Route Naming and Renaming at the Gunks

On renaming Shockley's Ceiling

The folks at Gunks Apps (makers of, well, the Gunks app and also authors of the newest guidebook, Gunks Climbing) have an erudite and informative page on route renaming. There’s been a fair bit of renaming in recent years; our own contribution to tearing down racist monuments. Of greatest issue—or at least the hardest name to take up for the old guard—is changing the name of Shockley’s Ceiling, to “The Ceiling.” William Shockley, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of semiconductors and the transistor effect, was also a prolific writer on topics he was much expert on: race, genetics, and in particular the superiority of white people.

In their blog post, the Gunks App folks write, “Suffice it to say he was not simply another racist in his time, he was vociferously embracing Nazi ideology.” This is false, and false in an interesting way. Shockley was, in fact, embracing a long American tradition of racism and eugenics, one that predated—and even inspired—Nazi ideology.

A 2008 NIH paper on “U.S. Scientists' Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939)” explains how and why “eugenics became a serious scientific movement in the 1920s.” The aim of eugenics was “the improvement of the human race.”

The eugenics movement extended far beyond a handful of scientists. No lesser light than Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was an enthusiastic supporter. She once wrote, “The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

Isabel Wilkerson, in her monumental study, Caste (Random House, 2020), documents the ways in which the early Nazis responsible for planning the persecution of Jews and other minorities traveled to the U.S. to study American persecution under Jim Crow. (Indeed, they found U.S. miscegenation laws too strict for their purposes; instead of “one drop” of tainted blood, a German was Aryan unless they had less than 50 percent Aryan ancestry.)

Shockley needn’t — and surely didn’t — have looked thousands of miles away for racist inspiration when there was so much to draw from, so close to home.

Generic route names abound in rock climbing. There must be a thousand routes named “North Face,” for example, and how many crags have an “Afternoon Delight”? But it’s always “The North Face of the Eiger,” for example. A name understood to be “The Ceiling of the Gunks” or “The Gunks Ceiling” is way too vague—there are thousands of routes at the Gunks, and half of them have ceilings.

Ironically, much better names were available. According to Gunks Apps, “A slew of names were floated.” One of them strikes me as ideal: “Semiconductor Ceiling.” Not only is a neighboring route named “Mr. Transistor,” this retains the word “ceiling”; it distinguishes it from all other ceilings at the Gunks; it alludes to the aspect of the man that’s still worth honoring; and it removes the offensive name Shockley. Perhaps if enough of us start calling it that, the name will stick for the next iteration of the guidebook.