What's in a name?

This week the issues of names arose in several different contexts. The first was an internet board where I serve as moderator. Someone jumped all over one of the posters for having a foreign name, then leapt to the conclusion that the person must be of a particular ethnic and religious background as a result. In the space of about eight hours, a normally civil area of discourse devolved into a mirror image of a real world war zone and had to be temporarily shut down until the moderators and administrators of the site could restore order. How ironic, when all the dust settled, to find the majority of the original attackers shared both a country and a religion with their hapless victim.

It was a valuable lesson, both in stereotyping and the dangerous assumptions people make based on something as simple as a person’s name.

In the same time frame, I had several conversations with friends and acquaintances bearing names foreign to the local area. I was amazed to find all of them had been renamed or given Americanized versions of their own names by the people they worked with.

How incredibly arrogant and dehumanizing. A person’s name is an inherent part of their self. Those of us who survived induction into the military know firsthand the effect of having one’s identity replaced with an epithet or a rank. “Maggot” is not so far away from calling someone “Fred” from sheer laziness and failure to learn how to pronounce their name.

Many of us experienced this somewhere in our family histories. “Lubumskaya” becomes “Bimsky” at Ellis Island. Traditions of multiple family names such as “Maria Theresa Alvarez y Montoya” are abruptly lost so that a three name format of “Maria A. Montoya” accommodates a credit card company database programmed around the common usage of one ethnocentric naming practice.

But weren’t we supposed to have made progress? Isn’t the U.S. supposed to be the melting pot for all cultures? Haven’t we learned anything from our own family histories?

These are questions I find myself pondering as I write my next book. I’ve always enjoyed playing against stereotypes. But as I name my characters, I find myself paying more attention to the world I live in and the rich diversity of the people around me.