Petition presses Quebec to drop N-word from place names

It took less than 48 hours for a petition calling on Quebec officials to drop the N-word from official place names to gather over half its goal of 2,000 signatures.

Rachel Zellars, a doctoral student and researcher of black history at McGill University in Montreal who launched the petition says she hopes the outpouring of support will convince the Quebec Toponymy Commission to change the names of 11 sites that still use the pejorative in English or French.

“It made me really sick to my stomach. I’m black and I have three small children,” says Zellars of learning through a media report that such places still exist.

“My children have been called n—– in this city so many times.”

She says they hike and camp throughout the province, in part to get away from pervasive racism. She does not want to encounter one of those places one day with her children.

Those places include “Nigger Rapids” near the town of Bouchette, “Nigger Rock” near Saint-Armand and “Nigger Eddy” near Grenville-sur-la-Rouge.

Some are historical sites tied to the history of black Canadians, she says.

The rapids near Bouchette are named for a man and woman of African descent who died there trying to cross the river.

The rock near Saint-Armand is named for a nearby burial ground where slaves brought to Canada by a Loyalist family were buried between 1794 and 1833, the year slavery was abolished in this country.

“The name, because it specifically used the word n—–, was clearly used to desecrate their deaths and not to honour in any sacred way to honour the deaths of those people,” Zellars tells Yahoo Canada News.

“‘Nigger’ has always been, in the history of Quebec, an inflammatory word.”

Despite any arguments otherwise, she says the term “negre” in French has the same connotation.

The spokesman for the toponymy commission has said that the names date back a long time. The commission is considering changing the names but he says there has been no formal request to do so.

Zellars launched the petition late Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon it had surpassed 1,000 signatures.

“Completely unacceptable in the 21^st century,” Fiona Williams writes on the petition page.

“This is embarrassing for Canada,” writes Ave.

But not everyone agrees that the names should be changed.

Dan Philip, director of the Black Coalition of Quebec, calls the effort ill-founded.

There are few places that mark the history of black people in Quebec, he says, and changing the names risks further obscuring that history.

“You can change the times but you cannot change history,” Philip tells Yahoo Canada News.

“When you change that, you try to change the history and it doesn’t work.

“When you take out the word, you have disassociated yourself with history because it was the acceptable norm of the time.”

While he says the word has no place in today’s lexicon, the place names have a historical context.

Philip does recognize, though, that the racial slur stirs emotions.

“The word nigger has been so beaten and so used in such a vicious and negative way against Black people, so once they hear ‘nigger’ they want to fight,” he says.

For her part, Zellars believes the history of black Canadians can be suitably honoured without the epithet.

She has visited former slave plantations in the southern United States as part of her research that are now monuments to that painful history.

“The word n—- is nowhere to be found. So we have 101 examples of how it’s possible to preserve the historical memory of a site in a way that really honours and does not desecrate those who died there,” she says. “Because, for me, the preservation of the word n—- is really an act of desecration.”