White girls: Stop wearing nameplate necklaces | Fusion
"For black Americans, names can be a form of resistance to white supremacy. Plucked from our homes in West Africa and forced into chattel slavery, bodily autonomy wasn’t the only thing stolen from us. Our names were stolen, too.
After more than 200 years of slavery and decades of Jim Crow laws, black Americans began to subvert whiteness by coming up with our own names. “The diversification of baby names in America started in the late 1960s during a larger sociocultural shift that emphasized individuality, and that’s where names for black and white Americans began to diverge,” Morgan Jerkins wrote in the New York Times.
Today, in some areas of the United States, “nearly a third of African-American girls are given a name belonging to no one else in the state (boys’ names tend to be somewhat more conservative),” David Zax wrote in Salon. So when black and brown girls and women wear nameplates, it’s not just an aesthetic choice—it’s political."
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