There are many, many versions of the January 8, 1815 Battle of New Orleans. None of them, so far, seem to tell the history in a manner that would be most fair to the participants.

Most ignore completely the most important detail:

American forces were made of “free men of color”. Specifically, of the 1,000 Louisiana militia and volunteers in the battle, it was nearly 50% non-white. The U.S. Army even has a print set called “The American Soldier” with a depiction of a the free men of color battalion in action to celebrate this fact.

An example of a site that does mention the “men of color” soldiers is the Tennessee Historical Society.

[Jackson] included a large number of both free men of color and enslaved black men in and around the city. To recruit the former, Jackson promised them the same wages and, equally important, the same respect as their white compatriots — a unique opportunity for black and Creole residents living in a Southern city committed to white racial superiority. For those enslaved, he appealed to their desire for freedom.

Take a moment to question the statement New Orleans was “committed to white racial superiority”. Lacking any citation at all, it sounds suspicious to me for a city known to be highly diverse in the 1800s.

Although it is true that New Orleans brutally put down a huge slave revolt in 1811, the free men before and afterwards still were present and exercising their rights up until America started shutting them down.

A good resource on this is the Louisiana Digital Library: Free People of Color collections, which is full of first-person materials as well as insights such as “white soldiers were thought cheaper than Negro slaves” as well as statements like “all the difference between a free man of color and a slave, that there is between a white man and a slave”.

During both Spanish and French rule of the colony of Louisiana the “free men of color” regularly served in militias. So when the U.S. took over New Orleans, it started with an integrated military.

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, about 16% of the roughly 8000 people living in New Orleans were free people of color. The first official U.S. census of the Orleans Territory in 1810 counted 7,585 free persons of color, or about 10% of the total population.

Remember how above I mentioned 50% of Jackson’s force from Louisiana was non-white? That’s a huge jump up from being just 10% of the population.

The above quote from the Tennessee History site is followed-up soon after on the same page by another odd statement:

Jackson not only ordered all black troops out of New Orleans at the behest of white residents who were fearful of armed black city-dwellers; he also reneged on his offer to free his enslaved troops and instead, ordered them to return to their slave-owners.

Let me try to untangle this.

First, Jackson saw all men of color as a potential enemy.

When Governor Claiborne offered the free men of color as a veteran militia, Jackson responded that arming them and putting them into harms way was a good way to prevent them siding with the British.

The free men of colour…will not remain quiet spectators of the interesting contest. They must be for, or against us — distrust them, and you make them your enemies, place confidence in them, and you engage them by every dear and honorable tie to the interest of the country who extends to them equal rights and privileges with white men.

This probably explains the exceptionally high percentage of free men of color serving, relative to population numbers. It is incredibly tempting to read that letter and think Jackson had in mind at least some advance to equal rights and privileges, however there’s a fundamental problem with such a line of thinking.

When Jackson arrived in New Orleans he declared military (martial) law for the first successful time in United States history. He proclaimed it necessary because “those who are not for us are against us, and will be dealt with accordingly” and then “refused to lift his order instituting martial law for months…”.

A Louisiana State senator expressed unease about the ongoing state of martial law in a March 3 newspaper article; Jackson promptly had the senator arrested. When a U.S. District Court Judge demanded that the senator be charged or released, Jackson not only refused, he ordered the judge jailed before banishing him from the city. (When Jackson eventually lifted martial law, the returned judge proceeded to charge him with contempt and levied a thousand-dollar fine, which the “Hero of New Orleans” paid.)

It is worth considering how martial law was Jackson’s preferred method of rule, completely inverted from his letters he sent that said to “place confidence” in the public would gain their loyalty.

He seemed very keen to convince people he had their best interests in mind while he also demanded they pick a side. Martial law stemmed from his complete lack of trust in allowing freedoms. The key to unlocking Jackson’s true feelings seems to be that his concerns over spies and dissent was related to what he saw as a “largely foreign city” (French and Spanish). Jackson fundamentally distrusted New Orleans residents because they were not white like himself.

In other words, what if martial law was Jackson’s manner of dealing with discomfort and protest from a militia of non-whites he planned to defraud?

Don’t forget the Peninsular War kicking off in 1807 between France and Spain meant that by 1809 Cuba expelled Franco-Haitian and French residents. They became refugees escaping to New Orleans, which doubled the population of the city, and tripled the size of its free people of color population two years before the 1811 slave revolt. Martial law may really have been Jackson’s way of dealing with how to maintain white supremacy.

Dozens of “citizens without charges” were put in jail for weeks, not to mention Americans put in jail on spurious basis such as just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jackson even tried (unsuccessfully) to enforce blatant military censorship on local newspapers.

Another line of reasoning is that martial law helped obscure a true casualty rate of the American militias, as well as lack of true threat from the British. Most accounts of American deaths seem low, even though hundreds of the “professional” British soldiers had laid down and played dead rather than fight.

Second, Jackson did not have honest intentions.

Of course the freemen were promised equal pay, equal treatment, freedoms and so forth but Jackson appeared to have every interest in bringing non-whites to his side, with no plan of honoring his word to them when he no longer needed them.

In other words, a large U.S. military force of veteran free men of color and slaves was used by Jackson to deliver victory yet his response was to deny those men freedom (as he had promised) at the time of victory and then, as he became U.S. President allegedly in part from the tales of this battle, to strip non-whites in America of their voting rights and perpetuate/expand slavery.

To be fair…while Spanish/French colonial-era slave codes had granted complete rights and equality to a “free man of color” (allowed to be educated, serve in military, own land, business, and even slaves) it was only the March 4, 1812 Louisiana Constitution that removed the right to vote from 2/3 of the people living there. That was long before Jackson would fight a vicious political campaign at the federal level to do them even more harm.

When you think of a battle for “freedom” from British rule, consider the new state’s constitution was so undemocratic and exclusionary, property worth at least $5,000 had to be owned by a white man for him to be a candidate for governor and then he would be chosen by the legislature not voters. So it wasn’t just Jackson trying to build a new aristocratic empire, denying democratic rights to Americans.

However, Jackson was a major influence on the undemocratic and racist direction of America in the mid-1800s. While the British abolished slavery in 1833 (led in 1829 by Mary Prince, an escaped slave from Bermuda), not to mention New York in 1827, or Mexico in 1824, America instead was about to be dragged down by Jackson’s seemingly endless thirst to use his authority for enslaving and massacring non-white Americans.

Extensive administrative and diplomatic experience since Washington was a norm for anyone serving as President of America. Jackson found this unnecessary and dismissed critics who pointed to his lack of time in any Cabinet post or even travel abroad. Jackson had poor writing skills in English alone, so studies in advanced topics such as foreign travel and languages seemed out of the question.

The thing Jackson really leveraged was brutality of his plantations and militancy against non-whites. It was in this context the stories told about the Battle of New Orleans under his martial law and strict control of the press worked to his political advantage.

Although stories of valiant brutality (despite the truth being British soldiers laid down and pretended to be dead) stoked his persona as a war hero by 1824, Jackson failed to navigate the process required to become President. Described as a simple “military chieftain” by his opponents, he proved the title accurate as he initiated a vicious campaign against the newly elected President Adams.

A truly barbaric personality, Jackson spent the next years in bitter opposition to everything and anything American government was doing, framing himself as a benevolent dictator. President Adams, who had been duly voted into office in 1824 under the 12th Amendment, was being challenged to lead the country given vicious and underhanded tactics coming from Jackson’s desire to shut the entire government down if he wasn’t the one put in charge.

When Jackson ran again for President in 1828, he framed himself a victim of free press and set about trying to take control of political discourse through disinformation tactics. For example, a famous “coffin handbill” depicted American militia men who had been unjustly ordered executed as six black coffins, suggesting that they had been murdered by Jackson. These basically were accurate criticisms of Jackson’s background.

While the press fairly pointed out a record of unjust brutality and lawlessness within Jackson’s only claim to fame, his campaign responded by cooking up a series of total falsehoods to target and destroy his opponent’s character. Jackson basically and openly lied in response to the press pointing out how awful Jackson was, all the while calling himself the real victim.

Jackson delighted in this process, even personally contacting papers with guidelines in what was basically an information warfare campaign by a military chieftain to undermine democracy. Once President, Jackson expanded his war on the press, as I’ve written before:

In 1844 former-President Adams won an eight-year long campaign in the House of Representatives and overturned the Jacksonian bans on free speech, but torture and murder by pro-slavery terrorists continued to rise.

Anyway, PBS has posted an excellent explanation of how free men under Jackson suffered greatly, as he pivoted from credit for this battle to lay the foundation for white-nationalist sentiments and stoke racial divisions in America that remain a challenge today.

Before 1800, free African American men had nominal rights of citizenship. In some places they could vote, serve on juries, and work in skilled trades. But as the need to justify slavery grew stronger, and racism started solidifying, free blacks gradually lost the rights that they did have. Through intimidation, changing laws and mob violence, whites claimed racial supremacy, and increasingly denied blacks their citizenship. And in 1857 the Dred Scott decision formally declared that blacks were not citizens of the United States. […] The concepts of ‘black’ and “white” did not arrive with the first Europeans and Africans, but grew on American soil. During Andrew Jackson’s administration, racist ideas took on new meaning. Jackson brought in the “Age of the Common Man.” Under his administration, working class people gained rights they had not before possessed, particularly the right to vote. But the only people who benefited were white men. Blacks, Indians, and women were not included.

Without taking credit away from the free men of color for their role in the Battle of New Orleans, and stoking up its significance for his own political campaigns, Jackson may never have succeeded in his information war to become President, gag abolitionists and perpetuate slavery, precipitating Civil War.

Jackson’s sentiments greatly foreshadowed not only the Trail of Tears and Civil War but also treatment of American blacks who served in much later wars. Most notable perhaps was the 1921 massacre of WWI veterans in Tulsa by the KKK restarted by President Wilson under the America First campaign.

We should worry “boundaries” increasingly set by algorithms will mean people may lose authorization to operate outside the “authenticity” boxes they’re placed in by others; denial of identity freedom may require generating more sophisticated forms of non-conformity.

In a couple recent blog posts I point out how an American expansion westward was driven by slavery economics and marked by concentration camps and genocidal campaigns.

• Stanford = Genocide
• This Day in History: 1862 Largest Mass Execution in American History

Victims of humanitarian disasters in America were in theory offered an “exit” from total annihilation, if they chose to conform entirely by abandoning any freedoms of identity. Expression in speech wasn’t harshly limited, you see, just an “authenticity” of identity.

The Native American people were cruelly forced to operate on soon-to-be industrialized U.S. platforms, which meant sacrifice of self-determination. They were told at gunpoint to dress differently, speak a different language, sing/play/dance to different music, eat different foods, cook different meals, do different work…they were forcibly transformed from private owners to public “users” and every aspect of their identity had to change to conform to the encroaching immoral platform owners.

This has aptly been described as “being spoon-fed out of a bucket of whiteness every day.”

The “longhair” revolution of the 1960s often attributed to white “freak flag” communities, for perspective, was in fact adopted from a Native American movement to reclaim their identity rights.

…the physical cutting of hair is a manifestation of the loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, and a loss of a part of self…

You perhaps can see why identity self-determination was so important. Native Americans suffered greatly under U.S. tactics that forced them to conform to “Christian” identity requirements or face starvation (a 1902 Bureau of Indian Affairs “haircut order” required short hair to receive rations).

We unfortunately, despite lessons from the past, see a similar conformance campaign ethic driven by Facebook today. While being implicated in genocide, Facebook has taken a tactic to harshly prosecute people for freedoms of identity instead of clamping down on the speech that actually foments genocide.

Anyone attempting anything less than what platform owners consider “real” or “authentic” is eliminated from the platform. Facebook mistakenly calls this culling of identity freedoms a security measure, which to me reads like someone studied only the imitation game (Turing test) in computer science and skipped history classes.

Meanwhile Facebook does very little or nothing at all to address the real harms caused by the people they judge as authentic.

…we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review.

It’s like Facebook saying the white supremacist diatribes of user Stanford couldn’t be blocked from facilitating genocide on their platform because he did so from an authentic identity. Only if he had done things like put on a strange coat of feathers and wore long hair, or grew a beard and put on a hat to look like the user Lincoln could he have been de-platformed.

From both a security and history perspective, Facebook has been wrong to blindly repeat the worst mistakes in history and force a dangerous conformity on their self-serving expansionist terms.

Edge cases of true impersonation (an integrity risk, such as stolen valor and authorization fraud) exist and should be stopped. “Deep fakes”, to that end, has been generating a lot of excitement. Yet it mostly begs old questions about whether new low-cost generation of content still should be regulated as art or expression.

People need to consider seriously whether a much greater threat to freedom is the opposite effect, Facebook operating a Kafkaesque identity conformance program of “deep realism” (e.g. already for several years I have met with government regulators concerned about harms to society including national security and the economy).

The risks from identity abuse edge cases of fraud/authorization are far less compared to dangers of militant removal of freedom and creativity of identity on global platforms. One could even argue, for example, the entire concept of the modern cosmopolitan lifestyle made famous in markets like NYC, Paris, London…is the high art of regionally managed platform identity freedom.

An appropriate reaction to centralization power for platform conformity pressures from a genocide-facilitating for-profit company like Facebook perhaps will be a non-conformity revolution.

The best intelligence analysts already know this tactic. Adversaries love conformity because they can predict moves so easily and camouflage isn’t even necessary. A “weird” analyst by comparison becomes a nightmare of any adversary, because prediction of how they will react becomes impossible.

Another appropriate reaction is rotating focus back to harm, which means pushing a standard for filtering by actual risks while letting people express themselves from whatever identity they choose to develop and the communities to which they belong.

Take for just one example the concept of gendered color coding.

Pink is considered by some even to this day a shade of the “warlike” red, as in the British Red Coats. It stems (pun not intended) from Oliver Cromwell’s “New Model Army” adopting distinctive “Tudor Rose” dye as their uniform for war.

This of course was reconsidered around WWI when machine guns and snipers were killing anything identifiable, and military uniforms shifted to more muted tones to impersonate surroundings.

Meanwhile others, particularly in America, somehow came to see pink as their tool for encoding female identity:

“…a kind of early gender coding that worked especially on young girls. The decade of the Fifties was characterized by an ideological emphasis on conformity, and by fashion images that were sharply age- and gender-specific.”

In that sense pink in America really represents strangely planned attempts to make science more anti-social and eliminate women who scored high on social-good measures:

…programming’s shift from a women-friendly occupation to one that is hostile to women. In the 1950s and ‘60s, employers began relying on aptitude tests and personality profiles that weeded out women by prioritizing stereotypically masculine traits and, increasingly, antisocialness.

Even with this history of encoding and sexism it should never be wrong for any gender to associate pink with their identity. There generally is no harm of the color (with rare exceptions, such as war). Compare that to someone wearing an offensive hate speech patch or logo designed to do harm and expand suffering, on the other hand, and you see more logical security control areas.

Facebook’s genocide-facilitating platform is likely coming for your community with its AI, trying to get a lock on all the identities using things like “coding that worked especially on young girls”.

Thus more non-conforming behaviors should develop as fundamental survival tactics. Where can your data live that it will have freedom for identity?

I have long advocated for, and concur with latest research, that we need to assess code as potentially malicious (whether human or machine) and emphasize filters as a useful control for individuals to operate.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have proposed a software program that treats online “hate speech” like a computer virus.

Scientific anti-pollutant concepts of continuous collection for known harms are a far more sensible approach than those of Facebook (repeating mistakes of American history) pushing to oppress identities through opaquely self-serving and centrally-planned concepts of what they call authenticity.

A search on the Internet for “Stanford genocide” brings up a long list of references. Some initial hits are these, all very promising:

• Genocide: A World History – Stanford University
• Genocide | Center for Comparative Studies…
• Preventing Genocide | Stanford Libraries

However, as you scroll down the list, perhaps the most interesting hit of all is this one warning that Stanford should be known as a “primary architect of annihilation”:

“Naming America’s Own Genocide”

“Genocide” is a powerful word, but one whose impact has been diminished through overuse. Madley doesn’t use the word carelessly, even though he’s writing about US policy toward American Indians, a subject that often leads people to toss the term around quite loosely. His book does not contend, as more polemical works do, that all Indian policy was genocidal. He concentrates instead on a particular place and time: California from 1846 to 1873. […] Madley argues—and this is the core of his book—that California’s elected officials were in fact “the primary architects of annihilation,” and that they were funded and enabled by the federal government. Together, state and federal officials created what Madley describes as a “killing machine” composed of US soldiers, California militia and volunteers, and slavers and mercenaries (so-called “Indian hunters”) in it for the money.

Overall, it is clear that Stanford’s success was built on a system that was often exploitative and unjust, which benefited from extreme violence, repression, and genocide.

Stanford served in California state legislature as a Senator in the 1850s and oversaw Native American policy as a member of the Committee on Indian Affairs. That foreshadowed his governorship actions in 1862 to 1863, when he signed into law appropriations bills specifically meant to fund a “killing machine” that would wipe out Native American tribes in the state, a policy of forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands.

Keep in mind at the point Stanford “oversaw” the fate of Native Americans, their population of approximately 310,000 just had been reduced to about 150,000 in the prior 77 years. Stanford’s push for a “killing machine” then totally decimated surviving populations, reducing them to just 12,000 people.

Stanford not only was head of government he was involved in business ventures that benefited from the displacement and exploitation of Native American communities, including the acquisition of land that had been taken from those communities through violent means.

Stanford University sits on ancestral land stolen from the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.

Genocide.

The San Francisco Chronicle calls this “The moral case for renaming Hastings [and Stanford]“.

Leland Stanford solicited volunteers for his Civil War-era army campaigns against California Indians and, as governor, signed into law appropriations bills to fund those killing expeditions. He later founded Stanford University in the name of his son, Leland Stanford Jr. Both Hastings and Stanford had made fortunes in real estate. Their ability to acquire land titles was facilitated by the massacre of the rightful claimants, a near-extinction they promoted and funded. As UCLA professor Benjamin Madley wrote in his sobering “An American Genocide,” published in 2016 by none other than Yale University Press, both Stanford and Hastings had “helped to facilitate genocide.”

The California State Library puts it plainly:

California is birthed in genocide. […] As governor of California from 1861 ­to 1863, [Stanford] signs into law appropriation bills to finance those killing expeditions. Stanford’s favorite Indian killer is Major James D. Savage, leader of a militia called the “Mariposa Battalion.” Facilitated by the successes of extermination, both Hastings and Stanford acquire vast tracts of land and make fortunes in real estate. Their ability to acquire land titles is facilitated by their massacre of the rightful claimants.

Stanford wealth and assets came from massacres.

While all these references may seem to be ancient history, don’t forget Stanford recently hired Facebook’s disgraced head of security after he allegedly helped to facilitate genocide.

Change seems necessary and long overdue.

Is renaming from Stanford possible?

It appears to me this University moving to a better name is not out of the question.

We already know Stanford agreed to remove cartoonish and degrading “Indian” imagery as its mascot. If you read the fine print on the following example it says offensive memorabilia was declared eliminated by making it secret, meaning easily available from the bookstore on request.

In other words Stanford moves quickly when it wants to and uses creative solutions to deal with those uncomfortable with change/progress. The school offers an official timeline explaining how in just two years time they switched to being the Cardinals in 1972.

On November 22, 1970, Stanford American Indian Organization (SAIO) members petition for removal of Stanford’s Indian mascot—both the logo (as a “false image of the American Indian”) and the man, Timm Williams (whose live performances at sporting events were a “mockery of Indian religious practices.”) Native American students position themselves outside the Stanford Stadium at the Big Game against the University of California with banners saying “Indians are people, not mascots.”

SAIO members retell the story a little more broadly. They point out Governor Ronald Reagan’s “Indian staff person” is who voluntarily dressed and danced as a human mascot, and was breaking a promise he made to cease derogatory and demeaning acts:

The big issue with Timm Williams was his mockery of Indian religions. He would dance around in a faux Indian dance at the games. Even though he was a Yurok Indian, he wore the recognizable Plains Indian headdress and clothes to every game. He would make the “woo woo” sound with his hand slapping his mouth. We met with him a month after we got there, and he promised not to do it anymore. Shortly afterward he became the Indian staff person to Gov. Ronald Reagan, who infamously did nothing to understand Indians, most of whom had lost their Indian status when their treaties were terminated in the 1950s. But Timm did it again the next week. That was it for us. The Indian symbol, the caricatured Indians with the big noses, the religious denigration—all of it had to go. It took two years, but we finally got it done.

Governor Reagan fired Williams just months after Stanford changed its mascot.

Outside pressure clearly has worked on Stanford. Also, inside pressure has shown to be effective, as explained by members of the Stanford marching band who transformed it into a protest against a history of exterminating native cultures.

Part of assimilating Indigenous children in boarding schools into American society was handing them European music instruments to play European music. The government thought it would assist with wiping away their traditional musical practices. Marching bands came into play. […] “When it comes to discipline, the Stanford band is zero discipline,” said the Miwok citizen with a laugh and an emphasis on zero. The university’s marching band is “pretty nontraditional. Technically, we’re a scatter band,” Brown said. So they don’t actually march. They run from one formation to the other. What else makes the band nontraditional? No experience is required. It’s zero commitment meaning they welcome beginners to advanced musicians. This can also be current students, alumni or community members. Members hardly wear bucket hats and military-style uniforms. If they do, they can customize it with buttons and pins. Other university bands, like the University of Southern California, hate them. People yell at them and get upset because they’re not traditional.

I write this all in response to those who have asked me what to do after they read history of America and its episodes of genocide, a history that quite frankly historians tend to point out Nazi Germany studied for inspiration.

Let me put it this way. If Germans asked what to do about a university named for someone who committed genocide, what would any American probably tell them to do? Renaming should be an obvious answer here, though Americans seem not to welcome the very step that they enforced on Germany during occupation.

Other states already have figured out how to turn the corner. Take for example Minnesota’s Governor who very clearly came forward and condemned a past Minnesota Governor known for saying the U.S. should exterminate Native Americans.

“I am appalled by Governor Ramsey’s words and by his encouragement of vigilante violence against innocent people; and I repudiate them,” Gov. Mark Dayton said in a statement released Thursday. “The viciousness and violence, which were commonplace 150 years ago in Minnesota, are not accepted or allowed now.” Dayton called for flags to fly at half-staff from sunrise to sunset Friday, declaring it a day of remembrance and reconciliation on the 150th anniversary of the start of the six-week U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. He asked Minnesotans “to remember that dark past; to recognize its continuing harm in the present; and to resolve that we will not let it poison the future.”

We have yet to see California leaders take even basic steps to call out Governor Stanford for who he was and what the Stanford name means to this day — resolve to stop letting it poison the future by demanding change in the present.

In case that reference to Stanford isn’t clear, his gubernatorial candidate acceptance speech of 1859 allegedly was “I prefer free white citizens to any other race”. Then, after becoming Governor of California, in his first speech he wrote clearly white supremacist life goals straight into the official record books:

There can be no doubt but that the presence of numbers among us of a degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race, and, to a certain extent, repel desirable immigration.

Racial purity? As Stanford’s basis for genocide and internment camps?

Go ahead and tell me how this is any different from someone following Hitler’s orders.

Stanford is an important domino towards addressing wider American systemic racism.

Of course some warn it won’t be easy erasing this genocidal xenophobic white supremacist’s name, while they also ironically point out how Stanford already has been renaming things (again thanks to outside pressures).

California has a racist past. But removing monuments sparks debate about how to reflect an ugly history…Stanford University last month decided to rename three campus references to Father Junipero Serra, who founded the California mission system in the 1700s and whose legacy came under fire for the missions’ treatment of Native Americans.

I’m not saying by any means that Stanford was the only bad guy to focus on, and thus also agree with removing Serra (Stanford has very shamelessly replaced Serra with… Stanford).

What I’m saying is that even Stanford admits there is an important point to renaming anything that reflects “ugly” treatment of Native Americans.

Stafford Poole, the renowned historian on colonial Latin America, explains at a macro level how Stanford really was a powerful cog in a wider context of U.S. creating California to exterminate Native Americans.

The true villain is James K. Polk, the [1845 to 1849] president who maneuvered the country into an immoral war for which he was opposed by a congressman named Abraham Lincoln.

For those unfamiliar with the Bay Area, Polk tends to be a popular and significant street name.

Poole is of course not only right, his point should be taken to mean the U.S. President Polk who in 1846 invaded Mexi-Cali to eradicate people living there and replace with white settlers…also probably shouldn’t have his name on anything today.

Note that quote from Grant, a true American hero in every sense. If you want to celebrate someone in American history, he’s the real deal.

Stanford stands out as the most significant target for renaming due to the heavy and widespread use as an honorific badge among scholars — influence is an understatement — not to mention the University obviously has aspirations to prevent further genocide (see initial links at the top of this blog).

When Stanford finally renames it likely will have influence on others to follow.

After Stanford in 1972 dropped their “Indian” mascot Dartmouth did the same.

I imagine after Stanford gets a better name someone will petition for places like San Francisco’s rather obscure yet busy Polk Street to be renamed (take note how “Polk Gulch” bloggers chastise other place names while apparently ignoring their own name).

The SAIO proved to the world in 1970 that Stanford University is capable of change, even rapidly evolving away from its ugly past.

We’re long past time to course correct the shameful “Stanford asshole” trend. Renaming Stanford to something not so “ugly” would be more than a symbolic way to help.

I propose Ohlone be consulted for the new name. Let them decide what the their land should be called.

And in the meantime go ask anyone brandishing the genocidal Stanford name to explain why they promote his crimes against humanity.

Oh, and also perhaps also ask why Mrs. Stanford was murdered with poison yet school officials refused to admit the facts, instead trying to claim she died from having too nice a lunch.