Stop Naming Buildings after People

In late January, the School Names Advisory Committee of San Francisco’s Board of Education voted six to one to rename 44 of the district’s 121 schools, with the goal of ridding the public sphere of any names that might call to mind racism or sexism. Among the names targeted for replacement: George Washington (owned slaves), Abraham Lincoln (encouraged settlement of the West; authorized mass execution of Sioux warriors), Robert Louis Stevenson (once used the word Japanee instead of Japanese in a poem), and U.S. Senator and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein (it’s complicated).

The committee’s process was short on historical research or consultation — one committee member dismissed the very notion, saying, “We don’t need to belabor history” — or logic. The decision to deep-six Lincoln took five seconds. A school named for Malcolm X was spared despite its namesake’s early career as a pimp.

This show of civic self-righteousness made headlines both local and national. In The Atlantic, Gary Kamiya — who has studied and written extensively about San Francisco history — was unsparing: The renaming decision was inconsistent, uninformed, a “holier-than-thou crusade,” “a joke.” Not to mention shockingly expensive. (All that signage, for starters.)

The San Francisco denaming is only the latest in a string of such decisions. In January 2020, UC Berkeley changed the name of its law school from Boalt Hall to UC Berkeley School of Law, citing the newly discovered racist writings of namesake attorney John…