The revelations about Cesar Chavez are grim and disturbing: multiple incidents of rape and abuse, in some cases involving girls as young as 12 and 13. But Chavez has been dead for more than 30 years and can’t be held accountable. What to do besides commiserate? One loud response: Erase his name from the dozens of schools, streets, and parks around the U.S. that had honored him.
It’s a start. Here’s what to do next: Stop naming all those things after any people. Just stop.
I have zero enthusiasm for deleting the names of cancelled leftists from our society while streets, schools, cities, entire counties all over the county are still named after notorious slavers and rapists who’s cancellation discussions are apparently verboten in halls of government. Columbus, Lee, Jefferson, etc…
I want a movement focused on the fight for material well-being of everybody in society, not a movement preoccupied with questions of self virtue. This moment reminds me of how the left dealt with Al Franken, and how petty that seems in the context of today’s political pantheon.
Yeah we’ve got a fucking state named after a slaver, and I’d love if we could fix that. And this time don’t have a state and the Capitol share a name
<laughs in Christoper Columbus>
Yes, naming streets after people is just a form of hero worshipping
I was the article. I think that it’s off the mark.
It’s assuming if we name something after someone it’s going to be revered forever. There’s loads of streets probably near you that are named after someone local and important you don’t remember.
It also indirectly implies we should only look up to and remember people without flaws or anything problematic about them. It suggests we don’t name things after Lincoln and a guy who misspelled Japanese or something. (Yes that was because of a San Francisco law that they backed down from and no I’m not going to look into the full context of that writer, don’t come at me with details like it undermines my point, the author wanted to take it a step further and get rid of naming everything after people so the author was in favor of that law or whatever). Everyone does something wrong or offensive, and as we progress as a society and our morality evolves, even saints of today will be sinners in the future.
Getting rid of statues and names is an erasure of history, and we would be better suited in not thinking of naming things as reverence, but to learn lessons about who we are and where we come from, rather than sweeping our sins under the rug. Have a complicated relationship with the past. Recognize how some people were not as great as we thought. Look up local history and know all of it.
Also with how late stage capitalism everything is, I feel that this attitude can backfire so everything is named after brands, not birds.
If I had to guide how making things and statues are decided, I’d say to make things that are relevant to the area, give people a sense of community, things that get people to learn local history.
That being said, they should rename Columbus Ohio to Flavortown.
We’d lose classics like this
Why tho? Just change the name and use that as an opportunity to learn, relearn or reinforce our values.
I like our Poincaré bus stop, it’s by rue Émile Zola and rue Pasteur.
Maybe use old long time dead people?
