Gee: Let’s not rename Dundas Street after all

2023/08/09 Leave a comment

Yep. Waste of $$ with no material effect on removing barriers or improving inclusion:

“The City of Toronto is broke,” its new mayor, Olivia Chow, said last month, turning her pocket inside out theatrically to show there was nothing in it.

She is not far off. City hall is a staggering $1.5-billion short of what it needs to keep the town running for the next two years. Naturally, it is looking around for ways to save money. One obvious way presents itself. It could reverse a costly and misguided decision to rename a major street.

Dundas Street spans the city core, linking the east and west ends. It crosses the Don Valley, passes the Eaton Centre and travels through Chinatown, extending all the way into the suburban city of Mississauga.

It is one of the city’s oldest and best-known thoroughfares. The first governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, started building it in the late 18th century for military purposes. He named the road after the man who appointed him, Henry Dundas, a powerful Scottish politician who held leading posts in the British government.

Until recently, most Torontonians had no idea who Dundas even was. But during the global reckoning with racism that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, a petition circulated calling for Dundas Street to be renamed. Advocates said Dundas was instrumental in delaying Great Britain’s decision to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. Two years ago, city council voted 17-7 to strip his name not only from the street but from other city assets such as Yonge-Dundas Square.

Now is a good time to revisit the decision. If Toronto wants to acknowledge the sins of the past, there are better ways than toppling statues and erasing names. One is to teach young people about shameful episodes such as the establishment of residential schools. Another is to honour pioneers in the fields of racial and social justice by naming streets, schools or parks after them. Yet another is to put up educational plaques acknowledging the misdeeds of the city’s early leaders.

Dundas, who never so much as visited Toronto, is not one of those. The case against him was murky to begin with. His critics say that in 1792 he delayed the abolition of the slave trade by proposing a parliamentary amendment that added the word “gradually” to a motion saying it should be ended.

His defenders say that was merely a tactical move to get an abolition bill of some kind through the House of Commons and smooth the path for a final decision to end the trade. The fact that the House of Lords was opposed to abolition and that Britain was fixated on its war with revolutionary France were much bigger factors in the delay.

They also point out that, earlier in his career, when he was Lord Advocate of Scotland, Dundas helped argue the case of Joseph Knight, who fought in court for his freedom from the plantation owner who had brought him to Scotland from Jamaica.

If Toronto erases a historic street name on the basis of such mixed evidence, then it is open season. Its downtown is positively littered with names from its past as a distant outpost of the British Empire. City staff identified about 60 streets named after figures “that are no longer considered to be reflective of the city’s contemporary values,” among them “at least 12 streets named after slave owners.”

A city report in 2021 said erasing Dundas’s name alone would mean, among many other things, replacing 730 street signs, changing 129 signs and 35 info pillars in the city’s wayfinding system and renaming three parks and two subway stations.

That is not to mention the hassle for the 97,000 residents and 4,500 businesses on the street. Sixty of those businesses have Dundas in their names.

The latest estimate of the cost is $8.6-million, no trifle at a time when the city is striving to find the money for things such as housing the homeless. Veteran city councillor Shelley Carroll told a local radio station that, simply put, “we don’t have the money to do it right now,” and she is one of those who voted for the change two years back.

Yet Ms. Chow – she of the empty pocket – is saying she wants to push ahead. She should think again.

Source: Let’s not rename Dundas Street after all

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Kerr: Renaming Dundas Street, or other landmarks, won’t help Black people

2020/06/25 Leave a comment

Agree. The symbolic is easier than the substantive, where the focus should be:

Would renaming COVID-19 make it less deadly? You know the answer.

But what about Dundas Street? Renaming it might “correct” a historical wrong – but would doing so make the underlying issue of systemic racism go away?

More than 14,000 people have signed a petition to rename the major arterial road named after Henry Dundas, a Scottish politician who obstructed the abolition of slavery in the late 18th century. The effort is serious enough that the city of Toronto will form a working group to examine the issue.

But the events that galvanized this movement to rename Dundas Street, along with other landmarks in Canada, are exactly why renaming efforts shouldn’t happen, at least not right away. We are still reckoning with racism and the many forms it takes, from workplace discrimination to police brutality, as seen in the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. These killings have ignited protests and important conversations. Toronto’s board of health just declared anti-Black racism a public health crisis.

There are bold proposals in the zeitgeist to fix things: defund the police, give descendants of African slaves reparations, hire more Black people in leadership roles. Like them or not, these ideas would actually do something to change Black people’s lives. Renaming Dundas Street won’t.

Andrew Lochhead, who started the petition, argues that this is not an either-or situation. We can rename the street and implement policy to address systemic racism.

“I don’t want the issue of renaming streets to necessarily overtake that conversation, because I think they’re inextricably linked,” Mr. Lochhead told me over the phone.

“While I understand it’s a largely symbolic gesture … it’s not outside of investing in communities, it’s not disconnected from other causes like defunding the police.”

There is a connection, but until city councils can freeze time and print money, there is always a question of what to prioritize. With COVID-19 putting significant pressure on municipal budgets, the only option is to be pragmatic and focus on implementing policies that will have a tangible impact on Black lives. One way to do this is to give Black voices the authority to make change.

“Black people have been warning about police brutality for decades … it’s not the folks who were perpetuating the system who are going to lead,” Cheryll Case, an urban planner based in Toronto told me. Ms. Case wants to see the city hire a Black consultant to audit its planning process.

“The issue in planning is that it is not confronting privilege, nor is it confronting discrimination. And by ignoring those topics, you actually further deepen the wounds of discrimination and subjugation.”

In a city gasping for more affordable housing, Ms. Case suggests creating an incentive for developers that would defer certain costs if they build affordable units. According to Toronto’s 2016 census, Black people make up 9 per cent of the population, but account for 13 per cent of the residents of low-income neighbourhoods.

The Parliamentary Black Caucus made the need for better policy clear in a recent statement.

“This is not a time for further discussion – the Afro-Canadian community has spoken for many years and is no longer interested in continued consultation,” it read.

“Black Canadians are in a state of crisis: it is time to act. Words and symbolic gestures, while important, are not enough.”

The Caucus proposes that the government ban racial profiling from the RCMP, invest in Black heritage organizations and increase the number of government procurement contracts for Black-owned businesses.

These ideas look pretty on paper, but it might not be easy to turn them into laws, which is why political resources must be focused on policy, not symbolism. The true cost of renaming Dundas Street is all the time, effort and money that could have been spent helping Black communities in more tangible ways.

What about the financial costs? Mr. Lochhead told me he hasn’t “taken the time to look into” the price of renaming Dundas Street. I don’t know how much it will cost either, but last year, Toronto spent just under $2-million to change the names of two arts centres under its purview. In the city of Toronto, Dundas Street stretches from Etobicoke in the west end, all the way to the Beaches neighbourhood in the east end, and features some of the city’s busiest shopping districts. The cost of changing the street’s signage is going to add up, and those dollars are better spent elsewhere.

Every breath politicians waste on a renaming debate should be spent discussing how to combat racism in schools, or how to address discriminatory fare enforcement officers on the TTC. If Dundas Street or other roads in Toronto are renamed, but Black people are still being harassed on the streetcar routes that traverse them, what has really changed?

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-renaming-dundas-street-or-other-landmarks-wont-help-black-people/

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Art gallery renames Emily Carr’s ‘hurtful’ Indian Church, but critics say it’s the wrong approach

2018/05/24 Leave a comment

Agree. More appropriate to put in an interpretative panel, including a more neutral name, acknowledging rather than erasing history:

The painting depicts a colonial structure in an Indigenous setting, but it’s the name of the work that’s spurred a debate about how the art world should address reconciliation.

The Art Gallery of Ontario has renamed a painting by Canadian artist Emily Carr as part of a broader effort to eliminate culturally insensitive language from titles in its collection, a curator says.

But others in the artistic community contend that displacing a work from its historical context does far more cultural damage than a name.

In the 1929 painting, a pallid white church stands out amid the verdant forest in an Indigenous village on Vancouver Island, with dense foliage encroaching on a thin steeple from above and a scattering of cross-marked graves from below.

Carr exhibited the painting as Indian Church, and for nearly nine decades, the name stuck.

But at the Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario, the work now hangs under the title Church at Yuquot Village, a reference to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht community where the missionary-built church was located.

A panel near the painting notes the name change beside an asterisk, explaining that the artist’s title was in keeping with “the language of her era.” The text goes on to say that the gallery is in the process of amending titles containing terms that are considered “discriminatory” by modern standards.

“People are wondering about this idea of: “If we change this title, does that mean that we’re changing the past?” And my argument is not at all,” said Georgiana Uhlyarik, the gallery’s curator of Canadian art.

“We’re interested in inviting people into this conversation that we’re having in order for us to move forward, so that we learn from the past and that we figure out what is constructive.”

Uhlyarik said the effort to “contextualize” Carr’s painting is of a piece with the gallery’s decision last October to appoint her and Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush to jointly head the newly rebranded Canadian and Indigenous Art department.

As part of their “nation-to-nation” artistic approach, the co-curators are working to remove “hurtful and painful” terminology from the titles of works on a case-by-case basis, Uhlyarik said, but the Carr painting marks the first time the gallery has revised a name in such a public and “deliberate” way.

“I don’t think that it changes the meaning of the work itself at all. I think the painting of the church is incredibly powerful, and the title is simply what it’s referred to as,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a poetic title in any way, that it was in some ways, much more descriptive.”

After consulting with the residents of Yuquot and Carr scholars, Uhlyarik said she decided to swap the word “Indian” for a geographical descriptor, hoping that the new title would prompt further examination of the history of the church, which she said burnt down and was rebuilt as a community centre due to its significance to the village.

“I think this is how we open up a conversation about colonial history,” she said.

“If there’s a way for us to still have the conversation, and still display the work and remove this immediate insult, then we’re trying to figure out what that way is.”

But for Ligwilda’xw interdisciplinary artist Sonny Assu of Campbell River, B.C., changing the name of the painting does not spark a conversation about colonial history so much as it “revises” it.

“I think (the painting) becomes more hurtful and problematic, because it does erase that history,” Assu said. “It comes off as almost revisionist in a way where it’s repainting that picture of inclusion and of tolerance that just wasn’t there.”

He said he would rather the gallery feature a panel offering Indigenous perspectives on the work.

Jan Ross, curator at Emily Carr House, said renaming a work in contradiction with the artist’s intentions is tantamount to “censorship.”

“That is sacrosanct,” she said. “It robs the artist … I think it behoves us to examine things within the context of their day.”

She said the best way for a curator to affirm their commitment to the principles of reconciliation is to place a work within its appropriate context, not impose one’s curatorial perspective.

Source: Art gallery renames Emily Carr’s ‘hurtful’ Indian Church, but critics say it’s the wrong approach

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Langevin, Ryerson, Cornwallis: Is our past unfit for the present? – Peter Shawn Taylor

2017/07/17 Leave a comment

More good commentary by Peter Shawn Taylor (The case for keeping ‘Langevin Block’ – Peter Shawn Taylor, Begbie’s Statue – Bill McKee) and useful citing of historian Witt’s test questions on renaming:

Yale University has long wrestled with similar complaints about Calhoun College, named for benefactor John C. Calhoun, a U.S. senator from South Carolina and outspoken proponent of slavery during the pre-Civil War era. Last year, Yale asked historian John Fabian Witt to resolve the controversy. His response was a unique series of questions meant to gauge the validity of renaming demands. It’s a first stab at a coherent, standardized system for settling commemoration disputes, and other U.S. institutions have quickly grasped its significance. Last month, the University of Mississippi employed Prof. Witt’s test in removing some controversial names from its campus, while letting other remain. In the absence of anything similar in Canada, we should adopt the Witt test to settle our own namesake dilemmas.

Prof. Witt begins with the overarching principal that name changes should be considered “exceptional events” and not frivolous or political acts. “Renaming has often reflected excessive confidence in moral orthodoxies,” he observes, pointing with caution to the Soviet Union. Then again, not every urge to rename is Orwellian: post-Apartheid South Africa or post-Nazi West Germany, for example.

To decide what deserves to be removed and what should stay, the Witt test applies four questions, modified here for domestic use, that weigh the actions and time periods of commemorated individuals.

  • First: Is the principal legacy of the namesake fundamentally at odds with Canadian values? This requires a broad understanding of the life’s work of the individual in question.
  • Second: Was the relevant principal legacy significantly contested during the namesake’s lifetime? Isolated statements or actions considered controversial today may have been conventional wisdom at the time. Context matters.
  • Third: At the time of the naming, was the namesake honoured for reasons fundamentally at odds with Canadian values? Why was this person commemorated?
  • Finally: Does the building play a substantial role in forming community? The more prominent the edifice, the greater the casefor retaining names of historical significance, Prof. Witt says.

Using the Witt test, Yale announced in February the removal of Mr. Calhoun’s name. White supremacy, it concluded, was his principal legacy. Mr. Calhoun claimed slavery was “a positive good” and that the Declaration of Independence erred in stating all men are created equal. For this, he was criticized in his own time and today.

Applying these same standards to Mr. Langevin, however, yields a different result. As an important French-Catholic Conservative federalist in the Confederation era, Mr. Langevin’s principal legacy was building a bicultural Canada, something once considered a great virtue in this country. This is why his name was placed on an important building in Ottawa. Though his name is today often paired with residential schools, Mr. Langevin was primarily involved with constructing the buildings, not championing the policies. The infamous speech he gave in Parliament on the subject was actually parroting what his boss – Sir John A. Macdonald – had said days earlier. While his comments are grating to modern ears, he was merely repeating widely accepted views from his time. The Witt test exonerates Mr. Langevin.

The legacies of Mr. Begbie, Mr. Ryerson, Mr. Cornwallis and the rest of Canada’s historically accused deserve a fair trial as well.

Source: Langevin, Ryerson, Cornwallis: Is our past unfit for the present? – The Globe and Mail

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