On Names

I'm a few days behind the news cycle on this one, but I've wanted to write about it for a while.

During the week in which Judge Sonia Sotomayor appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, two New York Times columnists referred to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) by his full name.

Maureen Dowd starts the trend:

President Obama has cited the Ledbetter decision as a reason the court needs a more “common touch.”

“The law requires some finality,” Sotomayor explained about her case, with an iciness that must have sent a chill up the conservative leg of Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, even as it left Obama hanging out on an empathy limb.

Ross Douthat takes it three steps further:

But the senators are yesterday’s men. The America of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is swiftly giving way to the America of Sonia Maria Sotomayor and Barack Hussein Obama.

There were other references to Sessions' full name, but I pulled these two because Dowd is liberal and Douthat is conservative, and their columns appeared days apart on the same opinion page.

Why is it a fair point to refer to Sen. Sessions by his full name? Does writing someone's full name, in an attempt to make a judgment about them, exempt the author from the obligation to include any actual information about them?

These are some of the same people who complained when Republicans referred to "Barack Hussein Obama" during the campaign last summer, and now some of them are doing the same thing with Sessions. In the absence of other information, why is it unfair to use Obama's name to imply he is associated with terrorism, but fair to use Sessions' name to imply that he is associated with racism?

Of course, in these case, there is other information. If pundits had wanted to argue that Sessions was racist or out-of-touch, they could have written about his history of racism. Similarly, if they'd wanted to argue that Sotomayor represented America's growing Hispanic influence, they could have written about her compelling family story.

But that's not the point I'm trying to make. People don't choose their names; parents bestow them upon their children. And sometimes parents make terrible decisions.

I would know. In a decision riddled with misplaced idealism, elitism, and a stunning lack of foresight, my parents chose for me a full name which the vast majority of Americans cannot pronounce, spell, or determine the gender of its bearer. The result has been years of stress and embarrassment. Some examples... My father once entered me in a youth tennis tournament, but I was placed in the girls' draw, and played girls. After that we had to be careful to specify that I was entering the boys' draw. My little league trophies used to have the female softball figurines on top, because the trophy-makers assumed I was a girl playing with boys. For two consecutive years in high school, I was placed in a hotel room with girls at the All State Band festival. When I meet new people, I often have to repeat my name several times before they understand, and of course few people can ever spell or pronounce my name correctly, even after meeting me.

For these reasons, I don't feel like I enter many of life's situations with an even slate. Similarly, Barack Obama might have been able to win more votes if he had a different name. Similarly, discussion sections at Cornell taught by TAs with Anglo-sounding names fill up faster than those taught by people who sound like English might not be their first language.

I prefer to be judged by what I accomplish, and not what my name is. But I have found that these are often inseparable. My name, just as Sessions', Sotomayor's, and Obama's, forms a part of me from which I can't separate myself, no matter how much I would like for it to be so. Just as Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that the individual is inseparable from the narrative which surrounds him, so is one's name often inseparable from what one accomplishes. And for this we have to thank people like Maureen Dowd and Ross Douthat, who teach us that it is okay to judge people by their names. We have to thank the Lee County sheriff whose intonations of "Barack Hussein Obama" riled the crowd at a Palin event. For those of us who try to exceed the expectations of the name we are given, who try to become something more than the stereotype into which we are pigeonholed, the road remains uphill despite the successes of Obama, Sotomayor, and others.