They say you should never meet your heroes, and it is becoming more clear that we shouldn’t name things after them either.
In the past, societies have named things after people who have made some kind of important contribution to the world or, more and more, because that person gave a lot of money to one institution or another. I understand the desire to celebrate these things, but people are messy, and complicated, and putting them on metaphorical or literal pedestals lifts up all of that messiness for the world, not just their greatest achievements.
I am very much on the side of not censoring history, but moving forward it might be time to take a different approach.
The folks who want things named after them often don’t deserve it, and the ones who might be worthy of the honour probably don’t want it anyway.
