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In reply to the discussion: Dozens of birds to be renamed to shun racism [View all]RobinA
(10,200 posts)and I'm not going to scream about it, but this is a quintessential BS woke thing. Very performative. They could have accomplished the same thing by saying, "Hey, we're changing bird names to make them more descriptive and therefore easier to remember" and no one would have thought twice. But instead they went for the diversity points by making that the point.
Do they honestly think that renaming a McKown's longspur because the discoverer of that bird later became a Confederate general is going to attract African Americans to bird watching? Do birders even know who McKown was? Do African Americans not get into birding because some birds are named after not nice people? As a female, I don't research the pasts of every person who has ever had a bird named after him to see what his opinions of women were. Similarly, I sure African Americans have better things to do than research what side of the Civil War various bird-discoverers were on.
What nonsense.