The concept of "post-truth" had been around for about a decade, Oxford noted at the time, but usage had spiked considerably in 2016 in the context of widespread misinformation circulating, like a giant cynical trash vortex of all-caps headlines and badly-photoshopped memes, around the US election of that year, and the Brexit referendum in the UK around the same time.

But, as a few ambitious studies of misinformation over the next few years showed, it wasn't that we had all suddenly decided that truth didn't matter - it seemed that it was, rather, the opposite. In the face of so-called "alternative facts" and "fake news", we had all collectively become obsessed with the truth. It was just that we could no longer agree on what the truth actually was, and that the truth (whatever it was) had become very difficult to find.

Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that the clarion cry of the culture wars seems to have recently become all about history and how we can't change it.

The quick-fire comment that "you can't change history," has a nice solidity to it at a time when the narrative that enforces our preconceived ideas and beliefs feels uncomfortably relative.

It's the kind of catch-cry line we heard a lot in the lead up to January 26, and when the Canadian-based dairy company, Saputo, renamed its cheese about a month ago, and now history seems to be the last bastion of the don't-change-it argument as Lake Macquarie City Council considers renaming Coon Island Point at Swansea to address its racist undertones.

So, if history is going to be the ground on which we have this discussion, it's worth taking a closer look at what the historical record actually says.

The widely publicised history of Coon Cheese, for example, seems to be that it was named for the American cheesemaker, Edward William Coon, who patented a curing technique he called "cooning" in the 1920s.

On the surface, the choice by Saputo to change the name of the cheese to "Cheer" in January could seem like a hand-wringing cultural overcorrection and P-C cancel culture gone mad. You also don't have to look far to find lazy comparisons made between the cheese and the island point at Swansea of the same name.

But there's two problems with that argument.

The first is that words have meaning and how we use them matters. Etymologically speaking, "coon" is an abbreviation of "racoon". The first usage appears to have emerged around 1742, according to Merriam-Webster, and it has linguistic links to the United States' history of slavery. Historically, it is a word that has been specifically used to dehumanise and caricature Black people in such a way that perpetuates racist stereotypes. The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, run by Ferris State University in Michigan, notes that the "coon" caricature is the "most blatantly degrading of all black stereotypes".

The second problem is that Coon Island was reportedly named for one of its residents in the early 20th Century, called Herbert Greta Heaney, who was apparently known colloquially as "Coon" because his face was often covered in coal dust, rendering any comparison to the cheese absurd and any argument about a nuanced use of the term moot.

So, if these histories are as blatantly and obviously problematic as they are, the bigger and more important issue seems to be why there is any pushback to changing the names at all, and who is doing the pushing.

The problem with the idea that we "can't change history" is that it seems to be coming almost exclusively from the mostly-white, mostly-male culture warrior set, who have historically enjoyed the comfortable position of writing history as being mostly-white and mostly-male. And that the rule about not changing anything is applied selectively to the things that reinforce the mostly-white, mostly-male view.

That idea is borne out in the same misinformation studies that followed our "post-truth" year in 2016, which found that "fake news" spreads more rapidly and pervasively than objective fact because the concept of the truth is less important to us than whether or not the story reinforces our preconceived beliefs and feelings about the subject.

One of those same studies, for example, found that only around 16 percent of participating Republicans thought that the headline "Over 500 'Migrant Caraveners' Arrested with Suicide Vests" was accurate, but more than 51 percent of the same group said that they would consider sharing it online.

"Together these results indicate that our participants can effectively identify the accuracy of true versus false headlines when asked to do so - but they are nonetheless willing to share many false headlines that align with their partisanship," the researchers wrote at the time.

The complaint about changing history then, seems to have almost nothing to do with the actual history it references, and more to do with how we feel about ourselves, and who we are, in relation to it.

It's a bad faith argument against doing the work to address and come to terms with a fundamentally complicated, problematic, and fraught cultural heritage that is structurally designed to benefit some of us by exploiting the rest.

Changing the title of a cheap cheese named after an American from the 1920s isn't going to fix - or even change - Australia's racist history. And it's arguably not going to change our current cultural problems with race and racism either.

But no one ever said that it would.

And any argument that predicates "fixing racism" as a prerequisite for addressing racial undertones in products or locations, is logically ridiculous.

If we are going to talk about our history honestly, and come to terms with what it means for our present and for our future, we need to talk about all of it. We need to come to terms with the fact that our foundational myth of white, male colonisers is fraught with brutality, genocide, and systemic policy that has exploited First Nations cultures for the benefit of the colonisers.

Addressing that undeniable "unchangeable" history is going to take a lot more work, and a lot more honest self reflection, than simply reprinting a few street signs and product stickers.

But the signs and stickers are, at the very least, a small start toward a much bigger, much more pressing, piece of work. And, if we're as committed to our history as we claim to be, it won't be the end of the work either.

Getting caught in the weeds of the culture wars, however, is to necessarily neglect that important and vital work; it distracts us from making honest and practical ground on addressing the bigger and more important issues.

The news of the past week that Lake Macquarie council was "considering" changing the name of Coon Island at Swansea was met with the same unjustifiable bad faith pushback, and it distracted us from what felt like a prescient point in the reporting. Way back in 2013, Peter FitzSimons, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, questioned the council about the racial undertones of the name of Coon Island, specifically referencing the history of how the place got its name. They replied that they were "looking into it".

- Simon McCarthy, Newcastle Herald digital journalist