The reason why racism continues to exist and perpetuate is that we rally for it with reasoning like this. The reasoning being, the coding being—-default to Anglo/White names because the System is dominated and controlled by Anglo/White people. So erase yourself, your creativity in favor of flattening yourself so that you can have job propriety and acceptance in the future.
That’s called hegemony.
When you do something detrimental to yourself BUT consider it a positive or it feels good. Like cutting. Or hardcore drugs.
My personal full name is so White that a middle school teacher told me he expected a small red-headed Irish/Scottish boy to stroll in. My father’s last name is Jackson but my parents got together in college, had me and broke up then a decade later got married, then broke up. They offered did I want to change my name last name and I looked at their marriage’s longevity potential and opted out of it. I assume though that having an Irish/Scottish full name has acted as a benefit.
But I will also assert that for hundreds of years POC has flattened themselves to fit in, to get along, to make our selves comfortable, agreeable to a White sensibility. Do White people ever consider how uncomfortable it is dealing with them? With all the White folk bullshit—-which should be not just a Quora question but ongoing blog—-yet due to proximity and resource need and social ties, we march on.
Naming your child, I spend far too much time considering names for my children and names for children when I’m writing fiction, is a sacred thing. It is the spiritual imbuing of what you feel and senses at the moment. And linguistically, historically the “La” “Tah” and “Sa/Sha” sounds are of African dialects that we have fragmented memories of. Sounds that mean something to us spiritually, not for a job application, not for White folks comfort and as a clever resume ruse, but to the core of what it means to be human. And everything that it means to be human is not to White comfort and sensibilities. We name to sound, to the ear, to the creativity of using a flexible language to create.
What I am struck by here in this trail of answers is how many people didn’t point out Black creativity. People who may have nothing but a sound to give to their child, a way of being unique, a slight piece of a forgotten history, and instead White washed it.
I recently had the experience of dealing with 50 students from Israel and there was a roll call list and I had to read it aloud. And you know what? A lot of their names were vowels and consonants in ways that I’d never seen before, never pronounced before. So I announced to assemblage, have patience with me and excuse me if I mess up the pronunciation of your name. And their leader came over and we, together, called out names and he corrected me and we laughed. And we worked as humans to honor his people, his culture, their parents, their intention as we worked our way through a mundane ticking off process.
Here’s how you know you’re dealing with your racist imbued thoughts n matter your imposed skin and cultural designation—-You stop telling others, based upon their imposed skin and cultural designation, that anything they do that isn’t sharply Anglo/White is suspect, problematic, detrimental——you instead support them in BEING HUMAN BEINGS.
And yeah, acknowledge and work your way through the one thing our parents have to give us. Which is why I use Kyle, technically my middle name, which I prefer to my first name because there aren’t often as many Kyles in a room and I like the African, Narragansett and Vedic power of how the K and the Y work in my name, on paper and then to the X in the end of my name.
Names of people of color are often evocative of things not part of a bureaucratic system, of blood and spiritual history that circumspect the banality of John and Mary. There’s no power in those names because ironically for all the Anglo/White demand to conformity, it’s to a mundanity that Anglo/White fight desperately at the other end of the hallway to get out of in Eminem, suntanning and cultural appropriation.
Most White people aren’t thrilled with the homogeneity of their own culture, why should we ascribe to default to it. I mean Obama should’ve changed his name, right? Or did it not matter to his qualifications?
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