouncing it which was publicised by a diverse group of SFS professors.

''It is also troubling that Georgetown made this proposal amid a global movement to remove public glorifications of leaders of systemic oppression, and a student-led push to rename Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, the namesake of which participated in and defended enslavement. Georgetown is moving in the opposite direction, disregarding the demands of people of colour globally, and on campus, for inclusion.''

Backlash to the proposal from the student body came quickly. Students circulated the statement widely over social media, prompting the SFS Academic Council, the SFS’s elected undergraduate student representative organisation, to release a statement urging the school’s leadership to comprehensively consult students and consider our views before making their final decision.

Before her passing in 2022, Albright was a professor at Georgetown, beloved by many of her students and colleagues. The positive impacts she left on various members of the Georgetown community will forever be a part of her legacy. However, Albright also irreversibly stained her legacy with the innocent blood she unfeelingly helped spill in Iraq.

As Ambassador to the United Nations, Albright defended UN sanctions on Iraq — a nation that had already been ravaged by years of war — that led to the completely preventable suffering and deaths of millions of innocent civilians, particularly children and the elderly. When renowned journalist Lesley Stahl asked Albright to respond to recent reports that half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of these sanctions, Albright gave her infamous heartless reply, "We think the price is worth it.”

While the precise number of deaths has since been disputed, that does not change the fact that Albright, believing that figure to be true, defended the murder of an unfathomable number of innocent children. Additionally, the sanctions undeniably devastated the Iraqi civilian populace, depriving people of access to basic necessities and vital healthcare, resulting in countless preventable deaths.

As Secretary of State, Albright continued to defend the US’ strict economic sanctions against Iraq, bluntly calling them “the right policy” in a speech she delivered here at Georgetown University.

She went a step further during a visit to Ohio State University, publicly calling for US military intervention in Iraq. Students in the audience chanted in response, “One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war,” calling Albright’s proposal exactly what it was.

Albright’s words and actions concerning Iraq are only one example of the unspeakable suffering she inflicted on people across the global south during her time in power. The positive impact she left on some members of an elite American university cannot overshadow the immense trauma, misery, and death she brought upon millions of people worldwide through the policies she advocated.

Many of us Arabs on campus can attest to how painful it is to see the repeated glorification of Madeleine Albright, a politician who treated our people as subhuman. Renaming the School of Foreign Service in Albright’s honour would send a resonant message to Arab members of our community that our people and our lives do not matter as much as the feelings of the American elite.

It is also troubling that Georgetown made this proposal amid a global movement to remove public glorifications of leaders of systemic oppression, and a student-led push to rename Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, the namesake of which participated in and defended enslavement. Georgetown is moving in the opposite direction, disregarding the demands of people of colour globally, and on campus, for inclusion.

Beyond the symbolic problems with the proposal, a name change has the potential to cause more tangible harm to the Arab community.

A 2021 study found a causal link between systemic racism and the development of implicit bias. We have seen this play out with the Arab-American community.

Our community has faced anti-Arab and Islamophobic rhetoric from American politicians, targeted policing and surveillance of Arab and Muslim neighbourhoods, and economic and military occupation in the Arab World that Albright spearheaded. These three forms of institutional racism contribute to a narrative that Arabs are a threat to American society.

Non-Arab people then internalise that view, consciously or subconsciously, sometimes leading to aggression against Arab civilians. Indeed, hate crimes against Arab-Americans spiked after 9/11 and during the presidency of Donald Trump, when these forms of systemic anti-Arab racism were especially prevalent.

By renaming the SFS in Albright’s honour, Georgetown would institutionally celebrate and glorify her abominable career of upholding anti-Arab systemic oppression, reinforcing the anti-Arab bias connected to it. Not only does that reinforcement present a potential danger to Arab students who already experience interpersonal racism on our campus, but also to the global Arab community and all communities Albright’s politics harmed.

Georgetown is one of the highest-rated schools for international relations in the world, and its alumni often become leaders in domestic and international politics. The future alumni of the SFS will undoubtedly impact the lives of millions of Arabs around the world. God only knows how many Arabs will die if we do not challenge the status quo of American foreign policy.

With the amount of influence Georgetown University has on the world’s future, it bears a responsibility to oppose the ideas and systems that uphold injustice. Instead, Georgetown has proposed to celebrate a face of injustice, destruction, and death. For the sake of the Arab community and oppressed peoples everywhere, Georgetown must reverse this proposal.

Lukas Soloman (he/him) is a writer, community organiser, and undergraduate student at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service studying politics, journalism, and justice & peace studies.

Follow him on Twitter: @LukasRemenkhemi

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.