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What’s With The Racist Names Of So Many American Places? | Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj | Netflix

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Hasan Minhaj takes his cameras to the U.S. map and finds 1,441 reasons it needs an edit.

On “Patriot Act,” Hasan Minhaj digs into a problem hiding in plain sight on official government maps: hundreds of streams, valleys, ridges, and peaks across the United States still carry racial slurs as their legal names. He traces how a 2015 federal review turned up the scale of the problem, then follows the surprisingly slow bureaucratic path required to fix even one of them. To make the process real, he heads to a specific spot in New York City and tries to get an offensive name changed himself.

• A 2015 federal review found at least 1,441 federally recognized place names in the U.S. still contain racial slurs, including terms targeting Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities, attached to streams, valleys, and peaks.
• The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which operates under the Department of the Interior, ran sweeping campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s to strip slurs against Black and Japanese Americans from federal maps — but hundreds of other offensive names survived because changes still depend on slow, piecemeal local proposals and state sign-off.
• Minhaj visits an offensively named landmark in New York City to walk through the civic process residents and activists actually have to use to petition for a name change.

The Map America Never Finished Cleaning Up

Minhaj’s starting point is the sheer number: 1,441 federally recognized places still bearing racial slurs, according to the 2015 federal count he cites. These aren’t obscure footnotes buried in old atlases — they’re names printed on official topographic maps and used in real hiking guides, property records, and local signage. The segment runs through the categories of slurs involved, spanning derogatory terms aimed at Black, Indigenous, and Asian communities, attached to everyday geographic features like creeks and mountain peaks that families drive past or hike every year.

The joke Minhaj works from — and the point underneath it — is that this isn’t ancient history. These names were assigned by surveyors and mapmakers who simply wrote down what locals called a place, slurs included, and the government stamped it official. Nobody voted on it. Nobody was required to revisit it. It just stuck.

Inside the Board on Geographic Names

The federal body responsible for all of this is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a unit under the Department of the Interior that has final say over what gets printed on official U.S. maps. Minhaj credits the board with real action in the past: in the 1960s and 1970s it launched sweeping, top-down campaigns that systematically scrubbed slurs targeting Black and Japanese Americans from federal place names nationwide.

At least 1,441 federally recognized places in the United States still carry a racial slur in their name — streams, valleys, and peaks included.

The catch, as Minhaj lays out, is that those broad sweeps were the exception, not the rule. Outside of those two targeted pushes, the board’s default process for renaming anything runs through slow, individual proposals — a local resident or group has to submit a request, get it through state-level review, and wait for the board to act. There’s no mechanism that automatically flags and fixes every slur left on the books, so hundreds of names simply never came up for review.

Taking the Fight to a New York City Landmark

To show what that process actually looks like on the ground, Minhaj travels to a specific offensively named landmark in New York City and tries to get it renamed. The bit doubles as a demonstration piece: he walks through the actual paperwork and local approvals residents would need to file to have a name struck from the books, underscoring just how much legwork and patience — filing with local boards, waiting on approvals — stands between a community and getting a slur removed from its own backyard.

It’s the same format Minhaj built “Patriot Act” around — take a systemic issue that sounds abstract on paper, then physically go do the thing to expose how clunky the system really is. It’s a tactic in the same lane as satirical news pieces like the ones on Last Week Tonight, where the comedy is the delivery mechanism for a genuinely reported process story.

Persistence of the Piecemeal Process

The segment’s real target isn’t any one slur on any one map — it’s the design flaw in how the Board on Geographic Names operates day to day. Because renaming depends on someone locally filing a request and pushing it through state channels, a place can carry an official slur for decades simply because no one with standing ever submitted the paperwork. Minhaj’s point is that the 1960s and 1970s campaigns proved the federal government can move at scale when it decides to — the current system just hasn’t decided to again.

Minhaj wraps the piece the way most “Patriot Act” segments land — not with a tidy policy fix, but with the paperwork still sitting on someone’s desk. The petition process he walks through in New York doesn’t resolve on camera; it just makes clear that changing one name, out of 1,441, still comes down to a private citizen filling out a form and waiting on a board to say yes.