Navigator: The Places We Come From

There are a lot of ways to disparage a place, but some words carry more venom—and historical baggage—than others. Some version of what the U.S. president reportedly said has been said forever; it’s been said about the place I call home.

Truth be told: It’s a pretty effective narrative. Use it, and you’re able to mark entire populations with the traits you perceive in their environments—they’re unclean, and therefore, inferior. Then, you can justify colonizing them, enslaving them, profiting from them, denying them rights, or just wiping them out altogether. And it’s a geographically flexible characterization. You can apply it to Palestine—as Winston Churchill did in back in the day—or to an inner-city neighborhood in the U.S. In either case, it absolves the entity deploying it of its own responsibility in creating difficult conditions in the places they are referring to—as if “shitholes” exist in a vacuum.