Who canceled birds?

You might be unsurprised to learn that the malicious defamation of everyone who is the namesake of a bird came thanks to our society’s good old blue bird, Twitter, the little phone app that gave us the Trump Era. “Bird Names for Birds” was a few very loud and persistent folks on Twitter who took the time to compile superficial biographies of bird namesakes around the predetermined theme of how evil each namesake was. Biographies where they couldn’t find much evil tended to start with lovely sentences along the lines of, “Surprisingly it doesn’t seem like this person was as terrible as everyone else alive at their time…” Unsurprisingly, the agitators of Bird Names for Birds were all white—and also unsurprisingly, young. You wouldn’t have to be a high school English teacher to conclude as much from reading their website.

This was followed by a ridiculously cherry-picked hit piece by Darryl Fears (quite well illustrated and tightly written) in the Washington Post that hastily generalized a specific connection between bird names of European descent and the lack of racial diversity in birding. The piece, a litany of the most terrifying anecdotes conveying little information about the history of ornithology, certainly achieved its seeming aim of shocking and horrifying the wealthy white liberals of the bird world, many of whom carefully balance an idealism that only privilege can sustain with a virtue signaling that only Calvinism could pre-ordain. Such hearts have been wrenched by quieter revolutions.

Then there was a Committee, the term used in English for any group of people convened for the purpose of legitimizing a controversial decision. Committees are almost always stacked in advance to produce the desired outcome and there is no indication this Committee was any different than all of the other wonderful Committees of the world.

This chapter could have concluded, perhaps, if individuals for whom there is a glaring enough claim to de-name (for example, slaveowners, like the three of the 90 individuals accused; and perhaps those who served in officer positions in settler armies during war) were axed. Instead, under the guise of “neutrality” of “no human names,” a narrative fueled by the American Ornithological Society has taken hold in the media that every bird being renamed was named for a racist, and that everyone who contributed to the founding of ornithology was a villainous person. It is as if, in this divisive Maoist schema, it is inappropriate to name something after any person, or certainly any white American or British person, from the 19th century.

That repudiation was the goal of Bird Names for Birds from the beginning, and they succeeded gloriously—they had a mass cancelation, a drama that would make the Red Guard beam with pride. Now the founders of bird science—the Dead White Men—are infamous and defamed, and our children can learn to relish the presentist vilification of the dead for contemporary political purposes while reaping the rewards of the scientific labor of the imagined Enemies whose contributions they may never know.

What is the next step in the revolution? It is awaited with titillating suspense. And what will be the next step after that? Where will the revolutionary zeal take us after that step, and what great transformation will be invented after that? A horizon of possibility unfolds. Any student of 20th century history would tell you that a revolution that announces itself so dramatically may sustain itself for 20 or 30 years. Such revolutions often produce unimaginable surprises as they rush from frontier to frontier!

Do send a postcard in fifty years, to let us know what you think of the revolution, upon reflection!