With the fourth pick of the first round in the recently completed NFL draft the New York Jets selected a large black man named D’Brickashaw Ferguson. With the last pick of that same first round the New York Giants selected another large black man, Mathias Kiwanuka. I’ve not really seen either of these men punish other, smaller men for sport, so what particularly struck me about the hometown picks was the very different manners in which these two very American kids (one is from Freeport, Long Island, the other from Indianapolis, Indiana) received their curious names. Mathias Kiwanuka is the grandson of Benedicto Kiwanuka who was the first Prime Minister of Uganda after that country broke the yoke of British colonial domination. Kiwanuka is a Bantu name, Bantu being what Ugandans speak when they are not speaking English. Benedicto was executed by Idi Amin (Amin by all accounts, was a cruel little bastard who ate people) and his son Emmanuel fled to Indianapolis, married and raised three children including Mathias. Kiwanuka is a normal American male, at least as normal as any 6’5’’ 265 pound male can be, yet his name harkens back to a family tradition steeped in the politics of a distant land.

D’Brickashaw’s name harkens back to a long tradition of African-American families having their ancestral history so completely stamped out by the legacy of slavery that now it is common to just make things up. Trey Wingo of ESPN says that D’Brickashaw was a character in The Thorn Birds, an 80s ABC miniseries. Whatever. Brickashaw would be bad enough, but adding the “D”? What the heck is that? His name ostensibly means “Of Brickashaw”? At least if they named him D’Freeport, it would make sense. His family probably just thought that D’Brickashaw sounded nice and got lucky that their kid grew to be 6’6’’ 310lbs football player, instead of a 5’8’’ 165lbs tax attorney. Of course Mr. Ferguson was not the only crime against language drafted; my personal favorites were the Cleveland Browns first two picks: Kamerion and D’Qwell.

I have no problem with non-English names. I like them so much I even have one myself. Elie (rhymes with “smelly,” so I’ve been taunted) is not short for Elliot (nor Eleanor!), nor is it a misspelled attempt at the traditionally Jewish name Eli. The name is Creole, the French dialect that is spoken in Haiti where my father is from. Occasionally my father’s side of the family calls me “T’Elie” a contraction of Petit Elie or “Little Elie,” and if you don’t think I am waiting for my dad to die so I can shed that moniker you’re crazy. Names are a mechanism by which families imprint a tradition and history to their young ones. We are lucky to live in a time and place where we can come across so many traditions and cultures that our world is not and endless stream of Dans and Joes and Jills.

African-Americans however, have been denied this sense of familial history. African-Americans do not get to know where their ancestors were from, what languages they spoke, and therefore what names they were called. Anybody who has ever sat through Roots has seen a dramatization of how black people had their names taken away from them by slave owners. In that interminable miniseries Kunta Kinte becomes Toby Reynolds through the force of a whip. Alex Haley (author of Roots and ostensibly a direct descendant of Kunta Kinte’s) did not get his name from the tradition that inspired the name of his forebear Kunta; rather, Alex devolves from the institution of slavery that all but wiped out whatever attempts Africans made to bring their culture with them to the New World.

Most data indicates that the for a long time after slavery black and white children were named similarly, but with a rise of black cultural awareness generally known as “The 1970s” black children started carrying more radically different names than their white counterparts. I believe the common explanation for the phenomenon is the increasing isolation of black populations and a decline in post-integration educational standards (the post integration period tracks perfectly with an acceleration of “white flight” from urban areas ... I wonder why?). In short, what scholarly work has been done on the issue would have us believe that black people started watching culturally different television shows than whites and collectively lost their ability spell. This apparently inexorably leads to names like Demterick—names that fail to follow any conventions of the English language. This kind of thinking feeds into the growing belief that somehow poor African-Americans are incapable of speaking proper English.

The far more reasonable answer is that in the 70s black people could speak English just as well as they always could (or as well as any other group of Americans could) but collectively realized that they were carrying around slave names. Once you realize that you are named Toby because some owner beat the living hell out of your great great great grandfather—that your real family name has been violently taken away from you—you probably aren’t going to be so keen to name your kid “Toby, Jr.” Once this idea is effectively planted in the community through books and speeches and yes, the occasional interminable miniseries, it doesn’t take long to spread. Understanding that your name springs from a well of evil is going to make you cut pretty hard against the grain and try to come up with something that does not pay even the slightest lip service to a condition of servitude. Viewed through that lens it is far more empowering and accurate to name your kid Kunta, an African name, instead of some anglicized convention like Kody.

But here we get into problems. How many African-Americans have the first clue about what an “African name” even looks or sounds like? Do you know how many different “traditional” languages are still spoken in Africa today? Does anybody know how many were spoken in the 16th century when black people were kidnapped and brought to these lands? What if I picked a Bantu name for my kid, do I even know if my particular ancestry even traces back to that part of the world and not the Swahili-speaking part, or the Shona-speaking part? In fact, most African-Americans have no real way of knowing where the hell their ancestors came from. Slave traders didn’t keep well-documented records. It is easier for me to draw the family tree of my American Kennel Club-registered Lhasa Apso back to her Tibetan roots than my own lineage through my mother’s side, which as far as I can tell basically starts with a freed man named Pittman sometime in 1880 who came off a plantation in Mississippi.

Faced with the fairly insurmountable task of actually tracing a working family tree or the seemingly ignoble path of assimilating the slave names foisted upon them, some African-Americans decided—for lack of a better phrase—to make the names up. Just make them up, full cloth, adhering to no reasonable linguistic standard. It started innocently enough: Sean (which some white people changed to Shaun because Sean is a Celtic name that makes little sense in modern English) became Shawn, which was still too close to assimilation I guess, so it then became DeShawn. DeShawn now has been the most popular name given to male African-Americans in the state of California over the past 20 years. Emboldened perhaps by the success of DeShawn (and be honest, nobody has ever met a white guy named “DeShawn”), African-Americans just started to loose their minds. If “De” works as a prefix, why not “Le”? Cleveland Browns starting center LeCharles Bentley, please stand up. Oh, and while we’re at it, why does Sean/Shaun/Shawn have to be spelled the way it is? What about Chaun (linebacker, Browns) or Chone (outfielder Angels)? In the zest to create names that are unique from the culture of our oppressors, we’ve instead created a culture where one of the most popular names for African-American females is, you guessed it, Unique. Inevitably we end up with some woman watching a miniseries about white people in Australia, liking the surname of a minor character, adding the omnipresent D’, and then passing off a name like D’Brickashaw as if it was even a marginally appropriate thing to do to a child. I can’t wait until I’m getting a burger and the 15 year old behind the counter is named DeeVeeD’Ee Johnson because then God won’t be angry at me for taking my own life.

Don’t let any Professor of “Ebonics is a real language, please make that check out to cash” obscure the reality that making up words and calling them proper names is generally a bad thing. The white corollary of naming kids based on pretty sounding syllables shows that even economic advantages are usually not enough to overcome parental silliness. White people who have achieved success based on little talent on less intellect will occasionally take creative license to their children’s names. We generally call these white people celebrities. Frank Zappa named his two children “Moon Unit” and “Dweezil.” The late Michael Hutchence of Inxis named his girl “Tiger Lilly” which I suppose is about as bad as Paltrow’s kid “Apple.” My personal favorite is the Bruce Willis/Demi Moore love child “Rumer” because I think they were going for a play on “rumor” but kind of lost heart halfway through. Children are not cuddly little manifestations of how cool the parents are. When children are treated, from birth, as such … well, read Kris’ exposition on the downside of owning pets.

I have rules to buttress my claims to the naming throne. There must be some objective reason why “Jazzmin” is not a name, just a purposeful misspelling, yet something that can not be used without shortening because of its sheer ridiculousness like Chaddington gets to be a “real” name. Names come from languages and those languages have rules. If you must have a truly “unique” name, than I don’t think it’s expecting too much to follow the rules of whatever language you are using. I am no linguist, nor am I an etymologist, but I posit that these rules are not all that hard to sound out. Let us use Elvish, a language that doesn’t even actually exist to illustrate the point. J.R.R. Tolkien tells me that “Legolas” is an Elven name, and I can believe that based on the other little bits of Elvish (and the names of the other elves) that he shows me during his grand story. I know far less about Elvish than I do about English or even French. However, if he busted out with an Elf called “Starbutickiss,” I’d be well within the standards of reason to brand that name as something not keeping with Elven tradition. Elves should not be called Starbutickiss, Klingons should not be called Leaftruffle, and Humans should not be called LaRhondaze. And we all know it.

Even though the naming revolution started from a place of empowerment and understanding, it has devolved into an idiotic creative outlet imposed on a person that should not be treated like a blank canvass. Children are not blanks. That is why we name them well before we know anything about their personality or interests and do not let them chose them chose their own name. Remember it doesn’t have to be this way. The first people to live in what is now America did not name their descendants straight out of the womb. How do you think Native Americans came up with stuff that we translate into “Walks with Rabbits” or “Sitting Tree” or any of a number of things I could say that would be blatantly making fun of a culture I don’t fully understand? A Native American child “earned” his or her name, through their childhood actions. We could do that if we wanted.

We don’t want to do things that way, and there is a reason for that. In our American culture (like so many others) we use names not just as a convenient way of labeling individual group members, but as a way to mark our children as part of a family and tradition far larger than themselves. We use names to pay homage to aging or deceased forebears, to mystically imprint the newborn with the good qualities of those that came before us. We use names to make our children feel like they are part of something, part of us, part of whatever greatness we perceive in our families or community as a whole. Everybody “gets” their name from somewhere or someone else; we don’t earn it, we have it bestowed upon us, we are endowed with it. A name should be something to live up to, not to overcome.

Breaking out of a slave-inspired naming convention is a noble gesture, but substituting that convention with a word made up from a whimsical collection of syllables is no replacement. Made up names rob the child of the very sense of tradition and belonging that motivated the effort in the first place.

Assuming that the Internet becomes even more ubiquitous, African-Americans will have better opportunities to do simple search and click research on actual African language names, and hopefully this technology can be used to help us reclaim parts of our history that were brutally taken away from us. In addition, African-American history and culture is rich with personages who have taken their imposed names and made them their own. When I think of a Frederick, I do not think of a German King as much as I think of a slave who risked death to teach himself to read. When I think of Malcolm, I don’t think of anybody’s slave. Even Jordan doesn’t so much sound like a Middle-Eastern country to me anymore.

Between the English names that remind us of times of servitude, and the African language names that would still amount to appropriating a tradition that African-Americans have long been cut off from, there are still so many different and ancient cultures that could be used to add a bit of color and tradition to the name game. You’re telling me that some snot-nosed Tad Hollingsford is going to mess with a kid named Hannibal Jackson? What about ancient African kingdom of Egypt? We can’t get Ramses Washington to play quarterback?

Just to make sure we understand how I really feel, there is no Earthly reason to call your son D’Brickashaw. None. It is not special, it is not empowering, it is just a terrible mutilation of language. The African-American community should allow the names of the next generation to stand for more than mere opposition to assimilation; they should allow the “new” names to stand for positive understanding and appreciation for our own impressive history.

If you know D’Brickashaw, please do not let him read this because I am sure this very nice man would very brutally hurt me.

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