Drake High grad wants all to feel they belong

I graduated from Sir Francis Drake High School in 1985 without knowing the explorer’s ties to the slave trade. I happily remember bicycle rides along Drake Boulevard in West Marin with friends. I live in Canada now, but I still have family and friends in Marin that I visit regularly. When I’m there, I feel like I belong, and I want everyone there to feel the same way. So when I learned more about Drake symbolism in Marin and discovered the effort to remove it, I got involved.

Some of the statements against these changes make no sense to me. One is that changing a name does little to achieve social justice, as if social justice has nothing to do with making your neighbors feel welcome in their own community. Another is to profess concern about cost, which is a way to drag your feet while sounding responsible. Officials should consider it a fixed cost for a broad, perpetual benefit.

More insidiously, some minimize the significance of Drake’s involvement in the slave trade, reviving the Anglo-Saxons’ ugly racial priorities. They minimize his slave-trade involvement, while pointing to how much he did for England. A variation is that we shouldn’t judge Drake by contemporary standards — except that we’re talking about values, not historical analysis. The only thing Drake ever contributed to Marin was his English reputation. If you think that you can get that to balance with buying, selling and owning enslaved Africans, well, let’s just say those aren’t values I espouse.

I hope that those who resist these changes now will change their minds and contribute to other changes around racial issues that would make Marin a fundamentally better place for everyone. I think most people see that if we want to free ourselves of the tangled legacy of white supremacy, we all have to pitch in.

— Steve Dodge, Vancouver

(British Columbia)