For release: 09/03/26
What’s in a name?
By Cal Thomas
Tribune Content Agency
As part of Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada that the administration claims isn’t a trade war, the president has signed an executive order, renaming Lake Ontario, “Lake America.” This follows his renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
These childish antics help no one, but Trump is not alone in changing names for political and woke purposes.
There is a long road in Northern Virginia that for years has been called “Lee Highway.” It passes through Arlington and Fairfax counties. Arlington County politicians decided they didn’t like Confederate General Robert E. Lee for whom the highway is named, so they changed it to Langston Boulevard, honoring John Mercer Langston, an abolitionist, an attorney and the first Black person elected to Congress from Virginia.
While that might be considered admirable, the silly part is that once “Langston Boulevard” crosses into Fairfax County it becomes Lee Highway again. Did Fairfax not receive the memo? Some GPS systems still show Lee Highway in Arlington County, while newer cars with updated GPS show Langston Boulevard.
It gets sillier. Columbus Day is now “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” though my calendar app has both. NY State Senate bill S9316 has changed mother and father to “non-gestational and gestational parent.”
Several Army forts had their names changed during the Obama or Biden administrations. Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty. Fort Benning was changed to Fort Moore. Fort Hood was changed to Fort Cavazos. Those other guys were said to have been associated with the racist South. The Department of War, formerly known as the Department of Defense and before that the War Department, restored the historical names of nine U.S. Army installations by re-dedicating them to different military service members who share the same last names as the original Confederate namesakes.
Don’t get me started on statues.
We then have the Washington professional football team (that’s what it was called until the name was changed to the Commanders from the Redskins), though some indigenous people said they thought the previous name was a “tribute to resilience and warrior traditions.”
The Cleveland Indians became the Cavaliers, though the Boston Braves kept their name, as did the Atlanta Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Blackhawks and the Florida Seminoles. Redskins suggested skin color. The others got a pass.
Then there was Aunt Jemima, who was a real person. Nancy Green was her name. Born into slavery in Kentucky, she moved to Chicago where she invented the pancake recipe many of us have eaten for years. “Her face on the box, that image on the box, was probably the one way that households were integrated,” Sherry Williams, president of the Bronzeville Historical Society in Chicago, told ABC News. Green’s image was removed by later owners of the brand apparently because they thought Green’s actual face portrayed a stereotypical “Mammy.”
It was a similar story with “Uncle Ben’s Rice.” In the 1940s, food entrepreneur Gordon Harwell and his partners put the image of an elderly African-American man dressed in a bow tie on the product’s box, “an image said to have been based on a Chicago maître d’hôtel named Frank Brown.” The title “Uncle” was used instead of “Mr.” because of racial customs in the American South. But the image apparently was thought to look more like “Uncle Tom.”
There are many more examples of this virtue signaling. Land O Lakes butter removed the Native American image but kept the land. A felon is now supposed to be referred to as a “justice-involved person”, or something similar. An illegal alien is now an “undocumented noncitizen,” though the Trump administration stubbornly refrains. Some believe the left can’t define a woman. Some may recall the old saying “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” That may depend on the words and what they mean at any given moment.
Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).
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