Monday, December 08, 2008




What's in A Name?


I must admit that 20 years ago before my daughter was ever born, I had a dream that I would have a daughter named Adisha. So when she was born, I named her Adeesha. I just wanted to spell it different since the dream did not show the spelling. Most of her life people asked her what it meant. To me it meant the chosen one since I had the dream and the name before she was ever thought of. It wasn’t until 13 years later when people started talking about children being born and given African American names that could do than more harm in their job search than good.

Okay I get what the masses are saying. But I never considered that she had one of those names. The only thing, the ‘sha’ started appearing on the end of many names of children born after her. I thought again about this when I received this email today.

MEMO:

Please don't start naming your daughters after the President… names such as: Obamanesha , Obamalisha, Obamarette, Obamalaya, Obamaria, Obamanette, Barakala, Barakella, Barakesha, Barakyah, etc., or adding, La, Sha, Da or Ja, Rhi, as a prefix is not allowed. Don't start that mess! PLEASE!!
It is acceptable to name your sons Barack or even Obama but that is as far as you may go.
YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY RECEIVED THE MEMO AND HAVE BEEN WARNED!

3 comments:

BostonPobble said...

I had never considered this until I was working at an agency where the people in charge of weeding out job applicants were throwing out resumes with "ethnic sounding" names on them, regardless of qualifications. It was quite a wake-up call.

chele said...

People do tend to make up their minds about a person based on their name. I can think of two instances when I was set to meet women with ethnic sounding names ... as it turned out, they were both white. Go figure.

Momma Bear said...

I would definitely claim this is discrimination. I don't understand why the everyone criticises the names of ethnic people. Oriental, White, African-American, Hispanic, and other cultures have names which helps to identify their race. I remember when black people first started naming their kids names with the "isha" endings. I believe this was an attempt to give us more African type names as a way of claiming our heritage as African decendents and breaking away from the typical "white" names so we can better identify ourselves by our names. Therefore, agencies that throw out resumes with "etnic sounding" names on them are indeed discriminating and this should be stopped. I get so bogged down with discrimination and the fact that agencies deny this.