Everybody has an opinion on baby names, and even complete strangers are not afraid to let you know their hot takes if given a chance. When you add race and politics to the discussion, people don’t just give you their opinions. They write op-eds.
It’s been two days since CNN published the article, “What It’s Like to be a White Woman Named LaKiesha,” and people aren’t letting this one go. Today, it’s still a headlining story and #LaKiesha is trending on Twitter, as the relationship between names and race takes front stage.
The article profiles a white woman named LaKiesha, who shares her experiences being discriminated against because of her name. LaKiesha grew up in a small, almost exclusively white town in Ohio, where she never knew that her name was a predominantly African-American one. Later in life, she “glimpsed racial stereotyping” when people laughed at or questioned her name. The article explains that LaKiesha’s mother simply thought the name was pretty, and had no concerns about race when she chose it for her daughter. “A name is a name,” she’s quoted as saying.
The article’s claims that LaKiesha’s name allowed her to “be black for a minute” and “step outside her whiteness” unsurprisingly led to a firestorm of charged responses on social media (and some parody). But regardless of where you stand on the white-girl-with-a-black-name story, this weekend’s name news speaks to how complex identity is and how tricky naming can be. When we choose a name for a child, we think about its popularity, how it sounds, and who it honors. But underlying these decisions is always the political. Names are inherently tied up in race, glass, gender, expectations, norms, and stereotypes. They always communicate our identity—the parent’s, and then the child’s—to others.
Because names stand in for those bigger aspects of who we are, they also serve as easy shortcuts for others to judge us. Social psychologists agree that unusual names and unconventionally spelled names tend to connote negative characteristics, while common names connote desirable ones. And we know that having a non-white name can make it harder to get a job and a place to live, as names allow others to make assumptions about an applicant’s race and gender. Chapter six in Freakonomics and the related podcast episode reveal how unusual names are often linked to low social class. We saw this in last year’s news story about 5-year-old Abcde, pronounced Ab-si-dee, who was name-shamed by a Southwest agent when boarding a flight with her mother. Almost every comment on social media poked fun at the name or blamed the mother for her name choice.
So today we leave you with this: Names are complicated. This weekend’s trending news story reminds us that names are about a lot more than personal taste or trends; they can never be entirely neutral, and that’s what makes them interesting. While tensions are high over the white woman named LaKiesha, we’re glad people are having the conversation.