"Without exception, cultural treasures...have an origin [we] cannot contemplate without horror....There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." -- Walter Benjamin, "Thesis VII," On the Concept of History. In recent months and years, names that should never have been affixed to public buildings have been coming down, especially on our college campuses. In 2017, Yale University, for instance, removed the name of white supremacist John Calhoun (Yale 1804), from one of its residential colleges, renaming the college after Grace Murray Hopper (who earned a PhD in maths from Yale in 1934). It's good to have removed Calhoun's name, but let's agree that it should not have taken a century-plus to know that white supremacism and ...
a part of the slow blog movement