In the movie Do The Right Thing, Buggin\’ Out questions why pizzeria owner Sal has photos only of Italian Americans on the wall. But Sal insists that he owns the pizzeria, and he owns the wall, and he can decide who is honored there.
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| A clip from Do The Right Thing, viewable on Youtube |
Names can be a little like those pictures on the wall. With them, we can indicate belonging, or aspiration, or we can feel they signify ownership: old newspapers show generations of women referred to only by their husband\’s name, while many Black lineages in the US carry a former slaveowners family name. Couples typically choose which line they will promulgate with their name, spouse or father (or sometimes, hyphenated both). If parents continue naming traditions, are they pulling the family closer, building a family culture, a proverbial pizzeria of heritage and belonging, signaling what they will carry on?
Sal\’s sons work the pizzeria with him. One son softens within their changing context. One son pugnaciously will not.
If renaming ourselves, especially changing our last name, is a kind of patricide, as my old Cal professor argues, what does it mean when we don\’t change? When adults decide to change their name, perhaps we are casting off the past to embrace the future. Maybe it is a radical thing.
Our parents changed their names. I think they linked the action to their future as well as to cutting off from a past that reminded them of unhappiness. My paternal grandfather died when my father was 13 years old, but his memories of him were unhappy and my father never expressed regret for the loss. As a boy often my father\’s task was to get my grandfather out of the Woodmere Country Club (Long Island), where he was drunk and losing money playing bridge. My father would tell of his brother Alan teaching him how to manage their father, and the ways Alan stepped in to protect him from their father. I calculate too that my parents\’ move across a continent, and name change, helped my father defend himself against grief that his beloved brother\’s health was severely compromised by polio in the late 1950s.
(My paternal grandparents were quite assimilated too. The brothers did not have religious training.)
My parents started anew in Los Angeles, and built a new in-group, giving each of their four children names that begin with the same letter rather than a family name with generations of history.
In My Grandmother\’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem invites us to name our children and rename ourselves after white Americans who have worked hard and sacrificed to dismantle white-body supremacy, or after African-Americans we admire (p. 269).
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| Resmaa Menakem with Keith Ellison, from Menakem\’s instagram feed |
A Black nurse helped us welcome our son into the world, very near MLK\’s holiday. (To this day I think of her as at least half angel, grateful for her presence during the big event.) She warmly and playfully suggested he could be named Martin. We did not for a minute seriously consider it. Why?
(Just a few weeks later the Academy would fail to honor Do The Right Thing.)
Who is featured on the walls of your literal or proverbial home? Does it reflect a softening or a hardening of who you are in our society?
EXTRA:
Our family history was positively impacted by Frederic March and Florence Eldridge, as described in an earlier post. Last year, the University of Wisconsin unnamed a building that had been named for March. A blogger lays out the case for this action as misinformed; nonetheless, who names buildings in the first place, and who decides whether they are unnamed or renamed? To whom does it matter, and why?
An informative interview with Resmaa Menakem: https://www.lionsroar.com/my-grandmothers-hands-resmaa-menakem-and-pamela-ayo-yetunde-in-conversation/
If you go back far enough 
Without having read the article about ‘patricide’ applied to name changes, there are so many alternate explanations — “names can indicate belonging, aspiration, ownership, or former slaveowners’ family names.” Then, there are name changes that define the Chinese American immigrant experience.My father was a “paper son.” He immigrated to the U.S. with the papers, name and cover story of a dead man. He served honorably in the US Army Air Corps in WW II, appended an American first name to his illegal last name; had a distinguished career in import/export, culinary and financial industries in his lifetime, during which time he became a U.S. naturalized citizen, still keeping the original name. The children opted not to adopt the ‘legal name’ because it by then we were accustomed to the sound of our first names with the illegal last name.So that ‘family name” will endure through two of three children that my younger brothers, had–biologically or adopted–with one exception. My youngest brother’s wife’s family was concerned about the preservation of their own family name, since there was little hope that their other children would marry and have children, so ‘persuaded’ my youngest brother (now divorced) to agree to using the wife’s family name for their only child, since his original family name could not be traced through history.My father’s name in the National Archives website displays all of his names, legal and illegal, with the legal last name appended at the end. My maternal grandparents were born in China, and likely immigrated as paper sons/daughters. Two of my mother’s older siblings had different last names which carried through their family line, then the other 4 children including my mother were born in the U.S., and were given a different last name. Of course, my mom adopted my father’s last name when they got married. That conversation wasn’t even on the table back then.In April 2021, my nephew (son of another brother) married a woman of Chilean, Mexican, Argentinian descent, who already has two last names – that of her father and her mother, so she is trying to decide whether to take on my nephew’s last name for social reasons, or continue with her ‘maiden’ name. My nephew says it’s her decision. My nephew’s sister was adopted from an orphanage in China, so she will never know about her lineage. I will be forever memorialized in public records under at possibly nine or more different combination and permutations of my name from two marriages – versions that include hyphens, no hyphens, misspelling, etc. which follow me whenever I apply for a loan or any kind of credit as those names live eternally in cyberspace. In hindsight, I should have just stuck with my maiden “not real” last name.I am more concerned about the legacy I want to leave than preserving my last name given the aforementioned history, not uncommon in many immigrant families.As a U.S. native born Chinese-American, I identify with the values in your definition of being an “American” –“ …striving for kindness in our freedom, generosity in our respect of human rights, for the evolution of the human project to a thriving that does not come at another’s expense.“ From what I have learned about you, you live these values, in word as well as deed.So, what’s in a last name? Spending needless anxiety on focusing on my identity based on the origin of my last name is not how I want to spend my time. Knowing about my history is important to pass on to the younger generation, but even more critical is the impact I want to make during the part of my life where I have more time to choose the causes where I think can make a positive difference– no matter how little — aligned with my values.I firmly believe that, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” So, let's get out there and make some 'good trouble.'