Bye-bye, Berkeley?

I miss the How Berkeley Can You Be parade that used to march down the streets of downtown Berkeley until Berkeley shut it down for being too Berkeley. Once upon a time - from 1996, to be precise, Berkeleyites used to gather to celebrate (satirize) Berkeley's inclination to be on the hypercorrect side of political correctness. You've seen those postcards of the globe with the communist countries - China, North Korea, Cuba and Berkeley - in red. One of the reasons the parade was shut down - after the 2008 parade - was that while the city might have gone on allowing people to parade in the nude, they drew a line at shooting spam at the parade-watchers with bazookas, and marching with flame-throwers.

What some see as ridiculous political correctness, most of us see as a heightened consciousness to be proud of. I live in the Le Conte neighborhood (yes, it's still called that) two blocks up from what used to be called, no surprise, the Le Conte Elementary School. It is now called the Sylvia Mendez Elementary School, after a woman of Puerto Rican/Mexican heritage who took Orange County to court back in 1947 for sending Mexican kids to remedial schools. She won. The case, Mendez v. Westminster, effectively ended de jure segregation in California and helped pave the way for the American Civil Rights movement.

What's wrong with that, I ask you? It's a hell of a lot better, don't you think, than sending your kids to a school named after Joseph Le Conte, a former slave holder who fought for the Confederacy. He and his brother John remained ardent white supremacists, even after becoming professors at the University of California at Berkeley.

The problem with fighting racism on the one hand and political correctness on the other is, of course, figuring out where the line should be. How much calls out for change, how much should we just let things be and save our energy for bigger battles? One of life's great moral dilemmas.

Was Berkeley right, for example, in changing the names of schools named after Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? They were slave-holders, too. Do we weigh the fact that they were arguably of the more benign type of slave-holders, that Jefferson apparently loved a slave his whole life long and released his slaves upon his death? And does the fact that Washington won America's War of Independence from Britain no longer figure in the calculus?

I think Jefferson and Washington should stay in the pantheon, that we only trivialize the issue when we bend so far backwards to purge ourselves of the mistakes of historical figures. Robert E. Lee, no - he preferred to break the country apart in order to keep slavery going. But Washington? I don't see the line as blurry at all here.

Boalt Letters on the trash heap of history

The University of California followed suit when the Berkeley School Board ditched Le Conte in 2018. It too has removed not only Le Conte's name from a university building, but dropped the famous name of the building housing Berkeley Law School, Boalt Hall, as well, wiping out 100 years of legacy. This happened just recently, in January 2020. And apparently now on a roll, in November of that year they removed the name of Barrows from another building, and two months later, they took down Kroeber from Kroeber Hall.  

Barrows was an anthropologist and professor of education who later became UC president. He served on the board at Mills College, as well. Although he took on the white man's burden approach to the third world (are you listening up there, Rudyard Kipling?), he was once described as a "humanitarian imperialist," if you can believe that. One of the good bad guys. No matter, Barrows Hall is no more....

Kroeber was an anthropologist, as well. One of his "mistakes" is said to be treating California Indians as a dying breed when they themselves insist they are alive and well and thriving. One member of the department tells us they agreed with the name removal unanimously. There is also considerable disagreement over his role in bringing Ishi to the campus as a living monument. See the remarks of anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, for example.  And not that he needs special credit for it, but he's also the father of Ursula K. Le Guin.

That brings us to Bishop George Berkeley. When George came to America, he settled first in Middletown, Rhode Island, where he purchased three slaves for his personal use. He kept them in the basement and urged his fellows to baptize their slaves, founded a mission to the "American heathens," and favored separating Indian children from their parents if they resisted. He was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who argued that tables and chairs could not exist if they were not perceived. But don't worry if you can't see those things. God sees them, so that makes them real. But lest you join me too quickly in rolling on the floor, please note this sentence from a Wikipedia article on the man: "While (his) work raised much controversy at the time, the conclusions are now accepted as an established part of the theory of optics."

He has a permanent place in the development of Western philosophy. Schopenhauer called him the father of idealism. Others list him with Locke and Hume as one of Britain's greatest thinkers. But philosophy aside, what do we do about his practical side? He took a great interest, before emigrating, in the orphan children of London, and served as governor at London's Foundling Hospital, so you can't exactly call him a Nazi. But there is this bit about his slaves. Do we toss the name of my much loved home on the trash heap of history along with Le Conte, Boalt, Kroeger, Washington and Jefferson? Will the Yale Divinity School follow suit if we do? And the library at Trinity College, Dublin? They too bear his name. Wasn't it bad enough we changed the pronunciation from bar-klee to burr-klee, do we now rid ourselves of him entirely?

I suppose we could simply let Oakland absorb all the streets north of 66th up to the borders of Albany and El Cerrito. I live only six blocks from that line, and spend nearly as much time in North Oakland as I do in Berkeley anyway, so what's the big deal?

Something tells me, though, that Berkeley won't go down without a fight.

Ain't no way we're going to give up our nuclear-free zones.

photo credits: 

People's Republic T-shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Funny-Peoples-Republic-Berkeley-Communist/dp/B079PDCZ7W

covering the Le Conte name on the former Le Conte building until a new name can be found: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2020/11/18/uc-berkeley-strips-the-names-of-professors-with-racist-views-off-3-buildings

letters chiseled off the Boalt Law School: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/05/14/boalt-halls-name-is-gone-but-its-history-is-examined-in-new-exhibit/   Photo by Alex A. G. Shapiro, Berkeley Law's executive director of communications.

letters chiseled off Kroeger Hall: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/27/us/uc-berkeley-removes-kroeber-from-anthropology-building-trnd/index.html