Naftali Bendavid

Well, I'd say that President Trump's always somebody who's been very sensitive to the power of names and what they mean. And he's always attached, of course, his own name to big buildings in Manhattan and Las Vegas and really around the world. And now that he's president, he has additional authority to name things that we all refer to and that we all look at and

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Of course, we all know about the Gulf of Mexico and him wanting to call that the Gulf of America. And also he's renamed some military forts whose names were changed because they were the names of Confederate generals. And I do think names are about the stories we tell. You know, when we name our children, those are about... who we want them to be in the world.

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And when we talk about landmarks, it's about the story of our country. And I think the story that he's trying to tell through these names is a more conservative view of America. It's one that ends up sort of downplaying minority or African-American or indigenous presences.

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And so I think just as a few years ago, activists wanted to remove the names of Confederates that were on all kinds of military facilities. You know, now there's an effort to change names and tell a different story of America.

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But so much of this is about identity. And the language we speak, just like the names that we have, is central to that. And I think a lot of what's going on in this country is about identity. And as we've been discussing, you know, sometimes that's the identity of an individual. And sometimes it's more of a collective identity.

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But I think it's a through line that runs through all these discussions of names and also, I think, of language.

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Well, that's one of the things I think is so fascinating about that move. As you say, Congress has made it illegal to name something after a Confederate official or general. So what the Trump administration did is they essentially found little known soldiers. I mean, these were brave guys, needs to be said.

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They'd won medals, but they certainly were not the kind of person that would ordinarily have a military installation named after them. Ford Benning was initially named after a guy named Henry Benning, but they found a guy named Fred Benning. He was a medal winner. And they just said, okay, now this Ford is named after him.

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And similarly, Braxton Bragg, who was a pretty unpalatable Confederate leader, they said, okay, now it's named after a guy named Roland Bragg. These are not well-known figures, but it was a way to say, okay, we are going to name these things Ford Benning and Ford Bragg, but we're going to circumvent the law by saying that it's not, in this case, as it was, named after a Confederate leader.

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I mean, I think names are the most basic part of who we are. I mean, you could be male or female. You could be black or white. Those are important categories. But you yourself have a particular name, and there's nothing more specific to your identity than that. So I think names have this fundamental power. And then when we're talking about landmarks or mountains or bodies of water—

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I have to admit, I suffered a lot from having this name over the years because nobody knows what to make of it or they think that it's a woman's name. But, you know, you grow into these things. And I guess by now I feel a lot of affection for it.