What's In A Name?
Apparently, a lot. Thanks to Rach, I have just read the most interesting article and thought, as an educator of those on the internet, I should post it here for everyone to view. It seems as if, with the genius name I have been given by my mother, my lot in life should be pretty well laid out, and fairly bleak. I suppose it's had it's moments of drastic bleakness and ghetto-fabulous disasters, but I think I am working against the curve. The one thing that does hold true for the article is that I certainly feel like I am labeled before I even get a chance a lot of the time just because of the obvious. I mean, I dare one of you readers to locate a white chick named Ebony, and if you do, I will show you a white chick with a black daddy or at the very least, an adopted chocolate baby with white parents who thought that letting her keep her name would in some way truly connect her to the person she was always meant to be. (Double damn for that child!) I will be the first to admit that I had a hard time learning to like my name. Growing up in white suburban America, being name Jennifer would have been so much easier. But now I think it's perfect, it sort of rolls off the tounge...Ebony Rose. People comment on it all of the time telling me how beautiful it is. The delivery guy last week told me it was a superstar name (I didn't want to mention that the kind of super star he was probably thinking of was featured on a video in the adult-only section of the video store.) But for the most part, it has served me well. Let's just hope that I don't end up as the name would suggest, "an unmarried, low-income, undereducated" woman. And perhaps I should rethink naming my daughter Raven.

(Oh, if you're lazy and just want to see the fun list of uber-white vs. uber-black names, click right here and see how you or your cousins or your future children fare.)