I am not going to discuss Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s professional history, her husband or President Joe Biden’s choice to nominate her for the Supreme Court.
I want to talk about names, and the weight names carry for Black people in particular.
As I played my favorite news podcast recently, I was surprised and slightly put off by the quickness and comfort with which the podcast host referred to Jackson as KBJ as he discussed her impending nomination. The letters K, B and J seemed to roll off the host’s tongue in the same vein, I can only assume, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s RBG and Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s ACB. (I’ll admit, the latter was news to me.)
This acronymization of Jackson’s name might seem like a way to establish that she’s poised to join an exclusive club that thus far only five women (and no Black women) have been a part of. But as the owner of a unique name myself, I’m in no hurry to refer to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as KJB now or after she is confirmed.
Short of knowing whether Jackson approves of this version of her name, I can only look at the fraught history of Black people and names. “Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names,” a July 2021 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found. Students of African descent have shared how they routinely feel forced to Anglicize, shorten or otherwise reject their given names to make them easier for teachers and classmates to pronounce.
Uzo Aduba, one of the stars of the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” offers a lighthearted example of this. Her mother taught her to take pride in — and make people learn to say — her full name, Uzoamaka, after a young Aduba asked if she could go by Zoe instead. Her mother replied: “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoevsky, then they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
Then there are the names Black people were given in the not-so-distant past: the racial epithets and stereotypical archetypes. Pastors, business owners, mothers, teachers and other citizens were reduced to little more than “boy,” “girl” or slurs. These names were unwanted, disrespectful and violent, but the recipients were forced to accept them because insisting that a white person address them properly could mean harassment, abuse or death. Today, the names that are lovingly given to children because their parents want them to stand out and have pride in their names, are parodied, mocked and exaggerated by people who cannot and will never understand their history or significance.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the enslaved Africans who were brought to this country against their will, stripped of their given names and often unwillingly handed first names and surnames as a way of completely erasing their identity and memory of life as free human beings, who were more than the backbreaking labor they performed for their white captors.
I am a Black woman, and Jorie, while unique, is shorter than the many names I’ve heard get butchered over the years. But even I wasn’t exempt from the callous disregard for what my parents named me and what I wished to be called. For years, I had non-Black dance teachers and schoolteachers call me the wrong name. (“Gorie” was a common one.) When I was 14, a dance teacher referred to me and another dancer as “trees” because of our height. She was aghast when I demanded to be referred to by my name. It wasn’t until I moved to Illinois from Florida that I realized my name wasn’t too big to say. It was easy to say for those who made the effort, and I neither needed nor deserved to be assigned nicknames that I didn’t approve of.
I don’t mean to speak for Jackson. KBJ may be intended as a compliment and nothing more. And if it lands with her as such, then so be it. But even if that’s the case, news sources and other authorities should normalize saying her full name before implicitly giving the public a cue to skip to a cutesy nickname for the person who is likely to be the first Black female Supreme Court justice. A person’s name should be respected and used. Given how unique names are so often treated when the owners of those names are Black or nonwhite, I can’t help but fear that many will take the KBJ acronym and run with it without making sure Jackson’s first name isn’t erased or “othered.”
As we unfortunately saw with Vice President Kamala Harris, sometimes it takes many not-so-subtle reminders to get white people to be intentional about correctly saying a Black person’s name, especially when a Black woman is involved. But this is no excuse for anyone.
I may decide I don’t agree with Jackson’s rulings, I may decide that she’s not progressive enough to balance out the still right-leaning Supreme Court. But I will never waver on the fact that an acronym shouldn’t stand in place of the name of any Black woman.
If white Americans can learn to pronounce Gorsuch, Rehnquist, Alito and Kavanaugh, then they can and must learn to say Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jorie Goins is a content editor who works with the Tribune Editorial Board.
