San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Another racial reckoning over Jack London Square
The Jack London I learned about in grade school was a seafaring adventurer. High school teachers taught me about his prolific pen and penchant for weaving together intoxicating descriptions of elemental sensations.
It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized London was more complicated than his reputation. While he was noted for being a progressive socialist, London was also adept at dystopian racebaiting and published horribly xenophobic prose, including about Asian people. Some of his writing also revealed an affinity for white supremacy.
Whenever I find myself at Jack London Square
these days, I can’t help but wonder how a statue dedicated to the man, located on a beautiful waterfront property also bearing his name, can exist a few blocks from Oakland’s Chinatown.
It’s time to rename Jack London Square. It’s time to remove the statue. There are less problematic Bay Area figures worthy of the honor.
The idea was inspired by a 2017 essay my Chronicle colleague Janelle Bitker wrote while working for the East Bay Express. There aren’t many pieces of journalism that cast a critical gaze at London’s past work, but Bitker had no trouble exhuming numerous examples where London vaunted Englishspeaking AngloSaxons as a superior race, condoned the genocide of “lesser breeds” and stoked fears about the rise of imperial China. Thousands of Bay Area residents are also aware of this.
Two online petitions emerged during the peak of the country’s social unrest last summer calling for the renaming of Jack London Square. One petition advocated for the property to be named after Barbara Lee, a beloved congresswoman representing the East Bay. It also called for the Jack London statue to be removed. Another petition called for the property to be renamed after Bobby Seale, who cofounded the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Both petitions admonish London for being a racist.
As of Friday, both petitions had yet to reach their signing goals. And it’s unclear whether the Port of Oakland will seriously consider any proposal to decouple Oakland’s touristattracting waterfront from a seminative son. (London was born in San Francisco.)
The port’s director of communications, Robert Bernardo, said talks about the petitions stopped once the pandemic started.
“(T)he discussions could continue once we are less focused on business recovery,” Bernardo wrote me in an email. “Our Board had this on their radar . ... I know they wanted a broader discussion on this topic.”
I’m torn. While it’s nice to hear that the Port of Oakland is interested in the public’s input, the fact that its board has no specific plans to address that input makes me think a brushoff might be happening.
Nick Cho thinks there’s no time to waste.
“Whatever the process is that needs to happen to change that name, it makes me sad that it would take a petition to get here,” said Cho, who in 2019 was one of the leading voices behind the push to change the name of North Berkeley’s “Gourmet Ghetto” neighborhood. Cho is Korean American and has a popular TikTok account under the name “Your Korean Dad.”
“The people who are responsible for these things should have already seen this moral and ethical and historical (decision) that is staring them in their face,” he added.
Last year we saw red states like Texas, Louisiana and Alabama remove statues and names associated with racial injustice. Confederate monuments were torn down in New Orleans and Birmingham. The same fate met many statues of people who mistreated Native Americans. Racial justice movements have finite timelines before the white populace grows fatigued with them. This moment could be gone tomorrow. That’s why Jack London needs to go now.
The thought of evicting London from Oakland’s waterfront is more nuanced for Catherine Ceniza Choy, a UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies and a Filipina American. She told me she isn’t against the idea but would rather see efforts to educate visitors about the author’s full body of work, including placing plaques on the property acknowledging London’s views about Asian people.
“Some of his viewpoints were racist and problematic, and so many people of his generation were racist,” Choy said. “I’m not against renaming, but it goes back to this thing . ... It’s so tricky to name something after anyone in some ways because over time our ideas change.”
Memorializing historical figures with statues and architectural dedications is inherently problematic. Still, the Bay Area boasts plenty of historical figures with less questionable legacies.
London was a generational talent. He also espoused anti-Asian rhetoric and wrote pieces with a white supremacist perspective. All of these things are true. But we should pay closer attention to the latter.
As Bitker wrote in her 2017 essay, London described killing millions of Chinese people “as though it were a heroic feat.” Keeping his name and face at one of Oakland’s most popular destinations is, in essence, an acceptance of his antiAsian views.