Abstract
This is an essay that explores the phenomenon of stripping dedicatory names—commemorative toponyms—from buildings, particularly on university campuses, but with the wider lens of thinking through renaming more generally. It comes out of my experience as a faculty member at U.C. Berkeley, where a number of buildings have been—or are in the process of being—renamed. The essay uses a building named after the eminent Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber—and recently unnamed, but not yet renamed—as the point of departure for exploring the various arguments for unnaming, as well as preserving names on buildings. Along the way, it investigates issues of what constitutes history or institutional memory, whether toponyms can be understood as free speech, and how institutions use unnaming to perform cultural work that is only peripherally about memory.
In October 2021, I was asked to serve on the Building Name Review Committee at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach in the Departments of Architecture and American Studies. In theory, the university was aiming in the right direction. I write about memory and the built environment and had a book in production called After giving your request some thought, I truly think that I’m an inappropriate person for this committee. I think renaming is a horrible misuse of our time when there are substantive and vital stresses on the social fabric and existential threats to the earth. I can’t agree to use my time quibbling over names. My position—remove all the names and replace them with plant names—would be unhelpful for such a committee. There are situations when a contrarian’s voice can be generative in committee work, but this is not one of them.
I regret this answer. In retrospect, I would soften my position about “quibbling over names,” because names can be powerful and important, especially for communities underrepresented in the landscape of commemorative names. Indeed, names can be vehicles of affirmation, pride, and collective identity. But I stand by my thoughts about plants. A verdant campus full of buildings named for California’s flora solves many of the problems of commemorative toponyms. Doubtful that the California Poppy will ever be disgraced the way dead racists are now getting their comeuppance. So long as non-native plants, such as Eucalyptus Globulus or Musk Thistle, are avoided, plants could be enduring and picturesque names. In any case, the proposal is meant to help us imagine a world that no longer feels the need to inscribe personal names on the built environment. I received no reply.
Part of the problem is that institutions tend to think myopically and with a very short scope in mind. What happens, for instance, when the inevitable feminist reckoning arrives? Most of the objectionable names now belong to dead white male racists. They’re easy pickings. Were institutions to take sexism as seriously as racism—and why not!—not many names would remain. Who is willing to unname the many Martin Luther King, Jr., streets or move statues to him into museums. It is hard to imagine who would escape such a toponymic cleansing. But why should the names of men who were part of the systematic patriarchal suppression of women be allowed to haunt our buildings and streets and towns? Should female civic leaders, artists, and public figures replace the bloated pantheon of forgotten great men, as has happened recently in a few examples? Europe and the United States are so thoroughly saturated with patriarchal toponyms, to unname them all would stretch beyond the diversity of botanical names.
In March 2022, I was asked again to be on a shorter term committee for the renaming of the Anthropology and Art Practice Building, its temporary name. Originally Kroeber Hall (Gardner Dailey, architect, 1959), the building had been unnamed, a novel verb not yet recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary. 1 The decision was taken in 2020, by the aforementioned (and equally novel) Building Name Review Committee. Alfred Kroeber, the building’s namesake, was one of the giants of Anthropology in the 20th century—and a major figure in the appropriation of Native American artifacts, who made one of his subjects, Ishi, the last living member of the Yahi people, live in the university’s anthropology museum and perform as a living exhibit by making crafts. Undoubtedly, he would not have a building named after him today. After the campus was solicited for comments, 85% of the 595 respondents favored removing Kroeber’s name. Now the building needed a new one. Again I declined, more politely.
In fact, while I don’t have a strong view about removing names from buildings, most of the arguments for preserving them are flimsy. A common one goes like this. Kroeber, to take one example, is an important part of the history of the institution. To lose his name is to erase part of that history, or worse to remove a mnemonic link to the achievements or misdeeds of people who built the reputation of U.C. Berkeley and heroicized him in an uncomplicated way. In essence, removing the name is dishonest. This is really several claims in one. It assumes that names on buildings are constituent parts of institutional history and advances a vague theory about what named buildings do. While there is a growing literature on naming, it has not decisively resolved such issues. 2 Lurking in and around these ideas is an even denser thicket of political assumptions, matters of conscience, and nostalgia.
The arguments against this smorgasbord are many and can only begin to be addressed in this essay. First, the relationship of names to institutional history and honesty needs to be clarified, not just at Berkeley, but everywhere. Had the building been named Live Oak Hall from the beginning, none of these arguments would be in play. From the point of view of memory studies, the second move is to ask how building names do this sort of complex work, wonder about their mnemonic power, and question their role in the way history is constructed. Nothing about these questions is settled. Of course, the process of
The present hubbub over names is primary evidence in the making and it will likely take a long time before we come to an historical consensus about its meaning. In the case of Kroeber Hall, for decades his name elicited little or no discussion. As a mnemonic, it was turned off or dormant. Most students, faculty and passersby had little idea who he was, aside from those in Anthropology. As Robert Musil once mused, there is nothing as invisible as a monument. Clearly there is: a commemorative toponym that has lapsed into anonymity. We have all passed by buildings and streets named for once prominent people whose memory has dimmed, rendering their commemorative toponym inert. Actual infrastructure—streets, bridges, buildings, parks, neighborhoods, and entire cities—is thoroughly inscribed with the invisible ink of commemorative names. It takes a special light to make them legible.
Kroeber’s name, then, had slowly become invisible. And then it wasn’t. Activists brought the anthropologist’s darker past to the attention of the university in a favorable climate for change. A reckoning was necessary. This shows that a building’s name is not some magical repository of history, but rather more like a tripwire connected to a shifting assemblage of subjectivities, institutional ethos, public affect, and power structures. For decades, people stepped over that wire. A new cast of historical actors refused. This is often how history is revised. From this point of view, renaming is not extreme or aberrant, as is sometimes claimed. It follows normative patterns of how the past is reconsidered and history is rewritten. Berkeley’s institutional history can still be told just as vividly without Kroeber’s name on the building. In fact, with the name-change, that history has become more interesting. From this angle, Kroeber’s importance to Berkeley’s history is incidental to the case for preserving his name on the building, so long as the entire episode in all of its complexity remains accessible. I have yet to hear an argument for how a name on a building does that more nuanced historical work.
Still, a naysayer might brush past these arguments to make a slightly different claim, namely that the long years of quietness surrounding Kroeber is revealing context. It proves his inoffensiveness. How could a long celebrated luminary who lapsed into relative anonymity be worthy of cancelation 74 years after he retired? Turn this argument around and it falls apart. If Kroeber had become anonymous, then why preserve his name on a building? But this naysayer may be raising a deeper trouble. The recent rejection of his name may be seen as an invention of wounds in the service of a political cause with only a nominal relationship to the Berkeley scholar. After all, Ishi died in 1916 and there are no Yahi left to be offended. Is the fate of Ishi, who without Kroeber might have been lost to history, being universalized and manipulated as part of the identity politics of the 21st century. 4 By this logic, unnaming indulges in ethical anachronism, a myopic kind of presentism that does violence to the past. This particular case against unnaming flexes its logic in a pseudo-Voltairean pose. History is a dirty trick played on the dead: it is unfair to judge people of another era by our own ethical standards.
Why, however, should the contemporary moment be required to tolerate the ethics of earlier eras? The limits of such tolerance are frequently on display in current events. To take a recent example, when Ye, formerly Kanye West, told Alex Jones that he was “done with” suppressing his admiration for Hitler, even the shock jock Jones flinched. “I love Jewish people,” Ye added, “but I also love Nazis.” 5 In essence, Ye was attempting to redeem Hitler through an increasingly fashionable White Nationalist lens. He was subjecting Hitler to reconsideration, much like Berkeley has been reevaluating its relationship to Kroeber. The politics are reversed, but the process is similar. The blowback against Ye’s revisionism shows the limits of what can and cannot be reconsidered in the present. The comparison to Kroeber might seem laughably inapt, but Nazism is not an aberration, it is an extreme. A similar logic can guide contemporary judgments of lesser evils from the past. Kroeber’s cultural incarceration of Ishi is intolerable. Why should he be beyond judgment? People regularly advance historical knowledge they care about, guided by the ethical paradigms of their day, while other episodes from the past retreat into footnotes or end up in seldom opened books in remote storage facilities. This is not presentism, but part of history’s ever-unfolding argument. It is true that there can be an ethical statute of limitations on some history. Few people fret over the barbarism of ancient Romans. No one will form a committee to remove Trajan’s name from his forum. Perhaps Nazis will become like the Romans in another 2000 years. For now, they’re fair game and so is Kroeber.
In any case, Kroeber’s name is gone, but he has not been erased. He still exists in manifold ways at the university. His archives are held in the Bancroft Library. To be sure, these papers, accessible only upon request, are far less visible than a named public building, but they are a better way to begin having a nuanced discussion about Kroeber and the institution. Archives can be unfurled through exhibitions and public events. Kroeber’s memory is also easily retrieved through Ishi Court, an architecturally undistinguished courtyard buried in the maze of Dwinelle Hall, one of the largest classroom buildings on campus. Ishi Court would not exist were it not for Kroeber having turned him into a living diorama. For this reason, Ishi’s name is not untroubled. It, too, might bring to mind the most offensive colonial practices of such living exhibitions: native peoples imported to world’s fairs to act out their nativeness for the Western gaze. Ishi Court has the capacity to bring these images to mind. Ishi is innocent, of course, but his name is tethered to Kroeber’s. It can still summon up a traumatic history.
Put differently, what are we really commemorating in Ishi Court? Should it be unnamed, too? A quick and dirty answer is no. Ishi Court is performing three of the most traditional roles of commemorative sites: remembrance, honoring, and admonition. The last two seem to be at cross purposes, but they work together. The word monument, from the Latin,
One occasional objection, usually posed from the political left, is that all of this fuss is over names, when there are more substantive issues. Unnaming Sackler buildings will not undo lives ruined by addition to the drugs that created the Sackler fortune. Canceling Cecil Rhodes will not reverse the harm he caused. In Berkeley’s case, First Nation artifacts still exist in great numbers on campus. For decades, they have been the subject of ongoing discussions of repatriation and restorative justice. Protestors occasionally appear near the Hearst Museum of Anthropology (in the former Kroeber Hall), where they are housed, to beat drums. Removing a name is easier than restoring cultural artifacts.
At the heart of this reservation about unnaming lies a legitimate concern: unnaming is too easy. It is a weak compensatory gesture when more serious action is forestalled or impossible. This is a fine argument as far as it goes. Even if toponymoclasm (to coin a word I hope does not catch on) is facile, names are fraught. Names hurt. As anthropologist Chelsey R. Carter writes, offensive monuments and names add to the allostatic load (the accumulation of chronic stress) endured disproportionately by minoritized people. The “perpetual exposure to . . . stereotypes in media and popular culture, racial slurs, and negative imaging in the form of monuments are psychosocial stressors that lead to deleterious health outcomes.” In other words, names “literally have the power to make us sick” by being “quotidian and tangible reminders of black people’s illegitimacy, inferiority, and insignificance” (Carter, 2018: 140). By this argument, monuments can traumatize and cause literal harm. Names can be existential insults.
A comparison from the early 1990s, before the debates about removing names became heated, is salutary. Before I went back for my PhD, I taught 6th and 7th grades in Louisville, Kentucky. One day, a Jewish student came to me, her Jewish teacher, and showed me an RSVP to her Bat Mitzvah invitation: “Mr. H. rules. I’m coming to your Bat Mitzvah.” She was shaking. I felt blood rush to my face. It is not Hitler’s name in and of itself, of course, that caused our physical reactions. These same students could have a reasoned discussion about Nazism using his name without it doing harm. Context is everything. On her invitation, this was a violent act, a way of undermining her coming of age by invoking the name of someone who tried to assure that no Jews would ever come of age again. Putting aside the fact that the boy was likely parroting the antisemitism of his family, and he himself may not have understood the gravity of his gesture, it was tantamount to saying that he had utter disregard for her life. The sickeningly cutesy “Mr. H.” was a threat, an existential insult. Mr. K. is not Mr. H., but the building name falls on a continuum of names—publicly presented and in this case institutionally sanctioned—whose very utterance can cause physical reactions in people born generations after the fact.
Thinking about the building’s name as a form of speech raises a weak but common enough argument against unnaming. The First Amendment protects free speech, aside from hate speech directed at protected classes of people. Surely, the name Kroeber cannot be construed as a form of hate speech. Hence it is legally allowable. This may well be, but in this instance legality is a low bar for community standards. In other words, someone can stand outside of the former Kroeber Hall with a sign that says “Kroeber is my hero.” This is protected speech. When building names speak, the context is decisively different. If a building name is a form of speech (and this is debatable), then the speaker (the university community) also has the right to take back its metaphorical utterance (the building name) that says “Kroeber is my hero.” And it did. Institutions across the world have made similar retractions. After a long discussion about Woodrow Wilson, Princeton University chose to take his name off of the School of Public Policy and a residential college. For obvious reasons, Washington and Lee University will likely never unname itself. I fully expect U.C. Berkeley, named for the Bishop Berkeley, who owned slaves, to have a difficult conversation about the name. Trinity College in Dublin recently removed his name from a library.
In some instances, unnaming is also a tacit form of apology, a speech-act in the negative. 8 Some of the students who pursued Kroeber Hall’s unnaming said as much when they interpreted the university’s action as a form of acknowledgment or apology, what Maoz Azaryahu (2015) calls “symbolic retribution” (p. 29). Even this subtle effect of unnaming raises vexing issues. What’s wrong with public apology? To begin with, it’s usually empty. In 1998, the Pope John Paul II apologized for the Catholic Church’s inaction during the Holocaust. In 2009, the United States apologized for the “depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes.” In 2019, Belgium apologized for the horrors of its colonial regime in Africa. Do any of these high-profile apologies create meaningful change any more than Florence apologizing in 2008 for banishing Dante, a formal apology the city hoped would help publicly rehabilitate the author? Dante would know exactly where to put such apologists.
The proliferation of public apologies has recently come under withering scrutiny by Jill Lepore in
A comparison to similar removals reveals the absurdity of these claims. Monuments to White Supremacy in the South are not removed in order to recognize a challenging history. They’re removed to snuff out White Supremacy, to make something that has no place in the public sphere disappear, to invisibilize it. It scarcely matters that the oppressed have adopted the same techniques as the colonial oppressor, invisibilization. How the institution envisions, represents, and enacts this erasure is more relevant. To say that unnaming Kroeber Hall supports diversity at Berkeley reveals how strangely the institution imagines diversity. What Christ seems to mean, I suspect, is that removing the name will make some members of the campus community feel less threatened and more welcomed. That would be a good outcome. It is true that diversity is often treated as a data point on university campuses and a deeper soul searching of how the built environment may alienate people would be welcome. Imagine renaming the building Diversity Hall, however, and it becomes painfully clear how the language of diversity is more muddled than clarifying in this argument. Would anyone believe that a building called Diversity Hall would support diversity at Berkeley? If not, then why would removing Kroeber’s name support diversity? Funding, admissions policies, teaching, community programs, and alumni networks support historically marginalized students. Removing names? The case is harder to make, unless it is a gesture alongside these structural changes. 9
This discussion of diversity and erasure circles back to an argument against unnaming sometimes found on the political left: offensive statues and names stimulate healthy dialogue, while suppressing names squelches it. As Tom Stoppard recently argued in an interview about antisemitism in
A more nuanced argument against renaming unfolds from Stoppard’s defense of free speech. Without the name, there can be no recontextualization. It leaves nothing to gloss or counter. This has typically been proposed in a number of forms. An interpretive plaque or QR code linked to community discussions about someone such as Kroeber could produce a deeper, textured conversation. Putting aside my skepticism about plaques, the obvious rebuttal is perhaps too easy: his name is not required to make this strategy work. Glossing is part of a memorial tradition with extraordinary manifestations in recent events. When the Black Lives Matter movement co-opted the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia, artists Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui projected images of prominent Black Americans onto the massive base. For weeks, Lee was made diminutive by gigantic images of Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriot Tubman, and others. These ghostly images illuminated a layer of BLM graffiti that spread across the monument. A spectral white BLM was projected onto Lee’s horse. These evanescent additions altered the meaning of the monument permanently. They are far more arresting and memorable than the Lee statue ever was. Iconoclasm can be iconic.
This sort of glossing may be understood through Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of “heteroglossia.” Bakhtin held that every word enters an “agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others,” all of which “may leave a trace in all its semantic layers.” This way of thinking about words, or what Bakhtin called the “living utterance,” offers a palpable parallel to names in the built environment (Bakhtin, 1981 [1936]: 276). The urban text, so to speak, resounds with many voices at once. Does removing names diminish the heteroglossian text of the built environment? It might, but it need not. Erasure is rarely total and sometimes it backfires. In one telling episode of failed
With or without his name on a building, Kroeber is here to stay and, at least for a generation, many will continue to call the building by his name. In this regard, his archives are worth revisiting. Archives require continued institutional resources, while a name on a building does not. The simple fact that Kroeber’s papers are preserved speaks to the extraordinary contribution he made to Anthropology and Berkeley. A kind of frontstage/backstage argument lurks in this observation. Kroeber’s archive celebrates and honors him far more than his building once did, but it does so privately. Here one can espy another argument against unnaming. Might some historical figures possess enough merit to overcome their darker past? Several examples have been debated publicly in recent years, notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both founding fathers and slave owners with virtually uncountable commemorative toponyms, monuments, and coins. Although these two are nearly impossible to erase, a provocative image of Harriet Tubman sitting in Thomas Jefferson’s monument in Washington, D.C., appeared in
Once in the public domain, monuments and commemorative toponyms are beyond anyone’s control. The most we can hope for is reasoned debate, Tom Stoppard’s call for meeting racist arguments with better arguments. Is this why White Nationalists sometimes brandish weapons ostentatiously at public events? Who wants to argue with a gun? By contrast, with Kroeber, no guns were needed. The university gave people the opportunity to register their thoughts. If it didn’t exactly happen with naked voices on the Athenian pnyx, and if the response rate was paltry, there was time and space for debate and unnaming won.
Yet, Kroeber is not an ordinary offending name or an uncomplicated evil doer. If his greatness pales before that of Jefferson, so do his crimes. He was a pioneer of cultural anthropology, a co-founder and president of the American Anthropological Association, founder of the Linguistic Society of America, and president of the American Folklore Society. His ideas worked against some of the racial underpinnings of early anthropology, countering assumed racial hierarchies with theories of cultural relativism. 10 His work with Ishi involved innovative methods of anthropological recording, ultimately saving the Yahi language from oblivion. 11
None of this makes him untouchable, like Jefferson seems to be (although an elementary school in Berkeley replaced his name) and yet the justifications of the Building Name Review Committee swerve astonishingly away from Kroeber’s historical record. 12 One committee member was quoted as saying that the recommendation “was less about passing judgment on Alfred Kroeber and more about the university forging better relationships with Native Americans.” 13 This was amplified into a full-throated presentist and instrumentalist view: “The reason many of us voted the way we did was because we really believe that the university is about today and the future.” Brushing aside what I take to be an obtuse or even dangerous view the past—as if it can be ducked by simple acts such as unnaming—it betrays several ideas explored in this essay. It follows nearly the same logic as replacement theory, but in a convoluted way.
Replacement theory indulges in the fantasy that invisible and conspiratorial forces are at work replacing White people with Black and Brown people. Marching at monuments to White Nationalism is pure gesture, since doing so will do nothing to discover and alter these forces. It is terror posing as activism. Likewise, removing Kroeber’s name alone will do nothing to change the deep structures that maintain racial inequality in the United States. It is gesture, with little chance to alter the present and future in substantive ways. It will not make Kroeber—or the Kroebers of the world—go away. As gesture, however, it is important and welcome. I would have voted the same way, but for different reasons. Perhaps such gestures awaken allies, reveal opponents, spur a more active movement, and eventually lead to real changes. Such gestures tug on the larger assemblage of public affect, institutional ethos, and the subjective realm in which names are situated. The threat of gesture turning into substance has made events like these alarming to opponents, newsworthy, and important as part of the wider debates about race and power. Nonetheless, historical realities are unlikely to be dislodged by political theater that dramatizes present desires.
One final argument against unnaming is sometimes posed. The economics of renaming are mostly hidden. Maps must be redrawn, stationery and websites changed, and the thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of hours committees spend on these issues takes an already stretched faculty and administration away from other labor. If the benefits were clear and tangible, these costs would be negligible. Adding to the quandary, buildings continue to be named for people who will undoubtedly run afoul of the ethics of future generations, if not of our own, setting up a future of unnaming and renaming committees. If the university is really about the present and the future, names should not go on buildings: everyone becomes part of the past, often in an unflattering way. The ugly truth is that most buildings are now named for the donor class, for those billionaires whose wealth often derives from contemporary economic inequalities deplored by many of the professors who teach in those buildings. These are vanity projects, publicity campaigns encouraged by institutions now dependent on this wealth as public money has dried up. Kroeber did not fund Kroeber Hall. But Li Ka Shing Hall (named after a Chinese business magnate) Blum Hall (Richard C. Blum, an investment banker and former Regent of Berkeley), Sudartja Hall (Sehat Sudartja and his wife Weili Dai, Indonesian billionaires), and Bechtel Engineering Center (funded by an engineering corporation that is a major military contractor) are part of the new commemorative toponyms at Berkeley, as happens at many universities. This is the new reality. It is easy to imagine the future protests and debates about unnaming these buildings. In fact, they are more compromised than Kroeber Hall from their groundbreaking, especially if unnaming demands defunding. Disentangling higher education from the military-industrial-university complex will not be easy. Unnaming will not do.
