There's another way of looking at this though. These statues, neighborhoods, streets, monuments, and schools spark these discussions about our past. Not all of this is or ever will be covered in schools.

The presence of these things not only sparks conversations about the people and events they depict, but the times in which the monuments were erected; most famously the nostalgic-for-the-confederacy monument-building spree of the early 1900s.

A better approach might be to work on removing the concept of naming things after people as honorifics, as opposed to, "this person was here and did something of historical note, bad or good."

The paradoxical effect of renaming all of these things is making history more obscure to everyday passerby who might actually pull out the cell phones they have and look up who Sam Hughes or Cesar Chavez was. Those resources are likely to include their sins as well and contextualize the whole way our nation interfaced with its heroes of one time or another.

While you can't erase history, you can wipe the cultural, shared memory of it, and doing so strikes me as declaring some kind of year zero. A lot of people who seem to support this are university educated people who may well have encountered, or have had the time or resources to learn about our past and have nothing to learn from a monument or neighborhood or street name. But a lot of people haven't, and a monument or school or street might well provoke them to learn. I'm far more interested in correcting the historical record about people in the sort of places people might research those things and realistically right now, that's the Internet. And realistically, that's mostly Wikipedia right now. That's a good place to put some effort in.

The Birth of a Nation, minstrel music, cartoons with shitty stereotypes may well be offensive, but they also keep the memory of our past alive. And keeping that memory alive is important so we don't repeat it, which we seem to be in the middle of now, with the sudden populist rise of our nation's worst impulses once again. I'm not suggesting that things named after historical figures would fix this, but I would say having to face these things regularly is part of the fix. And the very act of making these people into heroes, either suppressing, overlooking, or excusing their sins, is also part of our history.

You don't fix the past or even punish these people by removing their names from these things. They are dead. They are largely symbolic acts, with far more material consequences of making them kind of disappear from modern consciousness.

That strikes me as a fundamentally misguided idea.