UC Berkeley removes names of racists, including a 'colonizer' of the Philippines

SCREEN CAPTURE

A workman begins to remove the name of Barrows Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.

OPINION:

At the time I was taking sociology classes in Barrows Hall on the University of California, Berkeley campus, I never knew that the man the building was named after, David Prescott Barrows, was the man responsible for making English the primary language of instruction and governing in the Philippines. 

UC Berkeley removed his name from the building last week, part of a university initiative to remove links to the country's racist past.

As Superintendent of Schools in the Philippines, right after the Philippine American War, Barrows advocated the use of English asIronically, the building formerly known as Barrows Hall houses the Department of Ethnic Studies. Tagalog is taught there. Classes on the history of the Philippines and Filipino American history are held there.

In its letter to Chancellor Carol Christ recommending the unnaming of Barrows Hall, the Building Name Review Committee quoted Barrows’ claim that Filipinos had “an intrinsic inability for self-governance” and were an “illiterate and ignorant class’ to be brought into modernity through the benevolence of American rule.”

In Barrows Hall I took classes that helped me understand what led to the divisions in our society and the social trends that  urbanization and the suburbanization of our society. I took enough classes there I could have minored in sociology.

The unnaming, capped a formal review process, made in response to growing awareness of the controversial legacies of the halls’ namesakes — all of them early, prominent members of the UC faculty — that clash with UC Berkeley’s mission and values.

LeConte Hall, named after a pair of racist brothers, also had its name covered up. I took advanced calculus at the former LeConte Hall, which was named after former faculty. The brothers who were officers in the Confederate Army, fled the South after the Civil War because the Reconstruction and the rights granted to former slaves was destroying the life that they held dear. That included owning 200 slaves. 

The name of Le Conte Hall is covered up.

The naming of the buildings after these individuals are another insidious example of how history has been twisted to glorify white men and keep people of color in their place.

Since 2015, students, faculty, and staff members of the UC Berkeley community have been calling for the renaming of Barrows Hall due to Barrows’ advocacy of white supremacy and his legacy of racism towards Filipinos, Black people, and Indigenous peoples.

Barrows, UC president from 1919 to 1923, was a colonizer of the Philippines’ education system in the early 1900s and wrote, reflecting the U.S. “humanitarian imperialism” of his time, that “the white, or European, race is, above all others, the great historical race.”

His role as a colonizer, said Joi Barrios-LeBlanc, a lecturer in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies who teaches Tagalog and Philippine literature, “was responsible for the colonial education that privileged English over the Native languages, shaped minds to believe in the superiority of Western culture and reinforced feudal, colonial and pro-imperialist ways of thinking.”

In 1905, Barrows created a stilted textbook for Filipino high school students that reinforced the idea of white superiority. "A History of the Philippines" was used by Philippine schools until 1924. In it, he “framed a disturbing view of history and race, where people of color are most often considered in relation to whites,” the unnaming proposal states, “and where races can seemingly be ordered in a hierarchy of linear-temporal advancement, relative intelligence, physical attractiveness, and as members of either civil or savage societies.”

Barrios-Leblanc told the East Bay Express that the activism surrounding Barrows Hall was part of a psychological process she calls "decolonization."

"The renaming of Barrows Hall can be considered a part of the rectification of the Philippine-American War and the colonization of the Philippines," said Barrios-Leblanc.

“Unnamings are just the tip of the issue. They’re a step in the right direction — a necessary step, but a small step,” said Melissa Charles, UC Berkeley’s assistant director of African American student development. Charles co-authored the proposal to unname Barrows Hall with her colleague, Takiyah Jackson.

Last January, Cal removed the name of Boalt Hall and is now referred to as The Law Building. The attorney John Boalt was an outspoken advocate of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

While some argue that unnaming a building is removing the history of the person it was named after, and their contribution -- questionable though it be --  to Cal's heritage, Raka Ray, dean of Cal's Division of Social Sciences and a professor of sociology and South Asian studies, disagreed. 

“Unnaming is not an erasure of history, but a profound acknowledgment of history,” said Ray. The removal of Barrows from the building is “a reckoning of the present with the past. The unnaming of Barrows represents this acknowledgement and pledges commitment to a future that Berkeley stands for.”

The students of Barrios-LeBlanc, in learning of Barrows’ racist legacy, she said, experienced surprise, anger and then “a deep desire to forward the struggle for justice.”

EDITOR'S NOTE: A word of caution, this is news sprinkled with opinion. Readers are encouraged to seek multiple news sources to formulate their own positions.