Black Fox Staffers "Hold Their Noses"

In a "Key and Peele" sketch on Comedy Central, a substitute teacher played by Keegan-Michael Key finds white students' pronunciation of their names unusual. (video)

Native Magazine Won't Ask for Your "Colonized" Name

"No one knows better than Indigenous people that names are important. Sacred even,"Taté Walker wrote for the September-October issue of Native Peoples magazine.

"Names, especially traditional ones, are given with careful thought and purpose. Sometimes, children wait years before receiving a traditional Native name from elders who want to ensure a proper fit. These names have value. They are real.

"We've experienced how destructive names can be, like those of certain sports teams or those forced upon our ancestors and our land by colonizers. We've also seen the pride associated with having traditional names recognized and honored, as with the recent federal name change of Alaska's Mt. [McKinley] to Denali, and the 2008 federal decision to change Squaw Peak in Arizona to Piestawa Peak.

"I have gone my whole life fighting for the acceptance of my name, Taté, Lakota 'wind' (as in the weather). It is my legal middle name. More importantly, it's the name my loved ones gave me and call me. For many, however, including past employers, doctors and teachers, the name is 'weird,''hard to pronounce,' or 'different.' In other words, it doesn't fit their colonized mindset of how a name should look or sound and these people have often said they would call me by my first name (Jonnie, after my father, John), because it was easier. This is the definition of microaggression and cultural erasure.

"At Native Peoples magazine, we are fully aware of the importance of names and do our best to be fair and accurate to all our sources. We would never ask sources to identify themselves by their 'English' or 'Christian' or 'colonized' names. Ever. . . ."

. . . White Teacher Has Empathy for Unique "Black" Names

"What's wrong with black names anyway? What about them is so unacceptable?"Steven Singer, a white teacher and education activist, asked last month on his gadflyonthewallblog blog.

"We act as if only European and Anglicized names are reasonable. But I don't have to go far down my rosters to find white kids with names like Braelyn, Declyn, Jaydon, Jaxon, Gunner or Hunter. I've never heard white folks yucking it up over those names.

"I can't imagine why white people even expect people of color to have the same sorts of names as we do. When you pick the label by which your child will be known, you often resort to a shared cultural history. My great-great-grandfather was David, so I'll honor his memory by calling my firstborn son the same. Jennifer is a name that's been in my family for generations so I'll reconnect with that history by calling my daughter by the same name.

"Few black people in America share this same culture with white people. If a black man’s great-great-grandfather's name was David, that might not be the name he was born with — it may have been chosen for him — forced upon him — by his slave master. It should be obvious why African Americans may be uncomfortable reconnecting with that history.

"Many modern black names are, in fact, an attempt to reconnect with the history that was stolen from them. . . ."

• Jamilah Lemieux, Ebony: Raven-Symoné Rips Black Names, But Forgot About Her Own
  
  
• TMZ: Raven-Symone Getting Ripped for Refusing to Hire 'Black' Names

“It is inconceivable a boat with that many people can go missing…& nobody know about it.” #GhostBoat launches 10/7. pic.twitter.com/k9o4onkDAc

— Matter (@ReadMatter) October 6, 2015

Project to Report on Missing "Ghost Boat" of 243 Africans

"The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014 set off a worldwide search for the missing plane,"Laura Hazard Owen reported Wednesday for NiemanLab. "How could a flight carrying 239 people just go missing? The mystery dominated news cycles for months. (In July 2015, a piece of the plane’s wing was found on an island in the Indian Ocean.)

"But just three months after Flight 370 went down, another group of passengers went missing — 243 men, women, and children. The passengers were refugees, mostly from the severely repressive African country of Eritrea, fleeing the country in the hopes of reaching Italy. The boat they took from Libya disappeared in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. This time, nobody noticed, except for the families of those missing.

"Bobbie Johnson, a senior editor at Medium and cofounder of the Medium publication Matter, had been thinking for a while about the migration crisis and feeling powerless.

"'As a European, I have been watching the refugee crisis and wondering how people can really understand what's going on and make a tangible difference,' Johnson told me. 'Finding out what happened here seems to be one way of doing that.'

"On Tuesday night, Medium launched Ghost Boat, a new series that aims to find out what happened to the boat and its passengers. Readers will be included in the investigative process. . . ."

Owen also wrote, "Over the next couple of months, Medium will run weekly posts exploring and following the case. The lead reporter, Eric Reidy, is an American journalist based in Tunisia. He's working with Meron Estefanos, a Swedish-Eritrean journalist and human rights activist who publishes the radio show Voices of Eritrean Refugees.

"The first 'episode' is here. For at least eight weeks, Medium will run feature-length Ghost Boat stories along with running commentary of evidence and updates. . . ."

On NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday," Reidy added, "For members of the general public, I would like for people to stay engaged in the story, first of all. I mean, one of the comparisons that came up from Yafet, who is the Eritrean man whose wife went missing on this boat who I've been communicating with in the first episode of the series about.

"One of the comparisons that he made when I spoke to him last January, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, was that, you know, 14 people were killed in Paris and the whole world talked about it for two weeks.

"But 240 people go missing in the Mediterranean and there hasn't been one news story about it. There's nobody helping in the search. And he asked, why is that? Is it because we're black? . . ."

• Scott Simon with Eric Reidy, "Weekend Edition Saturday," NPR: In Search Of A Ghost Boat And The 243 On Board (Oct. 10)