It sounds like something straight out of The Onion, but Full Fact, which bills itself as “the UK’s independent fact checking charity,” confirms that a petition was filed at Change.org calling on the British government to change the name of the iconic cliffs to be the Black Lives Matter Cliffs of Dover:
Change.org confirmed to us that this was a real petition, started by one of their users, which has since been taken down from the site. They explained that: “We received multiple user complaints about it and when we assessed it we found it to be in breach of our Community Guidelines and so it was removed.”
EuroWeekly reports that the petition was filed by Hannah Stubbs, a reporter for The Sun, noting:
On Stubbs’ page calling for the name change, she wrote: “Is it really appropriate and sensitive in this day and age to persist in calling a national symbol “white”? The fact that these cliffs are called “white” stands as a racially-insensitive reminder of white privilege and white dominance in a country where many people are Black or Minority Ethnic. Why should marginalised people have to utter the name of the race that oppresses them in order to refer to a geological feature?”
A screenshot of the page has been making the rounds on social media:
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Although the petition is no longer up, a number of petitions like this one still exist on the Change.org site seeking signatures of Anglophiles bent on preserving the original name.
