I wanted to step away from politics to discuss something a little closer to my heart: The names we black people give ourselves. I’m going to refrain from saying African-American, because the name doesn’t properly represent the diaspora of dark-skinned people who take root in the United States whether brought here by force or delivered by choice. Furthermore, African-American highlights many groups including a significant portion of the Brazilian population that doesn’t define itself as North American (or even black for that matter).
I come to this 10 minute conversation because of a kid named Zaevion Dobson. He came to my attention as the post-mortem recipient of the 2016 Arthur Ashe award. He died while shielding his family and friends from nearby gunfire. This didn’t happen in a desert trench. It happened in Knoxville, Tennessee.
This all merely establishes the name. He has a strange one, and it is common among black people to have odd names. These are only odd because they don’t seem to connect to some deeply rooted cultural history. Here’s the thing though: The names do represent a culture and a history. It is the culture and history of that particular diaspora of people who look like me and ended up on the North American continent largely severed from any other identity. So, these names are an effort to connect (in what ways we can) to the place we presume we came from and to introduce our own inflection to that history.
Some Thoughts:
- I have a way too quiet voice. Fact.