The College Fix explains how a tiny minority of deranged communists are misusing university platforms in a really offensive way.

A group of professors and researchers identified 960 places within 16 of the country’s 62 national parks that contain “racist” names that promote “white supremacy,” “racism,” “settler colonialism” or “anti-Indigenous ideologies.”

Authors on the People and Nature research article included Grace Wu and Kurt Ingeman. Wu teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara and Ingeman is a postdoctoral researcher.

The research team “examined the origins of over 2,200 place names in 16 national parks in the United States” and found all of the locations “have place names that tacitly endorse racist or, more specifically, anti-Indigenous ideologies.” There are a total of 62 national parks.

These names are “thus perpetuating settler colonialism and white supremacy at the system scale for future generations.” …

The professors and other researchers split up the offensive place names into categories.

Of the 960 offensive names, 324 were considered offensive due to their descriptive, “neutral-seeming” names, including Crater Peak.

“Seemingly innocuous names, and names of forgotten or obscure individuals are perhaps just as pernicious as names for outright racist or violent individuals,” the study stated.

“Neutral-seeming settler names build a white-normative culture in the place,” the article stated. These names also “perpetuate the invisibility of Indigenous people on landscapes” and “demonstrate that settlers have the power to suppress deep Indigenous knowledge with relatively shallow Eurocentric names.”

The study also identified 254 names that support white supremacy, such as Roys Peak in Texas’ Big Bend National Park. These names “erase Indigenous knowledge” and support white supremacy.

The study also reported that 214 names appropriate Indigenous language, 205 names replace an Indigenous place name with a colonizer name, and 52 names honored violent individuals. Others, such as Yellowstone National Park, were “the work of white urban power elites,” including Teddy Roosevelt. The former president helped grow the National Park Service.

The researchers wrote that “white hegemonic symbols embedded in parks can contribute to a perception that white people are the primary stewards and knowledge keepers of nature” and as a result make racial minorities feel excluded. “Black people are 13% of the US population yet they are only 1% of US national park visitors, while white people are 76% of the US population and 96% of visitors,” the paper noted.

By renaming the “offensive” national park names, marginalized groups will become empowered, according to the study.

But, the new names cannot be neutral as it would still support “white dominance.”

RTWT