Every name tells a story. We assume we can guess someone’s background from their surnames. And sometimes we can. Last week, I was stopped outside London’s Liverpool Street station by a young man who wanted me to donate to a charity that helped teenagers in the city stay away from knife crime. He asked me my surname. I told him. “Nigerian?” he asked. I said: “Yes”. “Yoruba?” he further asked. I smiled and nodded. “Bawo ni?” he said, which in Yoruba means something like “How are you doing?”. This young man did not come from a Nigerian background. I was impressed enough to give him £20.
But names can also conceal. I recently met a man called Lee Elliot-Major. He is a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter and used to be the chief executive of the educational charity the Sutton Trust. Lee told me that many people assumed he came from a middle-class background because he had a double-barrelled surname. In fact, he was the first person in his family to go to university.
Names can be a brand. The Beckhams, the Kardashians; these are not just names but signify commercial value and status. Harry and Meghan have apparently decided to name their children Archie and Lilibet Sussex rather than Mountbatten-Windsor; they are carving their own distinctive brand within the general architecture of the royal family. Many people still refer to the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci as simply “da Vinci”, even though that’s not his proper name but his place of birth; “da Vinci” is, nevertheless, his brand.
But branding people by their names, or what we assume to be their names, has not always been positive. Names have often been used to stigmatise people. Many famous Jewish Hollywood actors – such as Kirk Douglas, who was born Issur Danielovitch and grew up as Izzy Demsky, had to anglicise their names to fit in with mainstream American society.
We still judge people by their names today. Consider the case of the holiday camp company Pontins, which was recently charged with an “unlawful act notice” by the Equality and Human Rights Commission over discrimination against Irish Traveller people. Pontins, which said the issues were historical, drew up an “undesirable guests” list of common Irish surnames.
A 2009 study by the National Centre for Social Research found that job applicants with ethnic minority-sounding names were less likely to be called up for interviews than people with white-sounding names. Names should excite our curiosity, not repel us. I want to know what a name means and where it comes from, but I don’t want that knowledge to dictate how I perceive the person possessing it; both Kurt Vonnegut and Dwight Eisenhower served in the US army during the Second World War yet had distinctly German surnames. I have cousins with my surname who can conceivably pass as white and don’t speak Yoruba. There are people with Jewish surnames who neither practise the faith nor are Jews as a matter of matrilineal law.
Every name tells a story, but not the full story. They should be used to start a conversation, not end it. If I ever see that young man from Liverpool Street station again, I will ask about his surname.
• Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
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