Did You Know that Racism is Stil Ingrained in Geography?

“Patriot Act,” host Hasan Minhaj has revealed that there are still way too many places with racist, federally recognized names.

“There is a place called ‘Negro Point.’ It’s actually on Randall’s Island,” he said of a spot in New York City. “When you think about racist islands in New York, you generally think Rikers.”

The point on the East River didn’t even have a name until 1984, “when a survey team learned the name riverboat workers used to refer to the outcropping of rocks and sanitized it for official purposes.”

Minhaj said that while there was a hearing to rename the spot in 2011, groups including the Coast Guard and the Sandy Hook Pilot’s Association argued that “changing the maps would potentially confuse tugboat captains.”

“When have we let tugboat captains stand in the way of racial progress?” the host quipped.

Minhaj referred to a 2015 study from Voactiv that documented more than 1,400 federally recognized places across the U.S. included slurs in their official names.

Places with derogatory names exist in every state, though the largest clusters are in the West and the South. California has at least 159 place names that are offensive to Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese people and Italians.  Not surprisingly, the thickest and most diverse cluster of racist place names is in Arizona.

At least 558 place names across the nation include derogatory words referring to African Americans. The majority contain the word “negro” and many of those were originally known by an even more offensive name until former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall wiped the word “Ni**er” off the map in 1962.  The despicable list also includes the slurs “Uncle Tom,” “pickaninny” and “Jim Crow.”  

In 1974, a federal board replaced all uses of the word “Jap” on the federal map with “Japanese,” after the Japanese American Citizens League protested the name of Jap Creek, Oregon. The initiative led to the changing of nearly 200 names. Yet, other signs of anti-Asian sentiments remain on the map.

There are 30 “Chinaman” place names listed in the federal database. The list had been longer by seven names until individual Chinese Americans and the Asian Pacific American advocacy group Organization of Chinese Americans separately pushed to have them changed. One of the most recent examples was Chinamans Arch in Utah, which was renamed to Chinese Arch in 2004.

The most common slur used in place names across the nation is “squaw.” There are 828 such locations across nearly every state, from Squaw Rock, Massachusetts to Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California. These names remain though many consider the word to be the most offensive term that can be used for Native American women.

Some historians and etymologists insist “squaw” is an innocent Algonquian word meaning “woman.” But many activists and Native Americans argue it is a white bastardization of the Mohawk word for vagina, “ojiskwa.”