9380: What’s In A [Racist] Name?

From The New York Times…

Race-Based Names Dot the Landscape

By Kim Severson

ATLANTA — The onetime name of Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas hunting camp is currently the most famous example of an egregious race-based place name, but it is not the only one.

Consider Runaway Negro Creek, which flows near a state park outside Savannah, Ga. The name is printed on nautical charts, but park rangers find it so uncomfortable to use, they try to avoid saying it.

It is one of several hundred places that have the word “Negro” in their names and still exist on government maps and in the local vernacular in dozens of states.

They are vestiges of racial attitudes that not that long ago made it acceptable to label a piece of property once leased by Gov. Rick Perry’s family as Niggerhead, which had been painted in block letters on a large rock at the entrance to the rural northern Texas hunting camp. The word was once so common it was used as a brand name for everyday items like soap, canned shrimp and tobacco.

Although it would be hard to find anyone willing to argue that the term or its variants should still be on any maps or signs, many people now also say that Negro — a government-approved alternative to the harsher epithet used in the past to name mountains, rivers and other places — should also be removed.

Debates over potentially offensive place names have long been a part of the civic debate in the United States, and some groups persuaded the government to change race-based names that were considered insulting. But it is not always a simple or a welcome process.

The United States Board on Geographic Names, the federal agency that maintains the official names of more than 2.5 million streams, mountains, cities and civic buildings, lists 757 names that use the word Negro or a variation, said Lou Yost, executive secretary of the board.

Some are based on the Spanish word for black and are not necessarily race-based, but many were derived from the same slur that caused trouble for Mr. Perry.

In 1963, the federal government ordered that the offensive term be replaced with “Negro” in all geographic names. At the time, that word was an acceptable reference to African-Americans. (The only other similar blanket order came a few years later, when the word “Jap” on place names was changed to “Japanese.”)

But language, like culture, changes. Now place names like Negro Mountain in western Maryland seem, to many, antiquated at best and offensive at worst.

But officially or unofficially, erasing race-based references is difficult.

Read the full story here.