How many names must we change?
The debate over the renaming of Cabrillo College raises many inconvenient questions with unlimited implications. In other words — and words are the crux of the matter — it opens a can of worms that can’t be closed and whose contents, loosed, are slippery-sloped enough to make anyone squirm. It proves the power of language to shape reality and, more unsettlingly, to complicate identity. To mix the metaphors even further, it pulls on a thread that threatens to unravel the whole cloth of American history.
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, like most Spanish explorers, missionaries and conquistadors, was not a heroic figure by current standards. Like virtually every other European to set foot on this continent in the age of its “discovery” and colonial settlement, he was operating under cultural assumptions that valued “civilization” over “savagery,” white skin over dark skin and Christianity over other spiritual traditions. And so, in the effort to impose these white-supremacist principles on Indigenous populations, many atrocities were committed that fit the definition of genocide — the subjugation and extermination of entire peoples and cultures.
Last year, I wrote a column headlined “Must we demolish the Mission?” in which I asked how far we should be willing to take the correction of historical injustice. Since then, mission bell markers have been removed from local public spaces and replaced by plaques explaining the tragic truth of California’s, or more precisely the Catholic Church’s history of oppression in the name of salvation. If we’re going to change the name of Cabrillo College, it follows that Santa Cruz (Holy Cross, for Christ’s sake) is equally if not more offensive to current multicultural sensibilities and must also be changed.
But what about all the people with Spanish surnames? If they trace their family genealogy deep enough into the past, they’re bound to find in their mestizo heritage a conquering ancestor whose conduct is shameful or criminal by contemporary standards. If Cabrillo is a name with such unsavory associations, it is uncomfortably indisputable that every other Hispanic name is equally implicated in the crimes of history and should be scraped from the record. And while we’re at it, let’s change the name of every other city, street and historic landmark in the greater Southwest that bears the stain of the Spanish Conquest.
Like the removal of statues in the South celebrating Confederate generals, revisionist purging of historical symbols in the name of racial sensitivity will never achieve the cultural cleansing intended until the entire history of the Americas is rewound all the way like a reel-to-reel tape until it snaps. Classic songs such as The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” would have to be banned if we are to be freed of their racist implications. Stephen Foster, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, The Dixie Chicks (already reduced to The Chicks, which to some feminists is equally offensive) and other artists who have chronicled the South’s cultural attitudes would be subject to erasure from collective memory. Like the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan blown up by the Taliban, any trace of heterodoxy could be obliterated on orders from the mullahs of wokeness.
An inexact comparison, perhaps, but worth contemplating before we assume we can, by virtuous acts of overcorrection, undo what has been done in the name of righteousness by people just as dead-certain of their own virtue. The true meaning of multiculturalism is that no matter what combination of traditions and identities we embody, each of us, like the proto-American poet Walt Whitman, contains multitudes and is thus a mixture of many peoples and histories that contribute to our individual and collective impurity. To believe that by changing the name of an institution like Cabrillo College (and what about the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music? Cabrillo Highway?) we can be free of its historical baggage is to deny the facts on the ground, whose indelible bloodstains prove that truly restorative justice is an illusion.