Did you know that the George Floyd riots are linked to bird names?

I didn’t until NPR informed me of the fact in this story about how the American Ornithological Society is moving to rename any bird with a name associated with humans.

Discussions of how far wokeness has advanced/been rolled back in journalism vs. academia can leave out territories like the American Ornithological Society, where Year Zero nonsense is still just stomping around unopposed.https://t.co/Z5mffTt27t

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) November 1, 2023

This is how far social justice has dipped into the nearly dry well of oppression.

Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna’s Hummingbird, Gambel’s Quail, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Bewick’s Wren, Bullock’s Oriole, and more.

That’s because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.

“Names have power and power can be for the good or it can be for the bad,” says Colleen Handel, the society’s president and a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska. “We want these names to be powerful in a really good way.”

The move comes as part of a broader effort to diversify birding and make it more welcoming to people of all races and backgrounds.

There are apparently too many White birders, although I was under the impression that the Black man who got a woman fired for having her dog unleashed in Central Park was Black.

Names have power, and if the name is too White sounding it apparently drives people without pallor to avoid looking at the birds.

Or something.

“We’ve come to understand that there are certain names that have offensive or derogatory connotations that cause pain to people, and that it is important to change those, to remove those as barriers to their participation in the world of birds,” she says.

The project will begin next year and initially focus on 70 to 80 bird species that occur primarily in the United States and Canada. That’s about 6 or 7 percent of the total species in this geographic region.

There had been pressure from some social justice advocates on this issue prior to 2020, but it was after the death of George Floyd that sanity was lost.

That really started to change in 2020, when police officers killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. On that same day, a white woman in Central Park called the police on black birder Christian Cooper, claiming he was threatening her.

Less than a month later, a group called Bird Names for Birds wrote to the leadership of the society, pointing out the potential problems that come with eponymous honors and demanding change.

They noted that a 2019 proposal to rename a small prairie bird that had previously been named for Confederate General John P. McCown had been rejected.

In 2021, the society officially gave that bird the name “Thick-billed Longspur,” after amending its naming guidelines to explicitly consider social justice reasons, says Handel.

The name “McCown’s Longspur” was apparently offensive to some people, driving them out of an otherwise welcoming hobby. Irony of ironies, the Latin name used by scientists for the bird will not change, and it retains the reference to McCown.

I have no particular stake in this fight. I can barely recognize a sparrow. But I and others have a stake in drawing a line in the sand when it comes to giving in to demands from Social Justice Warriors, who are now using magnifying glasses to seek out instances of injustice.

If there ever were a first-world problem, it’s this. Finding microaggressions in the naming conventions of the birding community.

The biggest problem facing Black people in America has little to do with bird names and much to do with a dysfunctional education system that leaves them uneducated and unprepared to succeed, not the mention the collapse of the family in the African-American community. But since those are difficult problems to solve, the SJWs focus on fake nooses on garage doors, actors who fake hate crimes, and the naming conventions of birds.

The absurdity has to end sometime.

Right?