No Rhode's an Island

I can't believe that the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, as our geographically smallest state is officially called, is revisiting the issue of its official name yet again.

In 2010, Rhode Island had a referendum to take the reference to "Providence Plantations" out of its official name because of the word "plantation"'s connotations with slavery.  The argument against changing the old name was that the word "plantation" referred to a settlement, not an agrarian estate operated by resident labor, specifically slave labor, and was not meant to be offensive.  The referendum failed.  But now, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, it's back for another vote this fall.  Even before there has been a vote, Governor Gina Raimondo has ordered the words "Providence Plantations" removed from official state documents and letterheads.

Good Lord!  Are we so politically correct that we have to let a non-issue like this interfere with more serious issues such as a pandemic, the Supreme Court, and, yes, racial injustice?  This is just another attempt by the Word Police to ban the use of a word or phrase because one of its two meanings offends people who don't know what the other meaning is.  Especially when the meaning they're familiar with couldn't be more divorced from Rhode Island's history.

Here's the deal. When English colonists settled along Narragansett Bay, they organized their early settlements locally, with no direct connections to each other.  Two towns, Portsmouth and Newport, were established on the bay's largest island, named for the Isle of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, while  other towns, including Providence - established as a settlement devoted to religious freedom for all by Roger Williams - and smaller settlements were established on the mainland . . . the Providence Plantations.  Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations governed themselves loosely until expansionist threats from Puritan Connecticut, which claimed the mainland west of Narragansett Bay, and hyper-Puritan Massachusetts, which claimed the land to the east, encouraged them to band together into a single colony in 1644 - the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.  It was a federation within the future federation we now call the United States.

As for Rhode Island's connection to slavery, well, it has none.  Rhode Island does, however, have a connection to abolitionism, its settlements having outlawed slavery as early as  1652 and banning  the importation of enslaved peoples in 1774 - two years before American independence.  Instead of changing the state's official name, why not educate its residents of the meaning of the current official name?

And what would the name be changed to?  The State of Rhode Island and Providence Environs? The State of Rhode Island and Metropolitan Providence? The State of Rhode Island and the Providence Vicinity? The State of Rhode Island and Providence?  More likely, it would simply be shortened to the State of Rhode Island.  Which of course, is dumb.  Because much of Rhode Island is actually mainland.  And no one even refers to the island of Rhode itself as Rhode Island anymore - it's commonly known by its Indian name, Aquidneck Island.

So, if the words "Providence Plantations" are removed from its official name, Rhode Island may soon be, officially, known by . . . an irrelevant misnomer.  Hey, Governor Raimondo, and the Rhode Island Word Police, why not just rename your state East Connecticut? :-p

P.S. Out of curiosity, I looked up this interesting factoid.  I always thought it was weird that Prince Edward Island - a real island - is a separate province of Canada.  But at 2,185 square miles, it's actually larger than the entire state of Rhode Island  (1,214 square miles).