Geography of Offensive Names

Offensive and racist names are an unfortunate part of the American landscape as highlighted by the furor over Govenor Rick Perry’s Texas hunting camp.  Both the Washington Post and the NY Times takes a look at the proliferation of racial names and histories.  The NY Times in its article, Race-Based Names Dot the Landscape,  notes:

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.

In the Washington Post article, Offensive place names once dotted the U.S. landscape, the widespread occurrence of these offensive names stems from relying on local input:

Mark Monmonier, a geographer at Syracuse University, says that the three most offensive place names that can still be found on some maps are “nigger,” “jap” and “squaw.” This is mainly because during the first half of the 1900s, topographers were sent out to name and measure geographic locations and relied on local input.

Mark Monmonier also wrote a book about offensive place names entitled “From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame“.

The NY Times article does note that although a 1963 order by the federal government to replace all offensive terms for African Americans with the word “negro”, the term is also used as the Spanish word for black.  Subsequent orders also demanded that geographic places with “Jap” be renamed to “Japanese”.

Ken Jenning’s new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks also spends some time on the issue of geographic name changes.  Even with the blanket name changes ordered by the United States government, Jennings notes, “The USGS quandrangle maps are still littered with Dago Springs and Chinck Peaks and Polack Lakes, and it’s not as if “Dead Negro Lake” is a huge improvement over the alternative anyway.”