Bristolians should be proud that they had the integrity to reject Question 1 and keep “Providence Plantations.” Our district representatives (so-called) had better sit up and take notice before they join another vote, 69-to-1, to irritate us with a “woke” litmus test. (Give Rep. Price my regards, ladies.)

Always iconoclastic, progressives at the Statehouse have drooled over mutilating “Providence Plantations” as early as 1975, when the first such proposal died in the General Assembly. Later, Question 1 snuck onto the 2010 primary ballot. However, its complacent sponsors had mistaken the Obama honeymoon for a four-year sentence for bigotry rather than a “post-racial” reprieve. Voters spurned the referendum in a landslide — rightly — as a navel-gazing trifle.

To reintroduce the question, last June, Mayor Jorge Elorza, Gov. Gina Raimondo, and members of the General Assembly seized upon George Floyd’s body with all the condolences of hungry cannibals. After chattel slavery, Jim Crow and lynch mobs, the word “plantations” in the largely unknown hindquarters of a marginal state’s name remained a grave obstacle to racial justice. Its malevolent vibrations, we were told, induced symptoms—like white guilt sniffles, privilege vertigo, and traumatic flashbacks of Vivien Leigh in hoopskirts — which couldn’t go ignored during a public health crisis.

You’d think that if two “men of color,” Canonicus and Miantonomi, signed off on “Providence Plantations” without a stomachache, our resident reparationists (namely Manhattanite interlopers) might’ve refrained from spitting up when those trigger-words appeared on tax forms for their second homes. But when the little honorific “Mr.” can excite menstruous conniptions, what language is inoffensive enough?

Can the paper even print suggestive vocables like “snigger” or “niggardly” which, like “plantation,” are etymologically innocent; or does the verbicidal left demand their redaction from Webster’s, too?

Previous letters have defended “plantation,” asserting its original definition  — “settlement” — over its cottony connotations, but the word’s original definition is more objectionable to liberals than any callouses it acquired in the fields. Think of the hit-jobs out for Columbus or the Pilgrims; to the left, white settlement is this nation’s original sin. The call for “diversity” — which simply means “less white people” — follows as the obvious penance.

If a word’s associations are really so indelible that only one of its meanings can be observed, the LGBT racket to redefine “male” and “female,” which have immemorial anatomical referents, is a doomed enterprise; and yet, the same party that insists there’s only one interpretation for our name denies there’s only one for our bathrooms.

Needless to say, the left’s actual game is an attack on our traditions, the “radical transformation” of America and her people, an onslaught against which conservatives must push back.

To those who burlesque our values as “apple pie, baseball, and commie-hating” rather than affirm the Constitution, Thanksgiving, and commie-hating; to those who fatuously declare “history evolves,” I reply:

I was born in the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. I am proud of that. Those are two facts you and your friends can’t change.

Zachary Cooper
Bristol