I don’t know how the statue of noted pummeler of black men, Rocky Balboa, still stands in Philadelphia when that of Matthias Baldwin was defaced by protesters who scrawled “murderer” and “colonizer” on the Philadelphian locomotive magnate who established a school for black children and campaigned for abolition. I’m only half kidding. America has been seized by a moral fury that is manifesting itself in a fixation over changing the landscape of symbols around us. It takes the form mainly in the desire to graffiti names onto things and pull the names of others, often in deeply incoherent ways.
We are experiencing what in The Analects Confucius said one should do first if put in charge, and what the bureaucracy periodically enforced after that: a “Rectification of Names.”
“The name ‘The Masters’ must go,” asserts Deadspin author Rob Parker, who helpfully imagines that a black golfer agrees with him without any evidence: “Tiger Woods, other big-time golfers, and corporate sponsorships should demand it. In the current climate, with all the sweeping changes, it’s only right and just.” The evidence for why this is justified, although the name of the tournament refers to mastery of the sport, not slavery, is in the author’s mind: “Be honest. When you hear anyone say the Masters, you think of slave masters in the South. There’s nothing else, nothing special. You don’t think of someone mastering the game of golf. When has anyone mastered golf?” Ask Tiger Woods. He won the Masters Tournament four times.
It was a lot like when Harvard’s masters changed their titles to deans because of the imagined connotation with slavery. Any classicist at the most prestigious school in America might have explained that “master” comes from “magister” for teacher rather than “dominus” for slave owner. Harvard still offers master’s degrees, of course, because this is not about coherence.
The fixation is taking on Washington, D.C., cafes. The proprietor of Colony Club coffee shop recently released a statement saying that it would change its name because customers have concerns “about using the word ‘colony,’ pointing to its very negative associations with colonialism and further connecting that definition with the in-progress gentrification of the neighborhood.” The name, he explained, “comes from my grandparents’ flower shop.” No matter. He’s “learned that the power of that word to hurt is real, no matter the justification for using it.”
The biggest rectification yet is the name of one of the 50 United States. Gov. Gina Raimondo of “Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations” is changing policy to avoid that p-word. The change is due to “its slavery connotations.” While the word plantation is often associated with slavery, it simply is not what the word means or even meant at the time Rhode Island was named. Per NPR, the state was named by Roger Williams, “an advocate of religious tolerance and the abolition of slavery — who, as the founder of the Rhode Island colony in the 17th century, is believed to have included the Providence Plantations phrase in the name of what was then a newly established British colony. At the time, the word ‘plantation’ referred to a new settlement and didn’t connote an agricultural estate cultivated by slaves.”
Are we also going to change the term for coffee plantations or the Dole Pineapple Plantation in Oahu? As with the Masters and Harvard masters and the defaced abolitionist statue, it is all unmoored from any reasonable sense.
People add racial connotations to words and then object to the immorality of what was added, demanding rectification. It is a sort of aggravation of names. As Confucius said, “What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”
