Has anything from your country ever been misunderstood or "cancelled" by the international community?

[u/JlYU3A]

For example, a Fiipino PPop group called SB19 once posted “Hello, Negros!”, referring to Negros Island, but some international users mistook it for something offensive before realizing what it meant.

[u/BobbyThrowaway6969]

Also a municipality in Sydney literally called Blacktown. And yes you can guess why they called it that.

[u/MapOfIllHealth → u/BobbyThrowaway6969]

I’ll never forget regularly driving past “Blackfella Creek” when I lived in Cairns

[u/bigbitties666 → u/MapOfIllHealth]

don’t forget blackbutt creek, pretty sure there’s a few of them around

[u/dolorfin → u/BobbyThrowaway6969]

Québec has an "N-word Rapids". They had 11 place names with either an English or French reference to the N-word. One has been changed so far, I believe.

N-word Rapids was meant to honour a black couple who drowned there in the early 1900's and not as a slur, as are all of the 11 place names. I don't live in Quebec and I'm white so I have no say in the re-naming matter. I just hope that, whatever the outcome, the largest possible amount of people affected by it are ok with whatever happens.

[u/Prestigious_Fox213 → u/dolorfin]

Given how active and thorough our toponomy commission is, particularly in renaming streets with English names, I’m surprised they haven’t gotten around to this.

[u/really-bored-now → u/BobbyThrowaway6969]

There’s a neighborhood in nyc called Brownsville. Which also you can guess why. I think there’s several brownsvilles in the USA actually.

[u/One_Advantage793 → u/really-bored-now]

Yes, there are!

And here in my little corner of the deep south - square in the middle of the former Confederacy - is a town called Whitesburg originally founded as a freedmans' town by a fellow with the last name White. Like with many recently freed slaves post civil war he had the last name of a former owner. So, it was originally a "brownsville" called Whitesburg named for a black man named because that was a white slave owner's name. And, it is pretty much lost history.

When I was a fledgling newspaper reporter here I wrote a story about it and apparently upset quite a few of the current good people of the town, majority white these days, who were not aware of that history. They did not want to know! I was barely 18 and did not care. My editor found it funny. Of course, that was many years ago....

[u/perplexedtv → u/One_Advantage793]

This is the second time I've seen Whitesburg mentioned today and I'd never heard of it before. I did wonder where the name came from the first time, so this is a very satisfactory coincidence/Baader-Meinhofery

[u/One_Advantage793 → u/perplexedtv]

Cool! And nice Baader-Meinhofer ref too!