Both New York State and New York City were named for the Duke of York, King James II of England.

James II, the Duke of York, headed the Royal African Company, a slave trading company.



Royal African Company involvement in Slave Trade

Things picked up for the Royal African Company as got more support from the Crown. It increased forts and military presence in West Africa and pursued gold and silver. Most noteworthy is the Company's much more active role in the slave trade at this time. Between the 1670s and 1680s, the Company delivers 90,000 to 100,000 slaves to British-held colonies.

What do we do now?

Can SJW's let this injustice stand?

New York State and New York City must be renamed!

Here is an honorable SJW detailing the Royal African Company

It cannot revert to New Amsterdam or New Netherlands, since the Dutch East India Company was also complicit in the slave trade. In fact, it cannot be the "New" anything, since something "new" is obviously a cultural appropriation of the old. Not to mention an assumption of superiority over the already-present Native Americans ... and come to think of feel about it, America must be renamed, since it is named after a white supremacist male, Amerigo Vespucci. And the word "Native" must be dropped from "Native American" as well, for fear that it may trigger old racist jokes about "natives."

I am beginning to think feel that we should abolish language altogether. Except for ourselves.

The city is actually pronounced as Noo Yawk by the natives (with a variation of Nu Yoik). This is what the English must have heard when they first arrived - and, being the Eurocentric hegemonists, incorrectly assumed the word was "New York" and so they spelled it that way.

All that's needed now is a reversal to the original spelling:

Noo Yawk

Example in a sentence:

When I first came to Noo Yawk, fresh off the boat from the Motherland, it took me a while to realize that the natives weren't, in fact, referring to the yoke of oppression when they said "Welcome to Noo Yawk," and sometimes "Welcome to Nu Yoik."

[img]/images/various_uploads/Noo_Yawk_New_York_Welcome_Sign.jpg[/img]

Red Diaperette, your comment struck something in me, something that may be double plus ungood. You mention the Dutch and the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). The VOC also established a way station at the tip of South Africa called Cape Town, which was soon home to some very nasty folks called Boers (not bores or boors, Boers). These Boers held slaves and dispossessed natives of their land, and when the British tried to make them stop slave-holding, many of them voted with their feet and moved out of British jurisdiction to set up their own independent states in the interior. The name for this migration was the Great Trek.

The word "trek" thus entered the English vocabulary. This means that the perfect and glorious world of Next Tuesday depicted in Star Trek (Remember Picard talking about how they didn't have money and such the 24th century?) is associated with slave-holding origins.

We're going to have to shove the entire franchise down the memory hole, I'm afraid.

Petition Calls FDR a ‘Racist,' Looks to Rename NYC's Roosevelt Island
We were here first.

Wouldn't an original Native American or First People's name be offensive and have to be changed anyway?

Ivan the Stakhanovets wrote:Wouldn't an original Native American or First People's name be offensive and have to be changed anyway?

English itself, or even a Native name subjected to transliteration into the Roman alphabet, would be offensive -- a gross imposition of European culture onto the Other. Come to think of feel about it, since Orientalism is the imposition of a Western mindset onto Eastern cultures, I suppose we could call this imposition of a European mindset onto a Farther West culture Occidentalsm.

That needs to be translated into Arabic or Farsi for the true meaning...

Ivan the Stakhanovets wrote:Wouldn't an original Native American or First People's name be offensive and have to be changed anyway?

Before Native Americans there were the original inhabitants of the universe, woven into the fabric of all the world's cultures.

[img]/images/various_uploads/Ancient_Aliens_Muslims.jpg[/img]

When name change is not enough.