We have a naming problem.
“Chinaman” is a derogatory term for a Chinese person, and it’s shameful that this word dots the American landscape. The reasons for changing these place names, and reckoning with their histories, are both ethical and strategic. The ethical is obvious: The term denigrates people of Chinese heritage. (Comparing “Chinaman” to the terms “Englishman” and “Irishman” isn’t apt, because those words aren’t wielded as insults.)
The strategic angle is more complicated, but no less important. The United States is locked in a struggle with China. Beijing claims that the United States discriminates against Chinese people, and that only the Chinese Communist Party can save them. This is false, as the many catastrophes of the party’s rule over China show. But when other Americans mistreat Chinese Americans, it aids Beijing in three important ways. It strengthens the party’s claims of protection over all Chinese, and it belies the notion still held by some Chinese liberals that the United States is a beacon of tolerance. It also alienates the many Americans who wish to toughen U.S. policy toward China without being, or seeming, racist toward Chinese people.
Renaming place names containing the word “Chinaman” is not about ignoring local history, or about censoring certain words. “Chinaman” is an appellation that Chinese Americans sometime use for themselves. Rapper Christopher Wong Won of the pioneering hip-hop group 2 Live Crew called his solo 1992 debut “The Chinaman.” Former White House speechwriter Eric Liu titled his 2014 memoir “A Chinaman’s Chance,” a phrase that means “nearly impossible” and probably originates from the inability of Chinese laborers to get a fair trial — or to avoid pogroms — in late 19th-century America. But as any American who has ever been called “White trash,” “Negro,” or “kike” knows, the race and background of the speaker matter. “We all say things about our own family, that if someone else said that about our mother, we would punch them,” Frank Wu, the president of Queens College in New York and author of “Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White,” told me. “It’s about intimacy and irony.”
Indeed, racist Chinese names aren’t the only ones that need fixing. In the 1960s, many communities updated their place names, adding the word “Negro” in place of the even more pejorative term that had been used before. But today, of course, even that updated term is widely considered undesirable.
Even amid the racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is still a mountain in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park called the Negrohead, as well as a cape, near my hometown of Syracuse, N.Y., called Negrohead Point. There are dozens of other examples, and not just against Blacks: Georgia and Pennsylvania both still have communities called Jewtown. And even more than 40 years after the publication of Edward Said’s influential book “Orientalism,” which describes the often denigrating portrayals of the “Orient” in European and American culture, the tourist town that calls itself “the Sailing Capital of North Carolina” still maintains the name Oriental. The town holds an annual dragon-boat race and a New Year’s Eve dragon celebration — while its population, according to one survey, is zero percent Asian.
Changing an inflammatory place name can be an intensely local endeavor, said Mark Monmonier, a professor of geography at Syracuse University. In November, commissioners in Colorado’s Chaffee County debated a proposal to rename Chinaman Gulch, a ravine 130 miles northwest of Chinamans Canyon. The commissioners voted unanimously against the proposal, with one calling the name Chinaman Gulch “descriptive and evocative.”
Sometimes national pressure can help. In 2001, after several years of advocacy from Asian American groups, the Board on Geographic Names changed the name of an Idaho mountain from Chinks Peak to Chinese Peak. Want to help today? Share the petition that is advocating to change the name of Chinaman Lake, in northern Minnesota. Call elected officials in Sacramento, California’s capital, and encourage them to raise awareness about renaming nearby Chinaman Creek. Or better yet, push for the Board on Geographic Names to expand its list of prohibited names to include “Chinaman” as well.
Margaux Garcia contributed research.
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