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.

UC Berkeley dean recommends renaming law school named after racist lawyer

ASAM NEWS

BOALT SCHOOL OF LAW at the University of California, Berkeley is moving to ditch its name which has been connected to a racist past, reports the Recorder.
The law school is named for John Henry Boalt who is best known for playing a major role in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law in this country preventing an ethnic group from immigrating.

About 60 percent of Boalt current students and alumni supported dropping the name, while 40 percent argued passionately to retain it.

“I was moved by the many who wrote me expressing their discomfort with honoring someone who expressed vile racism, especially without anything to point to that would justify honoring him as an individual,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky who made the decision, reported the Los Angeles Times.

According to the Recorder, some 600 comments were received on this issue by the University. Chermerinsky can only remove the Boalt name from law school clubs and lecturer positions. It is up to the University chancellor to change the name of the building. 

Boalt, a Nevada attorney, never attended the university. The law school was named for him after his wife donated money to construct the law school building in 1906.

Berkeley lecturer and attorney Charles Reichmann floated the idea of a name change in 2017 in an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I think the relevant question was whether the Berkeley Law School of the 21st century wishes to honor someone whose greatest public legacy was working to exclude Chinese people from the United States, and whose only legacy to the law school was his money,” Reichmann said.

In a letter to students, faculty and alumni, Chernerinsky outlined his recommendations based on the findings of a committee that he created in 2017 to study the issue>

"1. We will recommend to the campus Building Name Review Committee that it de- name the wing of the building known as “Boalt Hall.” Removing the name of a building is ultimately a decision by the Chancellor and not one the law school can make on its own.

"2. There are many things within the law school that use the name Boalt. We will cease using the Boalt name for these. We encourage organizations within the law school to discontinue the use of the name “Boalt” in their organization names and activities. Many already have done this. For example, lecturer positions (as distinct from the professorships mentioned above) named for the Boalts will be renamed in honor of our recent deans: Jesse Choper, Herma Hill Kay, and Christopher Edley.

"3. We will take additional steps to ensure that Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt and her generosity continue to be recognized. We also will take steps to ensure that the racism underlying the Chinese Exclusion Act be remembered. I will provide more details about this in the months ahead."

Views From the Edge contributed to this report. 

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I’m Asian and the first In my family to graduate from college

THIS IS the time of year when high school seniors and community college transfers send out their applications for college. I was reminded of my experience as the first in my immediately family to graduate from college (University of California, Berkeley) by this Buzzfeed video by Heather Yang, the mother of Hudson Yang, who stars in the Fresh Off the Boat sitcom.

I can't remember the time when I was NOT going to college. As the youngest of three children and the most "Americanized," it was always assumed that I would go to college to become an architect.

I was in first grade when I boldly stated to my parents of my career goal. FIRST GRADE! What did I know?

It wasn't until later that I figured out the reason I chose architecture was because my older brother wanted to be a draftsman and I asked my dad, who was in the Army Corps of Engineers, who would be a draftsman's boss. When he said, "architect," my future was mapped out. Ahh, sibling rivalry ...

My sister, who dropped out of the University of Washington to get married and sacrificed her dream of becoming a nurse to raise her kids, accompanied me to the dorm. She was more exicited than I was, I think ... reliving her first year at the UW dorms.

As a transfer student at Cal, the enormity of my acceptance to the best public university in the world didn't hit me until after I arrived and began walking through campus. I kept thinking, the best and brightest were at this school, so what was I doing here?

I came from a small town with one high school where everybody knew everybody and here I was on a campus almost as large as my entire hometown.

Over there Martin Luther King spoke; here the Free Speech Movement was launched; John F. Kennedy spoke there. It was a bit overwhelming. If not for the friends I made at the dorm, I think I would have been lost. There was no thought of dropping out (except when I received a "D" in one of my engineering classes).

There were the anti-war protests, the Third World Strike, more anti-Vietnam demonstrations, the draft that hung over all of us, militancy of the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets, the environmental and women's lib movements were born out the cauldron of change, and every Spring there was the smell of tear gas in the air as one walked through Sproul Plaza.

National Guard soldiers were a common sight when I attended the University of California, Berkeley.

My education included late night discussions (that seemed important at the time) and poker games, all-nighters in cold Wurster Hall (College of Environmental Design), free donuts at the local Catholic church, Thursday night beer at Kips to kick off the weekend, and walking through campus after my ROTC class while still wearing my Army uniform and desperately searching for some justification for Vietnam and what I was feeling in my heart overruling my intellectual quest.

In that bastion of learning, I gained a  lot of knowledge about right and wrong, how people think, about getting along with all kinds of people, but one of most important lessons was that despite my initial feeling of inadequacy and being an outsider (an extension of my high school experience), I discovered a lot about myself. I had found a place populated by fellow outsiders on similar journeys. At that particular place and time ... I belonged.

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