Tons Of Places Have Problematic Names; Guy Fieri Is The Solution

"Exactly how long are we going to put up with the glorification of Confederates and genociders?" is a question people in the U.S. have been asking pretty much since the U.S. began glorifying Confederates and genociders. It turns out the answer is "Only a few hundred years." In response to the uproar that's been happening for, oh, decades over racial injustice in America, people in power are finally starting to rethink the value in metaphorically sucker-punching whole swaths of the population on a daily basis. Addressing the actual violence appears to be a ways off still, but they're tearing down statues, quietly censoring comedians in blackface, and concluding that perhaps "Slavington County" isn't the most welcoming name.

Across the country, people are apparently just now waking up to the fact that their cities, counties, janitors, etc. are named after terrible people and making efforts to fix that. (Fun fact: When you work for the government, you forfeit your name and adopt whichever one they give you.) One of the most notable is the whole-ass state of Rhode Island. It's about as far north as you can get without encountering hilarious accents, so you might be wondering what this Rhode guy's deal was, but that's not even the troubling part. Rhode Island's official name is the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ...

... which raises just so many questions, to wit: Why on Earth did it take them so long to say "Hey, maybe we should drop that last part"? How were they just stamping that shit on official government paperwork all these years like that's a normal thing? What fucking plantations did they have in Providence?

Also, why didn't they take care of this shit when it was originally on the ballot ten years ago (j/k we know why).

A more immediately apparent candidate is all those cities named after Columbus, most famously in Ohio, but that one's not quite as easy as dropping a few words no one even knew was part of your whole thing. How do you rebrand such a major city? Well, the citizens of Columbus have a solution, and in fact, it requires no rebranding at all. Nearly 100,000 people have signed a petition started by a local resident to change the city's name to Flavortown in honor of Guy Fieri, who is as much a part of Columbus as White Castle and confusing urban planning. There seems to be no downside to the proposal: They could cast off the tarnish of some genocidal fuckhead and probably boost tourism to the area. Flavortown certainly sounds like a much more fun place than Columbus. It would have to be, right?

Manna will personally apologize to every Columbian on Twitter.

Top image: Flickr/Marco Verch