What's in a Name?
In memory of her
Over the past two days, Republican senators have done their best to turn the historic confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court, into a political carnival of conspiracy theories, mansplaining, base-pleasing, and bigotry. It has been sad and infuriating to watch, and it would be far too easy to fixate on the antics of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marsha Blackburn rather than the testimony of Judge Jackson.
But it is worth going back to Monday’s beginning, to Judge Jackson’s opening statement, which included these words:
When I was born here in Washington, my parents were public school teachers, and to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name; "Ketanji Onyika," which they were told means "lovely one."
Before all the smears and lies, a woman sat before the Senate and named herself. Naming — especially self-naming — announces agency, authority, and identity. Those simple words, “they gave me an African name; ‘Ketanji Onyika,’” which “means ‘lovely one,’” were a way of saying to the senators, “I am Black and proud. I am neither your victim nor your prize. I am loved and lovely. I am fully human.”
She began with her name.
* * * * *
I remember the very first Black woman with whom I had close contact. I was born in a different world — Baltimore in 1959, a city segregated by custom if not law. My mother, from the white working class, married my father, the son of a successful small business owner, and had risen (as so many post-war white families had) to the middle class. In a sign of their new status, they hired what was then called “help.”
Once a week, a Black woman came to our house and did laundry for my mother. Since our house was modest, she set up the ironing board in the living room. I was five or six, and I used to sit and watch her. I remember how strange and awkward it felt, seeing her dark skin that didn’t begin to resemble my “Flesh” colored crayons. She seemed to tolerate my presence though, as I played with my dolls or drew pictures while she worked.
She turned wrinkled cotton sheets into silky smooth fabric; she pressed the ruffles on my Sunday dresses so crisply that they appeared to stand on their own. I don’t really remember her talking to me, but I was fascinated by her command of the iron, a tool that seemed magic to me. I slept in a bed under sheets she prepared; I sang hymns in dresses she’d washed clean.
And I never knew her name.
* * * * *
I feel shame sharing that story now. There’s no real relief from such shame. It was the world I knew as a small white child, a world literally built in a contested geography between North and South, where poor white folks might rise to the middle class but feared that poor Black folks might rise alongside of them.
My mother was a bit of rebel though, and she often violated the boundaries of that world. As a teenager, she refused to protest the integration of her high school, choosing instead (in what I imagine was an awkward attempt) to befriend her new classmates. She’d bring iced tea to the laundry woman. I’d sometimes hear them chatting. She forbade use of the “n-word,” even though everyone else in our family demeaned Black people thus. If she ever caught one of her children using it, out came a bar of soap to wash our tongues. (Frankly, I always wanted to see her do this to my uncles!) She actually listened to Dr. King’s sermons and defended him against the larger family’s charges that he was a Communist. She cried when the little girls were killed in Birmingham. Yet she never told me the name of the woman who did the laundry.
Thus was my childhood in the violently racist world of white Baltimore, a world where the only names for Black people were ones I could never, would never utter then and am repulsed by now. It was a world where even seemingly polite white people exerted authority and self-proclaimed superiority over Black people, often by refusing to call them by respectful titles or chosen names. My relatives and my parents’ friends resisted calling Black people “Black,” instead opting for derogatory labels. In the case of Muhammed Ali, they persisted in calling him “Cassius Clay.” And, when it came to Justice Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore and the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court, they didn’t mention him at all. He was a non-person to them.
It was a world where white people chose names for Black people or chose whether or not to even recognize their existence.
Names are powerful. Names acknowledge personhood. To call someone by name is a sign of mutual humanity. Yet, to name someone is a way to control them. To name one’s self is to seize one’s identity, to proclaim agency and destiny.
I wish I’d known her name.
* * * * *
Of course, it wasn’t just my family or Baltimore. Going back to the ancient world, the history of slavery involved stealing not only people but their names. Robbing soldiers captured in war or people of a defeated territory of their names marked them as victims of conquest. Renaming the subjugated destroyed their personal autonomy and, in effect, imprisoned them to whatever identity was forced upon them by owners. Taking away a name was an act of power, a double-conquest. The enslaved no longer was him- or herself, or of a certain family or place, but belonged to another person who controlled the bondsman’s very survival and destiny.
In addition to the loss of self, those enslaved in Anglo-America were stripped of family and traditional names to destabilize any networks of tribe, kin, and culture that may have — despite brutal conditions — survived beyond Africa to the plantation. Usually, the enslaved were given a single first name by traffickers or owners; often, when people were shipped from one plantation to another, new slavers would change their names to further erode any sense of identity among the enslaved and cut any ties to former geographies, spouses, or children. Naming someone was a violent political act to control another’s story, to assert total dominance.
Eventually, after Anglo-American slavery ended, the formerly enslaved took surnames as a mark of freedom, often (but not always) the name of a former plantation or owner. The loss of a name had been the loss of self, family, and history. To name one’s self was an act of reclaiming personhood and restitching family and cultural connections. Naming — instead of being named — was an act of liberation and a protest against white supremacy. To name one’s self was also a political act.
To claim one’s name was to re-member — to put back together — one’s identity and one’s history. To say a name recreates a broken world.
* * * * *
One of the most powerful stories from the end of Jesus’ life is the story of a woman who anointed him with an expensive oil (Mark 14). The woman’s action angered the disciples who thought the money would have been better spent on the poor. However, Jesus would have none it it, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me” and uttered his memorable saying, “the poor will always be with you.” But the woman cared for Jesus’ body in advance of his death. “Truly I tell you,” he insisted to his followers, “wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
And no one remembered her name. She disappeared from history.
Eventually, the nameless woman was remembered — if not in by name, then through the story. For this episode of namelessness became the springboard for feminist reflection on scripture in the seminal book, In Memory of Her by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and inspired three generations of new scholarship and activism by Christian women.
I think of the nameless woman. I remember the woman doing laundry in my living room. I imagine all the unremembered women, the women whose names were stripped from them unwillingly and violently.
Women think about their names, especially since they often change through our lives. Black women, Asian women, Native women. White women like me — Diana Lee Hochstedt Butler Bass. That’s a lot of names, names that tell the story of me.
I think of my own first name, my most cherished name — Diana — and how my grandfather would angrily correct anyone who called me “Diane.” He’d roar at those making such a careless mistake: “Her name is Diana, with an ‘a.’ Like the goddess.” When he stood up for my name, I felt proud, like the goddess after whom I was named! And, believe me, those who mis-named me in his presence never did so again.
What is in a name? Everything.
Born Isabella Baumfree, one of the most famous women in American history would later say, of her self-naming:
“The Lord gave me ‘Sojourner,' because I was to travel up an' down the land, showin' the people their sins an' bein' a sign unto them. Afterwards, I told the Lord I wanted another name 'cause everybody else had two names, and the Lord gave me 'Truth,' because I was to declare the truth to people.”
Sojourner Truth: an unforgettable name.
Our names proclaim that we are goddesses, saints, heroes. The work we do in the world. Our deepest sense of identity. Our beauty, our character, our dignity. To speak names is power; to remember names is a radical act over and against those who want to control our destiny, define us to the world. Our names resist.
And so, when these hearings are over and those senators and the right-wing media have done their worst to tarnish Judge Jackson’s reputation and credibility — to paint her identity as they desire for their own purposes — and believe they have smeared her name to control her, to diminish her historic achievement, recall these words:
My parents were public school teachers, and to express both pride in their heritage and hope for the future, they gave me an African name; "Ketanji Onyika," which they were told means "lovely one."
Whenever the story of these days is told, Ketanji Onyika will be remembered. The names of those who tried to take away her name will not be remembered well.
In memory of her. Her personhood. Her courage. Her freedom. We won’t forget her name.
INSPIRATION
I am tired of having five different names;
Having to change them when I enter
A new country or take on a new life. My
First name is my truest, I suppose, but I
Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese
Name though it is on my birth certificate—
Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a
String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese
is Chuc Mei Wai. . . .
— Teresa Mei Chuc, read her entire poem, “Names,” here.
Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it’s gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.
— Stefan Zweig
We must also reject feeling that we are destined to live with and exemplify only the names given to us by others. Our tradition teaches that through our own choices and actions, each of us can name and rename ourselves. By doing so, each of us can bring honor to God, to the bestowers of our names, and to ourselves.
— Union of Reform Judaism
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the LordGod formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.
— Genesis 2:18-20
START YOUR SUMMER RIGHT!
Join me at the SOUTHERN LIGHTS CONFERENCE
May 27 - 29, 2022
Epworth By The Sea
St. Simon Island, Georgia
For 17 years, Southern Lights: An Adventure In Progressive Christianity (formerly January Adventure) has encouraged attendees to think more deeply about their faith and live their lives as followers of Jesus in today's fast-changing world.
This year Southern Lights will be hosted and led by me and Brian McLaren and features Anthea Butler and Kaitlin Curtice with special musical guests Odessa Settles, Solveig Leithaug, and Ken Medema.
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Thank you for this beautiful essay Diana.
I was almost in tears watching the low points of the hearing, I can't watch them live. It's so painful listening to those people disrespect this amazing, qualified woman, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, even though it isn't surprising. I'm a black woman, and this type of disrespect is not something I observe from a distance, it is part of our lives.
I've read all of the comments so far, and they are lovely. It always gives me hope after I feel let down to be reminded that those awful people are not the majority. God is so good.
Diana, I don’t know you but I’ve read your books, led the Spiritual Awakening study that featured you and so appreciate your balanced way of expressing your understanding of truth. So thanks.