The Joke That Opens a Bigger Conversation
Sometimes somebody tells a joke that sounds ridiculous at first, but underneath the laughter there is a serious historical question worth examining. I heard one joke that said White people must not have been very original because Europeans crossed an entire ocean and then started putting “New” in front of names they already knew. We got New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and New England, as though somebody packed a suitcase full of old names and carried them across the Atlantic. I laughed because there is enough truth in the observation to make the joke work. European colonists often named settlements after places, monarchs, patrons, and institutions connected to the countries they came from. But saying this proves White people cannot create anything would be far too broad and historically inaccurate. Every racial and cultural group contains extraordinary creators as well as people who borrow from what already exists. Human civilization itself has grown through exchange, adaptation, imitation, migration, conquest, and invention. The more interesting question is not whether White people are creative. The deeper question is who has historically possessed enough power to rename something and make everybody else use the new name. Once I started thinking about it that way, the joke stopped being only a joke.
Putting “New” on an Old Name
The naming of colonial America tells us something important about how settlers understood the world they were entering. Europeans did not arrive on an empty continent waiting for somebody to give everything a name. Indigenous nations had already named rivers, mountains, settlements, territories, animals, plants, and sacred places long before Europeans arrived. Some Indigenous names survived and remain so familiar that many Americans hardly think about where they originated. Other names were replaced as European political control expanded. New York itself became New York after the English took control of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, whose major settlement had been called New Amsterdam. The English renamed the territory in honor of the Duke of York. That was not simply a failure of imagination. Renaming territory could announce who now claimed authority over it. A map therefore becomes more than geography because the names printed across it can tell us who had enough power to make their language official.
Naming Can Be an Exercise of Power
There is something powerful about naming because names shape the way later generations remember a place. If I control the map, the schoolbooks, the government records, and the signs along the road, my names can eventually start looking like they were always there. The older names may survive mainly among the people whose ancestors used them. After enough generations, everybody else may forget that anything was renamed at all. That process happened in different forms throughout colonial history. European empires routinely imposed their languages and political categories on territories they controlled. Indigenous people were sometimes pressured to adopt European names as part of broader efforts to assimilate them. Enslaved Africans also experienced profound disruptions of names, languages, family connections, and cultural identities through the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. So I understand the argument that renaming can become connected to domination. But I would not say every act of renaming is automatically colonization. Context matters, especially when we are trying to understand whether a name reflects ordinary cultural exchange or unequal power.
When Culture Gets Repackaged
The same conversation becomes more complicated when we move from maps into food, fashion, hairstyles, music, and everyday culture. People have always borrowed from one another. Recipes travel across borders, musicians absorb sounds from other musicians, clothing styles move between communities, and languages borrow words constantly. That cultural exchange can produce some beautiful things. The trouble begins when something associated with a marginalized community is mocked, ignored, or considered inferior until somebody from a more powerful group adopts it. Suddenly the same thing becomes fashionable, sophisticated, or profitable. That difference can make people understandably angry. They are not necessarily saying nobody outside their community should ever enjoy their food, music, clothing, or style. They are asking why the original people could not receive the same respect. Appreciation becomes easier to recognize when people acknowledge where something came from. Erasure begins when the new version acts as though nobody was doing it before the latest person “discovered” it.
From Familiar Tradition to New Trend
Social media has made cultural repackaging especially visible because trends now move around the world almost instantly. Somebody can encounter a practice that another community has used for generations and present it online as though they invented something new last Tuesday. A traditional drink becomes a wellness discovery. A familiar hairstyle receives a fashionable new name. A food that somebody grew up eating suddenly appears in an upscale restaurant with a description that barely acknowledges its cultural roots. Sometimes that is harmless ignorance rather than deliberate theft. People genuinely may not know the history of what they encountered. But once the history becomes available, curiosity should replace defensiveness. There is nothing embarrassing about discovering that somebody else’s grandmother knew about something before TikTok did. If anything, learning the history makes the experience richer. The problem is not that cultures influence one another. The problem comes when influence travels in one direction while recognition and money travel in another.
Black Culture Knows This Story Well
Black Americans understand this conversation because so much of American popular culture has been shaped by Black creativity. Blues, jazz, gospel, rock and roll, R&B, soul, funk, and hip-hop all carry major Black cultural foundations. Black speech, dance, fashion, hairstyles, and humor have repeatedly traveled into mainstream American culture. Sometimes Black creators received recognition and financial success from their work. Other times somebody else became richer or more acceptable by presenting a version of something Black communities had already created. That history can make cultural borrowing feel different when you know the people who originated a style were once punished or ridiculed for practicing it. A hairstyle can be called unprofessional on one person’s head and fashionable on somebody else’s. A way of speaking can be treated as evidence of ignorance until advertisers discover that it sells products. Those contradictions are worth examining. They remind me that cultural influence does not always come with equal cultural power. Sometimes everybody wants the rhythm while remaining uncomfortable with the people who created the beat.
We Still Have to Be Historically Careful
At the same time, I do not want legitimate criticism of cultural erasure to become an excuse for careless history. Not every modern food or fashion comparison proves that one culture stole directly from another. Similar ideas can develop independently in different parts of the world. Foods that look alike may have different histories, ingredients, preparation methods, and cultural meanings. Hairstyles can also resemble one another while coming from different traditions. Human beings everywhere have wrapped cloth around themselves, braided hair, cooked dough, fermented food, seasoned water, and decorated their bodies. If I am going to accuse somebody of appropriating a specific tradition, I should know enough history to support the claim. Otherwise, a good argument becomes weaker because exaggerated examples are easy to dismiss. Cultural history is usually more tangled than social media makes it look. Giving proper credit also means doing enough research to know who actually deserves the credit.
Colonization Was Bigger Than Renaming
I would also be careful with saying colonization was never about innovation and was only about ownership. Colonialism certainly involved ownership, extraction, political domination, land seizure, labor exploitation, and control over resources. Renaming places could become part of that larger system. But history rarely fits comfortably inside one sentence. European empires also carried technologies, institutions, diseases, religions, languages, commercial systems, and scientific knowledge across territories, while simultaneously taking knowledge and resources from the people they encountered. None of that excuses conquest or exploitation. It simply means colonization was a complicated historical process with devastating consequences that cannot be reduced to one motive. Colonized people were not passive either. They resisted, negotiated, adapted, preserved traditions, created new cultures, and influenced the colonizers themselves. Some of the cultures we know today emerged from those painful collisions. Understanding that complexity does not soften the injustice; it helps us describe it more accurately.
Credit Changes the Conversation
One thing that can improve cultural exchange is remarkably simple: give people credit. If I discover a dish through Mexican culture, there is nothing difficult about acknowledging that connection. If a hairstyle comes from a Black tradition, learning and mentioning that history costs me nothing. If Indigenous knowledge helped people understand a plant, landscape, or agricultural practice, that history deserves recognition. Credit does not mean cultures have to build walls around themselves. Culture has always traveled, and trying to freeze it permanently inside one group would be nearly impossible. The goal should be respect rather than isolation. People can enjoy each other’s traditions while remaining curious about where those traditions came from. Businesses especially should think about this when turning cultural traditions into products. Making money from somebody else’s heritage while pretending the heritage does not exist is where appreciation can start looking a whole lot like exploitation.
Renaming Can Affect Memory
The more I think about naming, the more I realize this conversation is ultimately about memory. Whoever gets to name something often influences how future generations understand it. Put a new name on a place and eventually people may forget the old one. Put a fashionable name on a traditional practice and younger people may believe the practice began with the trend. Remove the cultural story from a food and customers may never know the people who carried that recipe through generations. That does not mean history disappears completely. Families and communities have remarkable ways of preserving memories even when official institutions overlook them. But recognition matters because public memory shapes whose contributions society values. Restoring older names or telling fuller origin stories can sometimes repair part of that historical absence. We do not have to erase everything that came later in order to remember what came before. Sometimes justice begins with simply putting the missing names back into the story.
Summary
The joke about Europeans putting “New” in front of old place names points toward a serious conversation about culture and power. European colonists frequently renamed territories that Indigenous people had already named. Renaming could reflect political authority rather than simply a lack of creativity. Similar questions appear today when traditional foods, hairstyles, language, and cultural practices are repackaged as new trends. Cultural exchange itself is not automatically exploitation. Human societies have always borrowed, adapted, and learned from one another. Problems arise when the original community is erased, mocked, or excluded while somebody else receives recognition and profit. Black American culture provides many examples of creativity becoming mainstream without equal recognition of its origins. At the same time, claims of cultural appropriation should be supported by accurate history rather than superficial similarities. Colonization involved far more than naming, including land, labor, political control, resources, and cultural domination. Giving credit and learning the history behind what we enjoy can make cultural exchange more respectful.
Conclusion
I can laugh at the idea of somebody crossing an ocean just to put “New” in front of an old name because there is something funny about it. But after the laugh, I want to know whose name was there before the new one arrived. That question takes me somewhere deeper. It takes me into power, memory, ownership, culture, and history. I do not believe White people lack creativity, because history gives us more than enough evidence against a claim that broad. I do believe powerful societies have often possessed the ability to rename what other people already knew. Sometimes the new name became so familiar that the original story almost disappeared. We still see versions of that process when old cultural practices return wearing fashionable new labels. Sharing culture does not bother me. Erasing the people who created or preserved it does. Before anybody announces, “Look what I discovered,” sometimes the respectful thing to do is look backward and find out who was already there.