In the 1980s people in South Brooklyn had T-shirts reading, “I live in South Brooklyn, I’ve never heard of Carroll Gardens,” but now Wikipedia wants to wipe out even the history of that working class community https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Brooklyn

And in Northern Virginia Google had renamed Amazon’s new campus “National Landing" 24 hours before the announcement. ‘Crystal City' having been disappeared.

Mapmaking in the European tradition has always been about Colonialism. The first thing whites — and Anglo whites have held to this longer than most— do when they move in is rename. How could Native Americans ever have owned “Virginia”? or “Carolina”? or “New York"? How could Africans ever have owned “Rhodesia”? How could even the Chinese capital be Chinese when the Brits renamed it “Peking"?

When language is stolen, it makes all the other thefts much easier.

• Ira Socol