The Association of Imaginary Schools has been in the process of changing its name and logo to make it more inclusive for over six years. Although all the young people and two Boomers on the Name Change Committee were in total agreement that the old branding had to go, there were significant institutional obstacles in the form of Oldsters and cement.
Questioning the Brand
It was a student who first pointed out that the 19th-century amusement park pavilion that served as the Association’s logo image referred to an architecture of segregation, racism, and sexism.
The student gave a rousing multimedia presentation on the history of exclusion at the World’s Fairs and the many copycat amusement parks that enforced racism and sexism across the United States.
The Name Change Committee invited Victoria Wolcott, author of Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America to come to speak to the Association and invited members to reflect on how segregated venues impacted their own personal histories.
Resisting Change
The sustaining donor of the Association of Imaginary Schools missed the presentations but reported having only good memories of the Victorian wrought iron pavilion and bandstand in the all-white seaside town where he spent summers as a child. He reminisced about being taken to concerts at the pavilion by his family’s housekeeper and wondered what happened to Old Bess. “Only positive associations for the logo pavilion,” he ruled by voicemail as he imposed a two-year moratorium on rebranding talks until the students “calmed down.”
As for the overly long name of the Association of Imaginary Schools, young faculty in the History department pointed out that it is redolent of the era of racist institutional consolidation of power in the hands of white men threatened by the implications of the Civil Rights movement. They explained to the Board how clubby professionalism locked up money and power in gatekeeper organizations designed to lock out non-whites, immigrants, women and working-class people, and highlighted how the Association of Imaginary Schools was an example of the phenomenon of centering whiteness.
Trustees were not interested in this argument either and passed notes about their upcoming golf tournament during the history presentation. The Chair of the Board joked in the hallway that he and his old white friends had come to their wealth and influence through brutal honest competition with each other and that if you had preferential treatment for some as reparations for imagined inequalities then we would never have a fair playing field again. Rebranding was shut down for a second time.
An Economic Argument
Three years ago, Marketing pointed out that the overly long name of the Association of Imaginary Schools had too many characters to meet Google Ads requirements, making it impossible to promote the organization via search advertisements. They brought in a branding consultant to explain that old-school names over 28 characters are being shortened to impossible-to-remember acronyms putting insular old institutions at a disadvantage against younger orgs.
The consultant told the Board that it used to be you could force people to accept the printed characters you put in front of them, but now readers have the choice to click on “YES???” instead of your boring old letter-hogging name. It no longer pays to sound stuffy and official.
The Oldsters had never heard of search ads and objected to changing the Association’s name to YES???. No problem with sending out the old full-color brochures they insisted.
False Flag
More recently, students raised concerns that the colorful striped flag of the Association could be seen as cultural appropriation of the similar rainbow-striped LGBTQ flag.
As it happened, this was the winning argument.
The old guard, unaware of the LGBTQ flag, now questioned their purchase of numerous rainbow items for their grandchildren, and suddenly expressed an eagerness to solve the brand confusion issue. The old guard abruptly pivoted to promoting the whole idea of brand confusion, which they branded as their own issue.
5 Obstacles To Inclusive Name and Logo Change
Despite the significant ideological resistance by Oldsters, an intern reported that there were other less tangible points of friction in the inclusive renaming process, which extended the process for another year. They posted their list of 5 Obstacles To Inclusive Name and Logo Change in a video on Twitch in which they appear draped in the old Association of Imaginary Schools flag (found balled up in the coffee cabinet).
- Fifty boxes of embossed letterhead with the old name and logo in a storage unit in Queens (who uses stationery anymore?).
- The Director’s brother designed the current logo and would be offended if it was removed. The brother can get really scary when he’s drunk and no one likes to confront him. No way he’s designing the new logo, so that was more bad news to deliver.
- The brass letters spelling out the name of the Association in the lobby of its Main Office are attached with cement. The handyman has outright refused to remove the metal letters. Everyone agrees that until the handyman hooked up the new espresso machine to the waterline, it was important not to alienate him.
- The new logo features a Mockingbird which is supposed to represent satire. Many Logo Committee Members say no one knows what a Mockingbird is. Two ornithologists complained that the Mockingbird was not realistic enough and requested a re-do. Half of the people in the meeting walked out when the bird-lovers insisted on showing a forty-five-minute Youtube video on Mockingbird nesting habits.
- A Work-Study office assistant took a sharpie to the bird logo mockup posted over the impossible-to-remove old brass logo in the lobby and wrote BIRDS AREN’T REAL. Oldsters don’t know what that means.
No one was interested in the argument that the whole idea of the Association of Imaginary Schools was to make fun of hide-bound, self-interested, self-dealing primarily white institutions. The handyman, an avid member of the Birds Aren’t Real movement, commented “Tragedy is humor plus time.”
Also Read: Close The Schools!