american indian movement

There has been an important hashtag -- #knowtheirnames -- circulating through social media recently that encourages us all to say out loud and remember the names of those murdered by a white supremacist in Charleston on June 17, 2015. Just a few months ago, the Guardian launched an interactive project, "The Counted," that names all of the victims of police violence in the United States in 2015, with a running toll in the left-hand corner (the toll was at 528 as I sat down to write these words). Saying the names of people who have lost their lives to white supremacy is something we need to remind ourselves to do, while at the same time large segments of the population generally have no problem with swimming in a lake named after proponents of slavery and Native American genocide, entering buildings named after Ku Klux Klan leaders to earn our college degrees, or spending and earning money with the faces of slave owners on them. The names of the people responsible for the deaths and oppression of large numbers of Americans are often on our lips and at our fingertips in the United States.

Popular arguments in the South, where I live now, are that buildings named after former Klan leaders and Confederates reflect the history of the South and re-naming them would "erase" or "sanitize" the past. As a scholar who studies and teaches history, I often hear students (as well as fellow academics) write off these contested names, excusing the benefactor because "everyone was racist then," "everyone owned slaves then," or, in the context of 20^th-century Europe "everyone was anti-Semitic." Of course, this is categorically untrue once you take into account the enslaved, the Jewish targets of 20^th-century Fascism, and the many allies who fought for the abolition of slavery and for the National Socialists in Germany to be stopped. History has the power to establish the status quo, but it also the duty of historians to expose the cracks in the monotonous facade.