Rhode Island May Change Its Official State Name Over Slavery Connotations

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Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo signed an executive order Monday taking the “first steps” to change the state’s full name: “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

The “plantations” portion has come under increased scrutiny following widespread protests after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The order, Executive Order 20-48, will change the name to just “Rhode Island” in official communications from the governor’s office — including future executive orders, citations and letterhead. It also calls on all state executive agencies to remove “plantations” from their websites.

The order does not change the state’s official name permanently — that will require voters to amend the Rhode Island Constitution, the order states.

Read more at THE NY POST.

{Matzav.com}


6 COMMENTS

  1. Let us fervently hope, Im Yirtza Hashem, that whenever they have a referendum on this issue, the voters will VEHEMENTLY REJECT this absolutely totally sick demand to remove the word “plantation” from the state name!!

  2. This is the entry at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary website:

    Definition of plantation (Entry 1 of 2)
    1: a usually large group of plants and especially trees under cultivation
    2: a settlement in a new country or region
    Plymouth Plantation
    3a: a place that is planted or under cultivation
    b: an agricultural estate usually worked by resident labor

    This is the opening sentence of the entry at the Wikipedia website: “A plantation is a large-scale estate meant for farming that specializes in cash crops.”

    Now, yes, further in that Wikipedia article, it does state: “African slave labour was used extensively to work on early plantations (such as tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar plantations) in the American colonies and the United States, throughout the Caribbean, the Americas, and in European-occupied areas of Africa.”

    HOWEVER, the word “plantation” itself only connotes an extremely large cash-crop producing farm, with, understandably, a large number of workers. It does not say anything at all about what KIND of workers are the workers, whether they are voluntary workers or slave workers. It just so happened that most of that most of the early day plantations did have vast numbers of slave workers; at the same time though, most of TODAY’S plantations DO NOT have slave workers. So, again, the word plantation itself has nothing to do with slavery.

  3. RI is the poorest State in the Nation. Now they are going to waste millions of tax dollars just to change their dumb name???

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