New York state has quietly moved to rename Nigger Lake. And Nigger Road. And Nigger River. Claiming that the existence of these locations had only recently been noticed, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has decided to refer to them as Unnamed Lake, Unnamed Road and Unnamed River.
Apparently the DEC can’t just decide to rename the locations without a proper process. In the meantime, they will change all references to the new names, although since the old names went unnoticed for so long, it’s fair to say that these probably aren’t places that get talked about too much.
No-one seems to know how or why Nigger Lake, Nigger Road and Nigger River got their names. It’s possible that there’s a perfectly innocent explanation. But in the meantime it seems that no-one wants to take any chances. There’s no indication of how long it will take to get the names properly changed, but surely it’ll happen sooner rather than later.
The word ‘nigger’ does, however, appear in more place-names than you might expect. There are two Nigger Creeks and a Nigger Reef in Australia, and there’s a Nigger Swimming Pool in India.
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