Racist Place Names in the USA
It used to be much worse, but it's not fixed
The prose project I’m working on right now takes place in a small Arkansas town whose name becomes, coincidentally, a contemporary term for a sex act. The town is not sure what to do, as they are selling a lot of shirts online for the town festival but they are also losing money as the town signs are being stolen constantly. It’s inspired by the Toad Suck Daze festival and the time when “YOLO” became popular and the signs around Yolo County were stolen rampantly.
But it stirred an odd memory in me, a toddler memory, of my exasperated mother getting close to my face and telling me to never repeat the word someone had used in my presence.
“We don’t call it that anymore,” she said. “We don’t use that word at all. It’s very mean. That’s one of the words you should never say.”
In my memory, my mom is big and has to lean over in the car to tell me1, so I must have been very small. And I don’t remember the specifics of what had happened, but it was the first time I was aware of the N-word, and it was put in the corral of Words to Never Say which was right next to the pasture of Words We Only Say When We’re in Church—in our denomination, we only used the names “God” and “Jesus” when we were talking directly about them, never as an exclamation. We didn’t even say “I swear,” but “I promise.” The context of the conversation is lost, but someone, I think while giving us directions, had mentioned the name of a mountain that would peel your brain to think about.
Of course I had to look this up to see if it was true, and couldn’t find it because there were so many places with racist names it’s just one racist needle in an epithet haystack. Turns out, until 60 years ago, it was totally fine to not only have these names, but to print them on the maps as the official names of towns, lakes, rivers, and other areas. The N-word was only banned by the Board on Geographic Names in 1962 (some sources say 1963) followed by a term for Japanese people three years later—so anyone born a short time before that can remember when it was socially acceptable to use these names in casual conversation.
“Oh, I’m not racist; that’s just what people call the lake!”
Now, the most well-known racist word is gone from names (I’ll bet there’s a holdout somewhere I don’t know about) but many of them just changed the term to “Negro” without renaming it all together, and when you consider terms for other peoples, especially Native Americans and Chinese, it’s still a rampant problem. The recent names for sports teams that were changed seemed so polite in comparison to some of these places. Maybe this is why people hesitate to accept the new names of the teams when they live within a day’s walk of a much worse term.
I usually hate to make absolute remarks, but I’m going to do it: not one of these places was named by the people to whom they refer. This is a naming convention that comes from cruel jokery, hatred, resentment, and fear—none of which are acceptable. This isn’t even a case of “well, they call each other that, why can’t I say it?”2 These are names that were created with, at the very least, ill intent.
We changed Cleveland’s baseball team and Washington DC’s football team. Let’s scrub out the rest. Shouldn’t be that hard.
Links
I don’t normally post links, as I’m usually just finger-babbling on my keyboard from my memory, but for this post, it was necessary. This is just a small sampling from what’s out there.
The USGS FAQ page on derogatory names. Somewhere in this site as well, you are free to suggest new names for places near you. These are the people to send your emails to. Please leave my comment section for other remarks.
CNN’s story about Texas changing 19 place names. It only took 30 years to complete!
In 2022, the Department of the Interior changed the names of 650 places that had a word for Native American women in the title.
An article from JSTOR that has links to its research (behind a paywall)
A creepy, scary piece on the acronym ANNA (which came to be used in town names as well), and an insight into “sundown towns.”
I was born in 1969, so this is from the ‘70s, when we didn’t have carseats. We just rode up front with no seatbelts. Yep.
There’s a type of white guy who says this, who really likes singing rap out loud in public.
My mom grew up in a rural area near Kenton Ohio and we would visit a few times a year. There was a town or area the locals referred to as "N****R Island". I heard someone at a restaurant use the term when giving directions to someone else. Something like "it's up there about a mile past "N****R Island". When I asked her what they were talking about, my mom said it was named that because it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. This would have been in the early 1980s and I never forgot how casually the name rolled off that man's tongue. I never heard any of my relatives say it, but it seemed like it wouldn't' have been uncommon for my grandparent's generation to use that nickname as casually as they would have used any of the other surrounding towns if they were giving directions.