Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Jim Crow Hill in Australia has name removed after it was deemed racially derogatory
The name "Jim Crow" is meaningful only in the USA. There would not be one Australian in a thousand who was familiar with it
A VICTORIAN council has been ridiculed for removing the name of a hill called after an early stockman whose name was deemed racially derogatory.
The Office of Geographic Names ordered Mansfield Council to remove or change the name of Jim Crow Hill.
It said Jim Crow refers to an 1828 US minstrel show song Jump Jim Crow, where a white man blackened his face to resemble a poor Negro.
It claimed the term has been widely used in Australia to disparage black people.
But locals are angry at the decision, claiming Jim Crow was an early stockman who had a hut on the hill.
The council, located in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, contacted the local Taungurung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, who confirmed the name was offensive.
This was despite research by the council which found records of a man named Jim Crow with some connection to the Benalla and Mansfield district in the 1880s.
Landowner Philip Newton told the council he was not interested in a name change. “It has always been called this and as far as I am concerned it is of no one else’s interest what it is called,” Mr Newton wrote. “So no change under my ownership.”
“The whole exercise is pointless anyway because locals will still carry on calling it Jim Crow hill.”
Deputy Mayor Cr Paul Sladdin said the hill, near the Mansfield Woods Point Rd in Piries, was now nameless. “Unfortunately we were obligated to follow the direction of the Office of Geographic Names,” Cr Sladdin said.
“I know the locals will still refer to it as Jim Crow hill so you could argue it’s a case of political correctness gone wrong, especially as there was some anecdotal evidence of an early stockman.”
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6 comments:
PC has become the normal thing for our idiot councils. Time to get rid of them and appoint administrators to remove an unnecessary level of government. Too many councillors are aligned with political parties, and want to step up to the next level, which makes for bad government at the lowest level.
This is the down-side of global Americanization - US PC-ism must be imposed world-wide no matter how irrelevant or inappropriate to a local culture or history.
This doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Since there is a Mount Jim Crow National Park in Queensland this seems to be hysterically ridiculous.
MDH
let's call a spade a spade. There is a huge black hole of ignorance in the PC universe, and it expands to extinguish all light. It encourages offense by proxy, and now it seems to encourage offense by 2nd or 3rd proxy (people who have never been caused injustice complaining about the name of a man who never caused them injustice because some other country has a slang expression of the same name for laws that were used to persecute an unrelated people group on another continent!) The one thing it is not is niggardly - it generously extends the right to claim offense to all, for all, against all!
PC justa code word for stupidity
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