If we are going to cancel everything so it doesn't offend anyone, as we are doing with statues, buildings, schools, and roads currently honoring presidents, Civil War heroes, Founding Fathers, etc., let's do it right!  We should also take a closer look at the 50 American states.  Many of these are problematic, having been named for local Indian tribes (oops, I meant Native American tribes) that were forcibly removed from their traditional lands and herded into reservations.  How racist!  Let's make everything all better by taking a close look at just a few of the states, then, in alphabetical order, to see how many we can cancel.

Alabama

Before Europeans landed on American shores, the upper stretches of the Alabama River in present-day Alabama used to be the homelands of a Native American tribe called — drum roll, please — the Alabama (Albaamaha in their own tribal language).  Clearly appropriating the name of the Alabama tribe to name a state is deeply offensive to the ancestors of these angelic original Alabamans.  So let's cancel the current state name and call it something less hurtful.  I propose "State #1."

Alaska

Like Alabama (and, as we'll see, plenty of other state names), the name "Alaska" comes from the language of the area's indigenous people.  This horribly racist and offensive practice should be ended immediately.  Let's call Alaska "State #2."

Arkansas

The first Europeans to arrive in the area of present-day Arkansas were French explorers accompanied by Illinois Indian guides.  The Illinois referred to the Ugakhpa people native to the region as the Akansa ("wind people" or "people of the south wind"), which the French adopted and pronounced with an r.  They added an s to the end for pluralization, and for some reason it stuck when the word was adopted as the state's name.  So, by now you get the drill — Arkansas gets canceled and becomes "State #3."

California

The origin of the state name "California" is controversial.  However, the most prevalent explanation is that the state name comes from the early 16th-century romance novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), where California was the name of a mythical island near to the Garden of Eden populated only by black warrior women.  Wow!  The name "California" breaks so many rules of modern cancel culture that we will leave the reasoning to the reader and simply propose that the state name "California" be canceled and be renamed "State #4."

So by now, you get the picture.  After this detailed analysis, I therefore propose a general rule to rename all the states in numerical order, from "State #1" to "State #50," starting with the letter "A."  Numbers cannot offend, at least not yet, although there have been accusations from some quarters that the even the number system is racist.  Well, this proposal should be good for now, at least.

Next time we will look at canceling the name of our country, which was designated after that dastardly racist white male explorer Amerigo Vespucci.