Let’s call this a shaming renaming.

       While cities have long named streets and plazas for heroes — from Via Appia in ancient Rome to Lafayette Square in D.C. — and the United States is removing Confederate names from its maps and buildings, ceremonial namings are becoming a way of wielding real protest power.

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       “I’m honored,” said D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), when she learned that a shaming naming that she helped author got her banned from Russia.

       Russia bans 963 Americans, including Biden and Harris — but not Trump

       The council had named the block outside the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue, located in Cheh’s ward, after a dissident whom the Russians are trying to forget. And it appears that little piece of legislation — D.C. Law 22-92, the Boris Nemtsov Plaza Designation Act of 2018 — made Cheh No. 911 on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s list of almost 1,000 U.S. citizens “under personal sanctions.”

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       She is identified as a “member of the District of Columbia Assembly.”

       “I’m the most obscure person on that list,” said Cheh, who is quarantined at home because she tested positive for the coronavirus last week. “But I’m very pleased to be on the list, too.”

       Most members of Congress are on it, as well as President Biden, Vice President Harris, Mark Zuckerberg and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over the trial of convicted spy Maria Butina.

       Cheh’s bill struck a nerve, clearly.

       She said she was moved when a Russian told her that every time a memorial — a bouquet, a candle, a picture — showed up on the Moscow bridge where Nemtsov was gunned down in 2015, “government officials would sweep it away.” It’s especially sensitive right now, because Nemtsov was about to release a report on Russian soldiers in Ukraine when he was killed, she said.

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       So renaming that part of Wisconsin Avenue right in eyesight of the Russians became important. “And nobody would sweep it away,” she said.

       Americans supporting Ukraine are pouring out their Russian vodka and volunteering to fight

       The Senate Appropriations Committee aimed for something similar in 1984, naming the part of 16th Street in front of the Soviet Union’s Embassy for dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.

       “Every piece of mail the Soviets get will remind them that we want to know what has happened to the Sakharovs,” Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) said when that bill was proposed.

       That’s the daily reminder we also hope will come to 601 New Hampshire Ave. NW.

       “Jamal Khashoggi Way” is the new name that D.C. Council Bill 24-22 gave the street in front of the Saudi Embassy.

       In December, the D.C. Council voted to rename that block for Khashoggi, the Washington Post contributing columnist.

       The embassy is a building decorated with Saudi national symbols of palms and crossed scimitars, where men in traditional ghutras are constantly going in. They go out, too, though. That’s something Khashoggi never did, after he was lured into the Saudi Consulate in Turkey four years ago, then strangled and dismembered.

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       Will diplomats and visitors avert their eyes when the street sign with Khashoggi’s name is mounted right in front of the building? Will D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson be banned from Saudi Arabia?

       Muriel Bowser and Black women are going after Trump. And they're winning.

       No one could avert their eyes two years ago when D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser ordered a “Black Lives Matter” street mural, so huge it could be seen from space, painted on the streets in front of President Donald Trump’s White House.

       “As Washingtonians, we simply all want to be here together in peace to demonstrate that in America, you can peacefully assemble, you can bring grievances to your government, and you can demand change,” Bowser said then, as a “Black Lives Matter Plaza” sign was bolted on a lamppost.

       Some Black Lives Matter activists waved the mural away as “performative,” after Bowser lashed out against Trump’s threat to take over the city during that summer’s protests. But Trump rage-tweeted about the signs. It got to him.

       And every time he struck back at Bowser, Trump reminded Americans of the Black Lives Matter movement.

       That’s how these gestures work.

       “The last place I want to go is Russia. I wouldn’t spend a penny or a ruble there,” Cheh said. “But here, by banning me, they are reminding people now about Boris Nemtsov. To which I say, hallelujah.”