How about DuSable Lake Shore Drive?

We can honor Chicago’s first permanent non-Indigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, and still retain the old name for our city’s iconic roadway.

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Lake Shore Drive, looking north from 31st Street.

Brian Ernst/Sun-Times

As we consider a new name for Lake Shore Drive, consider how the airport across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., was renamed. First it was National Airport. Then it was Washington National Airport. And now it’s Reagan Washington National Airport.

The name was not so much changed as added onto.

DuSable Lake Shore Drive sounds good enough to me.

Michael Riley, Uptown

Republican cancel culture

The Republican Party rants about cancel culture, but they are the foremost agents of cancel culture. Two examples:

1. Republican-led state legislatures across the country are busy passing laws to prevent the teaching of history that accurately details the devastating impact of the institution of slavery, as well as the devastating impact — specifically on Indigenous peoples — of the doctrine of manifest destiny.

2. Republican legislators in some states have recently misrepresented the goal of the Constitution’s three-fifths compromise, falsely claiming it was an effort to curtail the power of slave-owning states, with the ultimate aim of ending slavery, when in fact it was an effort to give more power to slave-owning states.

Why are Republicans afraid of the truth? This country won’t be able to come to grips with its imperfect founding until it acknowledges, in true terms, the existence of those imperfections. 

Warren Rodgers, Jr., Matteson

Nonsense didn’t begin with Trump

Are critics of Donald Trump giving him more credit than he deserves for the Republican Party’s stunning swerve into a deviant, invented and parallel reality devoid of facts? So it seems.

Trump’s brand of irrational nonsense has succeeded, to the extent that it has, only because millions of Americans were receptive to that mindset all along. All Trump did was expose the breadth and depth of the attitude that white supremacy is a cause to be supported by any means available.

The unwelcome evidence is clear to any rational observer, which is why the FBI has declared war on white supremacist militias and other such groups. There was the August, 2017 tiki-torch parade in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists chanted, “Jews shall not replace us!” There was the foiled militia plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor. There were the insurrectionists who took over our nation’s Capitol Building on Jan. 6. There has been the more than doubling of random assaults on citizens of Asian ancestry.  

Plainly put, too many of us are infected with the hate virus that preceded Trump. He only encouraged it. We must face this truth if we are to keep our nation from collapsing from within. The threat is real and homegrown, nourished by endless conspiracy on radio and TV. Ignore it at your peril.

Ted Z. Manuel, Hyde Park 

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