Why Isn’t Your Name “More Ethnic”?

Hello {{ first name | friends}},

My conversation with Shanti Joy Gold a while back got me thinking about other conversations I've had with white folx and this one about my name came to mind.

I was working in Warwickshire in England for a small national organisation with a tiny on-site team. I was the only Black person and the only person of the Global Majority. I've told you before about being questioned about my desire to take the job by a member of the board, who were also all racialised as white with a fair number of men (though I believe there were two women). So this was that workplace.

To take the job I'd moved up from London, moved in with a friend while I looked for a house, bought a car, and then started the job. My colleagues were friendly, and generally reasonably welcoming, though they didn't know a lot about people with my identity or my culture.

One of my colleagues had been particularly helpful in assisting me to get settled, providing what I needed to open another bank account - the town was so small there was just one branch of Barclays and I needed an account there to make it easier to pay me - and also facilitating things like getting to and from the airport when I had to take a trip at short notice.

So I was a bit surprised when she said to me conversationally one day: "You know, I'm a bit disappointed that your name isn't more "ethnic". It was another of those situations where I wasn't quite sure what to say. She was my superior in the office hierarchy so a verbal smackdown would have been ill-advised. I believe I made a weak comment about how that wasn't unusual in the Caribbean and left it at that.

But I remember railing to a good friend of mine later about the idea that Black people fit into a single mould, and the ignorance that she revealed in not knowing that settler colonialism, enslavement and genocide had resulted in lots of Black people with names that wouldn't be out of place for someone with a multi-century English heritage.

Truly, I was incensed because it was yet another example of my history being erased, of whiteness feeling the need and the right to dictate what was acceptable as Blackness and to demand explanations of anything that didn't "fit". For a white person to imply I wasn't Black enough because of my name?! Sheesh!

Here's the thing: the Black diaspora has and belongs to multiple cultures, and our names often reflect that. Some people’s names have a long lineage coming from their ancestors’ culture. Some have chosen over the years to reject the coloniser surnames (Malcolm X being a famous example), while others have kept the names they were given by their parents and left it at that. Still others have chosen to have two sets of names - including one they have chosen themselves. But that naming has to be our choice, not something to comply with a white person's concept of what's appropriate for us as Black people. After all, isn't that how we got here (racism and othering) in the first place?

Your next action: share this issue with anyone who might think of asking this question so they can see how it might be perceived.

Thanks for reading,

Sharon

"I Think of You as White" (Things White Folks Have Said to Me #1)

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I am an anti-racism educator and activist, the author of “I’m Tired of Racism”, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.

© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2025. All Rights Reserved. This newsletter is published on beehiiv (affiliate link).