#nomoreexclusion

[nonwesternartist]

"This image is a metaphor for a broken system. While we celebrate art within gallery walls, many non-Western artists, equally brilliant, are forced to make the streets their primary venue. If this scenario for a famous Western artist feels jarring, it's because it is. Demand better, demand global art access.”

[chsamuseum]

CHSA Praises Action by UC Berkeley Removing Boalt Name from Law School

Boalt’s principal public achievement was his essay titled “The Chinese Question” and presented to the Berkeley Club in 1877.  His resort to group libel and the rhetoric of racial hatred, expressed in his own words as “an unconquerable repulsion” to the Chinese pioneers, may have reflected the racist and hateful rhetoric of his day.  However, his paper achieved notoriety as a pamphlet and its inclusion by the 1878 California Senate Special Committee Report on Chinese Immigration.  As such, The Chinese Question fueled the racism and bigotry that transformed a regional grievance into a national movement – culminating in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Sadly, some misguided opponents to UCB’s action opposed the de-naming of its law school, favoring instead a peculiar celebration of racial supremacy and California’s mistreatment of its Chinese communities by reason of race.  As the UCB community has done here, decisions about historical monuments should be made thoughtfully and on a case-by-case basis.  However, no plaque of whatever size or content on one building would or could negate the taint with each invocation of a vilifier’s name in referring to an internationally-renowned institution of higher learning. 

Certain relics of a racist and bigoted past deserve elimination, and the story of a particular community’s resolve and action to remove such reliquary itself provides the teachable moment to later generations who will ask why the university took bold and courageous action to reaffirm, in the words of UCB’s own fact-finding committee, “the dignity of all individuals and . . .uphold a just community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated.”

CHSA applauds Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, prof. Charles Cannon, lecturer Charles Reichmann, and the rest of the law school community. We convey our thanks and appreciation for their diligent efforts to resolve an institutional symbol of a troubled and exclusionary past.