*Editor’s Note: This one’s not about pop culture

The Confederate Flag is perhaps the most recognizable symbol of racism in the United States. This week, after an avowed white supremacist murdered nine people in Charleston, South Carolina, the flag has started falling from state capitols around the South. This is a powerful, and important achievement in America. But high-profile racist symbols can often cast shadows over the deeply embedded, daily evidences of systemic racism around the country.

Here in Minnesota, we tend to avoid talking about race. It’s comforting to live in a state that fought for abolition and has a long tradition of progressive politics. That is a comforting story. But we have our own racist roots and symbols that need confronting. One that has been getting attention this week is Lake Calhoun.

The largest of the Minneapolis’s twenty lakes, Lake Calhoun is part of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway. A link in the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes, visitors love to run around it, sail on it, or fish for musky in it. Now, though, residents are asking the Minneapolis Park Board to change the lake’s name, and break the connection between the lake and the legacy of the white supremacist whose name it bears: John C. Calhoun.

The campaign to change the name started with a petition launched by Minneapolis resident Mike Spangenberg, who created it after Dylann Roof’s killing spree in the Emanuel AME church of Charleston. Spangenberg asks the city to change the name because the slavery-promoting Calhoun should not be promoted anywhere. “While changing the name of a lake will not, in itself, bring an end to injustice,” Spangenberg writes in his petition, “it can and should be an important step in an ongoing effort to confront our nation’s past and to end systemic racism and oppression today.”

John Calhoun is undoubtedly a part of our nation’s racist past. Calhoun was Vice President of the United States from 1825-1832, and was a preeminent advocate of slavery. In an 1837 speech on the Senate floor, he called the slavery “a positive good.” He used his political power to protect slavery where it existed, to promote the expansion of slavery into new territories, and to decry abolition.

But it was his time as Secretary of War (1817-1825), that linked Calhoun to Minnesota. In 1817, Calhoun sent a group from the US Army to survey the land around St. Paul before the Army began construction of new western outpost, Fort Snelling (then called Fort Saint Anthony). Ten miles west of the future site of Fort Snelling, the Army surveyors found a lake, at the time called Mde Maka Ska. In the Dakota language, it meant White Earth Lake. The surveyors designated it Lake Calhoun.

In the days since it went live, Spangenberg’s petition has found support. As of this writing, more than 3,800 individuals have signed on, and some prominent Minneapolis residents have spoken out in favor of changing the name. Among them is R.T. Ryback. Ryback was Minneapolis mayor from 2002 - 2014, and today he posted a message of support to his Facebook page, writing that any decision on a name should be made by native people, who were the lake’s original stewards for centuries prior to white settlement.

Not everyone agrees. Pioneer Press columnist Joe Soucheray wrote yesterday that changing the name of Lake Calhoun “is tantamount to letting mass murderers” decide what we do. He also argued that it would open the door to a flood of name changes. Soucheray points to our state’s capitol, St. Paul, claiming it “wouldn’t stand a chance with the Freedom From Religion crowd,” before concluding: “It would never end.”

Whether or not Lake Calhoun gets a new name this year, the petition started by Spangenberg is already working on behalf of the cause he is looking to support: confronting our history. But it’s important that Minnesota take the chance to confront our history, not just reject a name of a Southern Politician dead for a century and a half.

To see that history we need look no further than in the fort Calhoun left behind. Built in the 1820s as a frontier post and military fortification, Fort Snelling was home to slave-owners and slaves (including, temporarily, Dred Scott) before the Missouri Compromise ended slavery in the Minnesota Territory. A few decades later, Fort Snelling would serve as a Civil War fort, training over 20,000 men for battle. After the Civil War, it became a prison camp for indigenous peoples during the US - Dakota War of 1862. Between 1862 and 1864, thousands of natives would be held by force at Fort Snelling. US Army soldiers stationed at Fort Snelling would fight in the Indian Wars until the end of the 19th century.

In Minnesota, we take great pride in our role in the Civil War. We talk fondly of our 1st Minnesota Volunteers, trained at Fort Snelling, one of the first infantry armies mustered to fight for the Union. We talk a great deal less about how we turned that Fort into an internment camp for indigenous men, women and children. That history is ours, but it’s a racist history many chose to ignore. If they even know that it happened.

That racial conflict remains, today. Minnesota, in 2015, is a politically liberal state, often happy to pat ourselves on the back for our progressive politics. We’d rather not worry too much about the ACLU’s report that black Minnesotans are 9 times more likely to be arrested for minor crimes than whites, or that our schools have the lowest on-time graduation rates for Native American students in the country.

Changing the name of Lake Calhoun would be a positive result. But it should not cloud the reality of our own racist history, built with our own Northern hands that will need to be confronted if we are going to solve those problems caused by a history of systemic racism.