Whats in a name? in a racist society everything
By Richard Irvine
(source: Electronic Intifada)
Names have always been political. Throughout history different regimes have used naming as a means of racial or religious identification. In Nazi Germany a 1938 law obliged Jews to add Sara or Israel to their names so as to eliminate ethnic confusion. And in my own country, Northern Ireland, even without a law, a name could determine one’s success in life.
Until comparatively recently many Catholic families I know chose Protestant Anglicized names so as their children could have a chance of escaping the discrimination inherent in the sectarian state. It rarely worked however, as there were always other ways one could tell someone’s background. Indeed, even today most of us immediately conduct a sort of scan upon meeting a new acquaintance. If we can’t tell by name then we move on to other questions like, "Where do you live?" or the clincher — in a society where schools are largely segregated — "What school did you go to?" This approach is not always successful but most times we can quite quickly classify who we think our new acquaintance is and how much we can reveal of ourselves to them.