by Amelia Long

Long is the president of the Lilith Fund, an abortion fund that provides financial support to low-income and poor people in south and central Texas who cannot pay for the abortions they want and need.

For more on what you can do to help fight this bill, see this post by NARAL Texas at the Burnt Orange Report. If you live in Texas and plan on calling your state legislator and would like a script to use when you call, there is one towards the end of this post at Jessica Luther’s site. Also, Andrea Grimes at RH Reality Check has more on this bill.

The Texas 20-week abortion ban is back. The bill didn’t even make it to a House vote during the regular session, but now Rick Perry has added abortion to the agenda during the Legislature’s special overtime session. The bill, a proposed ban on abortions after 20 weeks, is a pet project of Perry’s – it’s yet another step toward his ultimate goal of banning abortion completely in the state.

We have only days to mobilize against this bill. Due to the special session, abortion restrictions may be wrapped up into an omnibus bill, making them even harder to fight. We have to speak out while we still have time.

I care about this issue because I work with the Lilith Fund, a nonprofit assisting low-income Texans who seek an abortion and cannot afford it.  When I bring up late-term abortion, people are often confused as to why I care. After all, nationwide, just 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks of gestation.

But among the low-income and marginalized women the Lilith Fund works with, the rate of later abortions is much higher. During the first quarter of 2013, one in five women we funded was seeking an abortion after 20 weeks. That was nearly 50 women.

Why is there such a connection between low income and later abortion? In 2011, the Guttmacher Institute found that second-trimester abortion seekers tended to fall into one of two groups. The first group was higher-income and paying for their abortion with insurance; often, these are women devastated to discover at their 20-week ultrasound that a much-wanted fetus is incompatible with life.

The second group seeking later abortions tended to be women of color, women with less education and women who had experienced three or more disruptive events during the past year. These are the women the Lilith Fund works with.

These are women like Tasha – 21 years old and 21 weeks pregnant when she contacted the Lilith Fund. When her parents found out she was pregnant, they kicked her out of their home. Scrambling to find a place to stay and short on funds, she was forced to leave school and live house to house with people who would help her. With no job and an unsupportive partner, she told us she felt like she had “nowhere left to turn.” She was ultimately unable to pull together enough money for an abortion and we lost contact with her.

Our clients are struggling with poverty, losing a job, an illness in the family, being displaced from a home, abuse from a partner or spouse, sexual assault.  Often times they are chasing the money to pay for the abortion they want and need.  Every week that they are just $50 or $100 short, the cost of the abortion goes up. In seeking an abortion after 20 weeks, they are not lazy, capricious, callous or stupid.  They are working hard to manage difficult and stressful lives and make the best decisions for themselves and their families.

A ban on late-term abortion hurts women, especially the low-income, marginalized women in Texas who are most vulnerable to merciless anti-abortion policies. We don’t have much time to speak out, so please do what you can. For more information on advocating in Texas, check NARAL Pro-Choice Texas’s website or contact the Lilith Fund at info@lilithfund.org.

[Editor's note: more people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care.]

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Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Rebekah. Photo used with permission of author.

Rebekah is a married feminist and activist who has worked on projects for Planned Parenthood and has interned with her state legislature. She grew up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. She currently is majoring in accounting and lives in the suburbs of Seattle with her husband.

I don’t know how to feel about my name

I have a very complicated relationship to my name. To say that I grew up in a very conservative family is an understatement. Both of my parents are evangelical Christians. I am the black sheep of the family. From the very beginning I was strong willed and would not do what was socially expected of me. Needless to say I did not have a happy childhood.

My parents got divorced when I was five and both of my parents quickly remarried, with my mom taking her new husband’s last name, and my stepmother taking my father’s. My father quickly started building his new family, which didn’t have a lot of room for an unruly five year old who didn’t like sitting in church on Sundays and preferred climbing into trees and reading instead of playing with dolls. My mom, who was stuck with me by way of the court chose to lord it over my head that she and her new children had her husband’s last name and I had my absentee father’s.

I was taught from the very beginning that my name wasn’t my own. I was and would remain the property of men for all of my life. My parents purposefully chose my first name because it means bound in Hebrew.

It should not have been any surprise to either one of my parents that I left home at 18 to make my own way, far gone from the grasp of their emotional taunting and the pain that it caused to a child who desperately wanted the love and approval of her parents. It still shook the ground that they walked on and my mother has never quite forgiven me for that.

Six months ago my boyfriend of two years proposed. Up until that point we really hadn’t had a conversation about what we would do with our last names if and when we got married. My preference has always been to make a new last name. He as the child of a feminist who kept her last name when she got married.

Because it costs quite a bit of money, hassle, and time to change your name, when we got married we both kept our last names.

The lily pond at Juanita Bay Park. Photo used with permission of author.

Two weeks ago I needed my dad to send me paperwork that was in his possession. He sent the paperwork, not to me, but to my first name and my husband’s last name even though he knows that I haven’t changed my name. Today I had a conversation with my mother about why I am not going by my husband’s last name. I explained the reasons why I had chosen to keep my last name to a resounding argument that it’s not proper for me to be so uppity. She then felt the need to justify her decision to change her name because she felt that me keeping mine was an implicit judgment against her decision to change hers. It made her feel as if I saw her as less than.

I don’t know if I made the right choice about my name or not. Some days I appreciate it’s simplicity. Some days I feel an extreme disconnect to it and wish to change it. I know that I always have the option of doing that later. I still have complicated feelings about having the last name of a man who wasn’t really a father to me, and I would much rather have a last name that speaks to something that I freely chose, instead of something that was thrust upon me by way of birth. Either way I have learned that the names chosen for me by my parents aren’t my identity.

A quick note about images in this series: each essay includes an image of a place that holds personal meaning for the author.

This post is part of an on-going roundtable on naming that Flyover Feminism is doing in conjunction with Are Women Human?

Let’s Talk About Names: Nia is the previous post in the series.

The entire series is available at the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

by Bianca Campbell

Campbell is a doula and reproductive justice organizer at SPARK Reproductive Justice Now. She is also proud to be a member of Echoing Ida, using the potential of social media to promote the reflections of Black women.

Too often public discourse on the reproductive and sexual rights issues of women living in the U.S. South, as well as the Global South, describes women as perpetual victims of their location and circumstances—especially Brown and Black women. In an effort to highlight the gross social and economic disparities, these narratives lose sight of the fierce feminist organizing happening in these regions. Even well-intentioned reproductive justice leaders can forgo balanced remarks by focusing on the injustices.  This is simply detrimental to our movement.

Instead, let us foreground the dynamic reproductive justice work happening in the South and debunk the myths that we are helpless, uneducated, and in need of rescuing by the North! This Mama’s Day join SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW as we honor three amazing Black mothers and celebrate the resilience of women social justice leaders who continue to pave the way for our reproductive freedom in the South and the nation.

What We Face . . .

Recently, legislators in Arkansas passed a twelve-weeks ban on abortion care.  Doctors, women, and families are already countering this anti-choice measure with public demonstrations and suing the state of Arkansas to repeal the ban. Shortly after the Affordable Care Act was announced, a number of Republican Governors, concentrated in the South, publicly denounced implementation of vital aspects of healthcare reform including opting out of the state exchange programs and refusing to expand Medicaid eligibility. Yet, advocates of reproductive justice are gaining ground and can mark important wins in the current hostile climate.

Women of Mississippi and their families prevented the closing of the state’s last-standing abortion clinic in April. Also this month the South Wind Women’s Center, a full-spectrum reproductive healthcare practice including first- and second-term abortions, became available to women in Wichita, Kansas. Wichita and outlying areas have not had access to abortion care since the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in 2009. Finally, Georgia saw less anti-choice legislation introduced this legislative session than in the last two years. Yet, a twenty-week abortion ban did pass. But prepared women and families are gearing up to fight this anti-choice legislation. We have already won an injunction on the law, as the ban is currently being debated in the state court for repeal.

Our past success will influence future victories, so we must always reflect and refuel. 

What We’re Working Towards . . .

A new poll reveals that, despite the tactics by the Right, African-Americans are still overwhelmingly in support of protecting a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. This poll also reveals that a majority of African-American adults affirm comprehensive sexual health education and access to preventive healthcare. These important survey results demonstrate that we, as Black women leaders, have the needed support to keep advocating for the health issues that members of our communities say they want.

At SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW we situate our work at the intersection of health, economic, racial, and gender justice knowing that today’s freedom fights require fearless dynamic approaches. We know that Cissexism, compounded with other systemic issues, leaves many trans and gender non-conforming people without health insurance to cover their mammograms, prostate exams, pregnancies, abortions, and any other procedure deemed by society to be contained in one gender. Therefore, we are working towards affordable, accessible, full-spectrum reproductive healthcare for all of our chosen families. We continue to create necessary spaces for political and social empowerment for queer and trans youth of color through our media camps and leadership trainings. Finally, in order to actualize legislative change, we must stay involved, so SPARK will continue working with our constituency through our civic engagement initiative.

Celebrating Southern Mamas!

Women in the U.S. South and in the Global South want our expertise, our legacy of resistance, and our bodily autonomy respected. We stand on the shoulders of the brilliant Black women from the South who have long been rebelling and demanding social justice—women like Fannie Lou Hammer, Coretta Scott King, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Ruby Sales, Tracee McDaniel, Mary Hooks, and Marylinn Winn. We stand on the fertile ground they left for us and recognize them as the greatest Mama’s Day blessing of all!

In the end, as you think about and discuss the South, remember to shift your focus from what is wrong in our parts of the world, and instead, remember and foreground our legacy of success. On Mama’s Day, understand that women in the South have autonomy and refuse to be paternalized by the state, the North, or anyone else. Stand with us and support our leadership, respect our lived experiences, and honor our herstories!

This blog is part of the Strong Families Mama’s Day Our Way celebration. You can read more posts in the series on the Strong Families blog. Strong Families is a national initiative led by Forward Together. Our goal is to change the way people think, act and talk about families.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Annamarya. Photo used with permission of author.

Annamarya Scaccia is an award-winning freelance journalist who has reported extensively on reproductive health and reproductive rights, women’s issues and rights, civil rights, constitutional issues, marriage equality, sexuality, sex worker rights, and sexual violence, among other rousing topics. Her work has appeared in/on Philadelphia City Paper, Philadelphia Weekly, West Philly Local, Initiative Radio with Angela McKenzie, RH Reality Check, Prince George’s Suite, Origivation, and BLURT. She was a 2011 Peter Jennings Project for Journalists & the Constitution Fellow, and is the author of the 2005 poetry and prose collection, Destiny for a Tragedy.

Naming Problems: Who Am I?

For years when I was younger, I wished my name was Amanda.

That was the first name my mother originally picked to brand me with—to shape my identity for the years to come. But my father was adamant against it. So they decided to name me Annamaria instead.

And, for a while, I despised it.

It was a seething hatred I never fully vocalized. Instead, I sat with it silently, keeping Annamaria—and whatever it meant to be Annamaria—at a far, tense distance. Plus, it’s not like I was ever actually Annamaria. It was either shortened to Anna by me or assuming others, or was given some perverse variation, like Annemarie, Anne Marie, Annamarie, or Anna Marie, so on and so forth. And it was mocked mercifully. “Anna Banana Plays the Piano” was the soundtrack of my youth.

Annamaria was just a name I wrote on paperwork.

But this isn’t why I hated my name or why I wished upon stars that my birth certificate read Amanda instead. The simple, unabashed truth is I wanted to be named Amanda because of what it symbolized: an American girl in an Italian family.

In a lot of ways, my family is the quintessential Brooklyn Italian famiglia. Our heritage is important to our identity, to the way we communicated, and to the way we responded to the outside world. A mix of broken English and broken Italian was spoken over dishes of orecchiette and ragu. We would walk the line of the Santa Rosalia feast (better known as the 18th Avenue Feast) every year and shove our faces with delicious, messy zeppoli. And we would attend midnight mass on Christmas at St. Simon and Jude Church, filing in with our other Catholic neighbors.

Yet, I wasn’t Italian enough. Even though my mother would only joke about how I was “Americanized”— how I couldn’t speak or understand a lick of Italian or I didn’t like certain traditional foods—I always felt she had a point. How can I really be a first generation Italian-American if I couldn’t comprehend the language that filled our house? How could I really be a first generation Italian-American if I turned away from Catholicism to pursue a more profound faith?

How could I be this Brooklyn Italian girl I’m supposed to be if I couldn’t even fit into her clothes properly?

So I rejected my full name for a long time, because I rejected my heritage. I didn’t feel like I deserved it—that I was worthy of it. Instead, I insisted on going by Anna. I would spit on my name, even my middle one (Celestina), because it felt ugly. I felt uncomfortable in that skin that was assigned to me. If I am indeed Americanized, I thought, then that’s how I’ll approach my identity.

Around 2003, that all changed. I can’t remember the exact moment I had the epiphany that my name is beautiful, that I deserve to be a part of the culture that was so present in my formative years. I can’t remember when I decided that I wasn’t just this American girl—that I was a product of old Mediterranean customs trying to conform to a modern East Coast world. But it hit me like I just crashed into the side of a brick wall.

I am Annamaria. This is who I am.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. Image via WikiCommons.

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t apply my own twist. So when I started Brooklyn College in 2004, I began to write my name as Annamarya. I actually owe that to an acquaintance of mine who knew me when I still went by Anna. She suggested my name would be even more beautiful if it was spelt Anya, and that lit a fire in me. If I am going to be Annamaria, I am going to be Annamaria on my own terms.

Since then, I’ve introduced myself as Annamarya. It’s the only name my boyfriend of eight years calls me. That’s the only name that marks my emails, my social media accounts, and my legal papers. That’s the only name I want to be called from here on out. That’s my identity.

Still, because of all those years fighting against Annamaria, I still feel like I don’t know myself. When I utter “just call me Anna” because people can’t grasp the length of my name, it doesn’t feel right. Something just halts inside of me. It feels like I am denying who I’ve become and want to be—like I am reverting back to the days of hiding.

It doesn’t bother me when my family or pre-Annamarya friends call me Anna. That’s how they’ve grown to know me. There’s a comfort in that familiarity. But when people take it upon themselves to shorten my name despite introducing myself as Annamarya, I cringe. I become annoyed at the superficial disrespect. I want to scream, “Can’t you see I’m Annamarya?!? Can’t you see I’m not that girl anymore?!?”

And that’s where I find myself as Annamarya: conflicted. Even though I’ve grown to love my full name, I can’t help but think I am just this person trying to mask who she really is with a nice set of pearls. Is going by Annamarya my way of hiding that neurotic, erratic, depressed kid or have I just evolved into a depressed adult who knows how to handle the world better? And will I ever be fully comfortable in that skin?

That last question, I am not sure I’ll ever answer, but it is the crux of my story: that no matter what name I’ve gone by, I’m still not settled in.

And I don’t know if I ever will be.

For now, though, I will continue to let her enfold me. I will continue to be the bitter grace she represents, and continue to accept it cordially.

A quick note about images in this series: each essay includes an image of a place that holds personal meaning for the author.

This post is part of an on-going roundtable on naming that Flyover Feminism is doing in conjunction with Are Women Human?

Let’s Talk About Names: Robyn is the previous post in the series.

Let’s Talk About Names: Nia is the next post in the series.

The entire series is available at the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Marna. Photo used with permission of author.

Marna Nightingale lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She is very married.

I put a lot of thought into the question of taking my hypothetical future husband’s name, when I was in my late teens and early twenties. Just as I felt I had come up with a plan, though, I got a girlfriend. Then I turned out to be poly. I now have two wives, a husband, and my birth name, not on principle, exactly, but because when it comes down to it, there is no practical alternative.

We did consider it, but all of us taking a new, made-up name didn’t appeal to any of us. Choosing one of the four names and going with it didn’t work either. As for hyphenation, I think quadruple-barrelled surnames should be given only to minor European nobility, who are presumably issued special passports with extra blank space to fit it all in.

Aside from all of that, I like my surname. If I didn’t, I might think differently; I don’t know. I don’t really think of it as “my father’s name”, either, even though he’s the reason I’ve got it. He carries it; he doesn’t own it any more than I do – or I don’t own it any less than he does.

It’s my sister’s name too, and my cousins’, and it’s been my mother’s name for much longer than her original family name was. It was carried by a fairly famous distant female ancestor of mine, and, finally, for over forty years it’s been mine. I’ve finally taught most of the people I do business with how to spell it; going through that and then changing it would just be masochism.

It doesn’t help that I’m not actually all that personally radical, either. One of the great joys of my life is that same-sex marriage is not only legal in Canada, it’s damn near unremarkable anymore; I don’t have to watch what I say and do, and I don’t often have to fight with people about what they say or do. Even when I tell people that I have three spouses, it barely rates a raised eyebrow, and this suits me fine. I am, at heart, conventional: so long as The Done Thing isn’t unjust or oppressive, I’m happy to do it. Conventions can make life easier.

This doesn’t mean I have no opinions about the politics of name-changes in marriage, just that, especially when it comes to what individuals rather than institutions ought to do about the situation, I try to hold them very lightly.

I believe that people should be allowed to change their legal names, whenever they like, for whatever reason they like, and to whatever they like. I concede that governments and other institutions have a reasonable claim on being able to figure out which individual I am, and on knowing who my next-of-kin is, and whose parent I am, and stuff like that. I just don’t see why it has to done by making it hard to change our names, about which most of us have strong feelings. I’m sure that the federal government already thinks of me as a Social Insurance Number with some syllables attached; why not make it official?

People of any gender should be able to change their names easily and inexpensively when they marry – or when they divorce, or when they transition, or when they leave home, or any other time they like. (Monday to Friday during normal business hours, at least.) Of that much, I am quite certain.

Photo used with permission of author.

Well, I suppose I do have one more strong opinion, made stronger by trying to negotiate the whole four-person marriage thing: the whole name business, if you’re a woman, is currently kind of a pain, and feeling as if every choice available is some kind of deep personal and political statement makes it a deep personal and political pain. Even when it’s not a particularly difficult choice, even when everyone’s in agreement and it all goes smoothly, or when, as in my case, the choice is obvious, it’s just one more thing we’d rather not have to think about quite this hard. In my case, I mostly wanted to get the name discussion out of the way so we could talk about the stuff we really cared about.

My family may have dodged the question of our own last names, but now we’re trying to figure out what to do about the surname of the child we’d like to have, and already we’re aware that all of our choices are ones that will complicate border crossings, PTA meetings, introductions, and conversations at parties…forever. If I may say a few words? yuck. crap. phooey.

Creating a new tradition is hard, and takes time: fifty years ago the woman changed her name, the man did not, the kids got the father’s name, and not everybody liked it, or even went along with it, but it had this one, sole grace: most of the time, for most people, it was easy.

Easy, on its own, isn’t good enough, especially when easy-for-most-people means oppressive-or-impossible for many people, and so people started rebelling against the tradition, and we now have a state of mild chaos: fruitful, useful, and necessary, but not, I hope, permanent.

Fifty years from now, we’ll probably have a new set of conventions, I think and hope much more inclusive ones. Conventions that work for opposite-sex and same-sex and multi-person marriages, and for people who transition between genders, and for nearly everybody else. And I hope that the options for people who still don’t – or don’t care to – fit the available boxes will be fair and affordable and relatively painless, and then we can all drop the subject and get on with other things.

In the meantime, well, in the meantime we’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve got to work with, and nobody really knows what anyone else’s situation is or was, so it’s just as well to be as non-judgemental as possible.

A quick note about images in this series: each essay includes an image of a place that holds personal meaning for the author.

This post is part of an on-going roundtable on naming that Flyover Feminism is doing in conjunction with Are Women Human?

Let’s Talk About Names: Minna is the previous post in the series.

The entire series is available at the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Elly Blue

Elly Blue is a writer, publisher, speaker, and bicycling advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her publishing company, Taking the Lane Media, produces feminist non-fiction about bicycling. She has written, edited, and published books, zines, and other independently produced media and is also an active speaker on tour with the Dinner and Bikes project.

In addition to her writing and publishing accomplishments, Blue co-founded PDX by Bike, a business that helps people find their way around Portland by bicycle, and a nonprofit business alliance called the Portland Society.

Her first book, Everyday Bicycling, came out in December, 2012. Her next full-length book, Bikenomics: How Bicycling Will Save the Economy, comes out in February 2013.

Follow Elly Blue on Twitter @ellyblue

1) What inspired you to start producing feminist zines largely focused on bicycling?

I made the first one in 2010 when I was at a crossroads. I’d left my job editing a blog and was trying to figure out what to do next. My partner (and now publisher!), Joe, was planning to go on a month-long tour to show movies and sell books. I was at odds and ends I figured I might as well go too. I wanted to have something to sell, gift, and trade, so I wrote a long form essay venting my increasing frustration with sexism I’d experienced in the bike movement. Someone told me about Kickstarter and it all fell into place. I made zines as a teenager in the 90s, and it felt good to revisit that format in a more polished form at the same time as rediscovering my feminist ideals from that age.

2) What has been your most effective tool for connecting to other (feminist) bike activists and for finding an audience for your work?

Events! I sell and promote books and zines online out of convenience, but really love making connections in person. Joe and I have kept going on tour together every year, and now we travel with an amazing vegan chef and put on really fun Dinner and Bikes events. We are coming to flyover country this May — our schedule is getting finalized quickly.

3) What are one or two pressing issues related to women’s cycling that you wish people were paying more attention to? Why?

Feminism is a big deal in cycling right now, but we really need to get away from the general narrative of women being fearful. Not that we can’t be afraid, or shouldn’t talk about it—but it makes advocacy battles unnecessarily difficult, when you’re saying at the same time that we need to invest in this edgy new kind of infrastructure for bicyclists, but at the same time that bicycling is dangerous and scary so people don’t want to do it. From a marketing perspective, fear is a dud, unless you want to sell pedal-powered tanks. Want to win women’s hearts? Make the connection between cycling and jobs.

Also, I predict that the new generation of leaders and role models in the bike movement will be women of color — that sea change is already happening, and it’s heartening to see that fact being acknowledged and amplified by the old guard, especially the League.

4) What do you love about Portland, (where you live, bike, and write)?

There are so many things I love about Portland! Bicycling here is for the most part, easy, and there’s something for everyone. We also have a really high density of independent bookstores. I love that.

5) Favorite under-the-radar writers and or blogs?

There are so many to choose from! I love reading Urban Adonia’s blog. On paper, the Dames on Frames zine comes out infrequently (you can download back issues online here). and has great content, in both Spanish and English. But most of my written inspiration lately is coming from the 1970s — I love the handmade aesthetic and the unabashedly huge, world-transforming visions of the Whole Earth Catalogs and the books they offered. That’s where I first heard of zines, from the big, white one that came out in the 1990s.

This is part of an on-going series of interviews with activists around the world who are putting their feminism into practice.

If you have any suggestions of people we should interview (including yourself), please write us at flyover[at]flyoverfeminism[dot]com.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Trudy. Photo used with permission of author.

Trudy Hamilton is a writer and culture critic at Gradient Lair (@GradientLair), and a photographer, writer and eBook author at Tru Shots Photography. She has a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice with additional graduate work in Psychology. Her interests include critical media/art examination, and media/art’s impact on a plethora of sociopolitical issues. She identifies as a Womanist/ intersectional feminist. Follow her daily musings on Twitter: @thetrudz

“Raceless” Names, “Acceptable” Names and Employment

A Rose by any other name may be a Black woman who has to worry about whether or not her name makes her “unemployable.” It doesn’t really matter if her actual name provides zero insight into whether or not she can perform the tasks required of a job and doesn’t correlate to her résumé indicating whether or not she has the education and skills that even warrant a callback. Her name alone can mean that a door is never opened to even be slammed in her face later.

We are in the age of the intersection of social media and labor, where protected class and other information is easily accessible prior to interviews and can be legally used to disqualify a candidate (though ridiculously, i.e. an after-hours party photograph interpreted as a person cannot perform their job during work hours) or illegally used to disqualify a candidate (i.e. a profile photo that reveals race, gender, and/or age and this information is used to disqualify a candidate).

However, easy access information was not always the norm. A name, address, high school/college attended and professional interests on a faxed or emailed résumé used to be almost all of the information available to employers prior to interviews, yet this is more than enough information to weed people out.

A zip code can reveal that a candidate lives in an area that’s not suburban or “White.” HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) listed in the education section of a résumé can reveal that the candidate is Black. A name deemed “urban,” “ghetto,” or just “ethnic” is enough information to disregard a candidate altogether. A name that doesn’t indicate race on sight is often assumed to be a White one. The presumed “universality” of Whiteness allows many employers to assume that if a name doesn’t appear to be “ethnic,” it’s a “good name” and must belong to a White person. Some especially think this is true if the résumé pleases them. Except for the times when it isn’t true.

I know these times well. My name is Trudy Hamilton. I’m a Black woman who’s always assumed to be White until proven otherwise.

The name Trudy comes from the name Gertrude. It’s a name from Germanic words meaning “spear” and “strength.” Hamilton alludes to British colonization and slavery in Jamaica, as my family is Jamaican and my siblings and I are first-generation Americans. All of my siblings have rather short first names like mine and a few of the youngest ones have biblical names. I doubt that my late mother named us with the forethought of acceptance in future corporate jobs at White-owned corporations in America; at the same time, I can’t deny the possible impact of Christianity and European colonization in Jamaica on the name choices that she and my dad made. African-Americans have their own beautiful culture, as Nikki Giovanni articulated so well, and some have names–used to discriminate against them during the application process–that my family members don’t have solely because the names aren’t common to our part of the diaspora.

I don’t view the name “Trudy” as some sort of “gift” or “ticket” into corporate America as some Whites and Blacks have suggested to me in 15 years of adulthood (many Black people have absorbed the idea that any name deemed “good” by Whites is in fact a “good name,” so they don’t question the White supremacist and racist concept of culturally Black names being deemed “bad” in the first place).

When I finished college over a decade ago, I started the job search like every other graduate. Though I worked during most of my undergrad years, I assumed finishing my degree meant that I could get jobs that paid better than retail and call centers.I attended PWIs (predominantly White universities), lived in a racially diverse and economically stable area near my college and of course have the name “Trudy.” The combination of these factors consistently conveyed “White woman” to employers. However, every time I walked into the door for an interview, surprise, confusion, irritation, disappointment and even disgust covered White employers’ faces. (It never gets any easier seeing these expressions, even a decade later.)

It no longer mattered that they previously thought that I had a good résumé. It no longer mattered that the pre-screening phone call was pleasant and even charming or humorous at times. The laughs shared or conversation became a long forgotten memory as I, a Black woman, stood in their offices, practically interrupting many all-White spaces with my previously clandestine Blackness revealed. This doesn’t mean that in the over ten years since undergrad I haven’t had a job. I’ve been hired by the surprise-faced Whites more than the disappointment or disgust-faced Whites, obviously. (Completing a Master’s degree almost five years ago, plus the recession, has made it harder to find work outside of my own freelancing work as an artist. Employers seem even angrier when a Black woman with a Master’s degree shows up at an interview, versus one with a Bachelors degree.)

I’ve experienced unprofessional and utterly racist and/or sexist interviews. I’ve been asked questions that are illegal to ask a candidate. I’ve been told upon arrival that the position is filled even though it was open the evening before when I called to confirm the interview time. I’ve witnessed White interviewers have loud and overtly racist conversations with White employees while I was in the lobby waiting for my interview. They knew I was there; they just didn’t care. I’ve had interviewers make specifically racist sexist statements (misogynoir) or “jokes” during the interview. I’ve had conversations via email and phone where the same salary offered in the job posting was offered but once I arrived at the interview, the salary offer was significantly lowered. Once it was lowered by $2,000 a year. Another time, it was lowered by a whopping $10,000 a year. Honestly, these examples are just the icing on a very horrible, over-a-decade-old cake with layers of racism, sexism, and classism as well as general bigotry and unprofessionalism.

None of this even speaks to how perhaps being named “Trudy” versus “Takeeshia” or “Toccarra” meant I eventually got hired at some jobs (versus my résumé being immediately discarded). I still earned significantly lower salaries than equally qualified White women, at times, half of equally qualified White men, and dealt with day in and day out microaggressions, racial/sexual harassment and at times, hostile, threatening overtly racist and sexist environments. Having a “good” name as deemed by Whites means possibly getting in the door of an endless stream of hatred versus the door never being opened or being slammed. The problem is having to choose to endure bigotry for lower pay versus not being allowed in at all. These aren’t real choices. They certainly shouldn’t be based on a name.

One of the halls at Stanford University. Photo used with permission of author.

Black people and other people of colour in America have a long history of experiencing employment discrimination. There’s a plethora of socioeconomic, educational and social barriers as a result of how White supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy manifests in our society. There are institutional and structural barriers to overcome to even have a shot at getting the education and skills necessary to compete. In the job market, Black people at any educational or socioeconomic level have double the rate of unemployment of their equally qualified White counterpart. Often Black people have to be more qualified to get a position that less-qualified White candidates can get.

In addition to all of this, there are Black job candidates legitimately worried about their names on résumés and even more painful for me to consider, there are Black parents thinking of “White-approved” names for their babies. Worry over names in reference to their children getting jobs 16 to 21 years in the future stresses some Black parents as compared to being able to celebrate the naming process for their babies–a luxury of White privilege that many White parents take for granted.

Names are culturally connected or made up. All words are made up–language as we know it is a human construction. Black people or any other people of colour should not have to have Eurocentric or White-approved names; White supremacy dictates the lie that other cultures, and proper names by proxy, are inherently inferior and thus “bad.”

After watching the disgusting hatred and willful ignorance regarding reporters refusing to pronounce 9-year-old Academy Award nominee Quvenzhané Wallis’ name and many others despising her name, her healthy confidence and prominent self-assurance at only 9, I imagined what her path would be like without acting and at 21, applying for a “regular” job. Would White employers ignore her intellectual merits and skills because her name is not “White” enough? Would people continue to provide arbitrary reasons as to why her name is awful and not realize that their reasons are grounded in White supremacist thinking?

What’s in a name? Apparently another way to value or devalue a person for employment. Apparently another way to reinforce socioeconomic and cultural oppression in our society. Apparently, another example of how, despite the exceptional successes of an Oprah, Condoleezza and Barack, many Black people will continue to face unopened and slammed doors because of their name, let alone other factors. Their abilities won’t even matter. This will always be wrong.

A quick note about images in this series: each essay includes an image of a place that holds personal meaning for the author.

This post is part of an on-going roundtable on naming that Flyover Feminism is doing in conjunction with Are Women Human?

Let’s Talk About Names: Rawls is the previous post in the series.

Let’s Talk About Names: Minna is the next post in the series.

The entire series is available at the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Sarah Gilbert

Sarah Gilbert is an award-winning memoirist and editor-in-chief of Stealing Time Magazine. She founded Stealing Time Magazine in 2012 with the goal of offering a space where non-normative parenting voices could speak free of judgment and restraint.

The publication describes itself as a “community of writers and readers: parents who come together [...] to celebrate that a parent’s work is intellectual as well as emotional.” Stealing Time Magazine aims to change the way parenting is talked about in mainstream media as well as what it is that makes a parent. To that end, the magazine features narratives from an open and all-encompassing perspective:

“All content must be parenting-related, broadly construed. We are eager to give expression to the broadest possible spectrum of parenting experience. Naturally we want to see parenting essays that reflect monogamous heterosexual families as well as single parents, queer parents, transgendered parents and parents of transgendered children, blended families, grandparents raising grandchildren, families including children or parents with a special needs diagnosis, parents of children lost or deceased, and other less conventional parents and caregivers of children.”

Gilbert also blogs as Cafe Mama, which she dubs a “domestic realist” space, and can also be found on Twitter @sarahgilbert.

1. You are founder and editor-in-chief of Stealing Time Magazine, a literary magazine for parents. In your mission statement, you write that you want the magazine to represent parenting experiences outside of the mainstream, giving voice to queer parents, single parents, parents of adopted children, etc. What motivated you to come up with this kind of parenting publication?

This idea came from where come all good ideas: the void. Specifically, a void of truly-told, carefully-examined parenting stories. There are many parenting stories in the mainstream media, but they’re often very flat and one-dimensional. In my experience as a consumer of other parenting stories and as a writer of them, I have repeatedly felt this hunger for better, clearer, wider-angle looks at the spectrum of parenting experience, told without the context of what you should do, or what a perfect socially-acceptable, best-of-all-possible-worlds parent would do, feel, think — but what we actually DO. How we navigate the flawed world as individuals who are not flawed in all the right ways — and still strive to be good people, good models, and authentic versions of ourselves (gay, straight, step-, infertile, special needs parents or parents of special needs, all of it). It’s a delicate dance; it’s worth telling all these stories. Brave stories that lay themselves open to judgment without offering any. It’s sure as hell worth reading.

2. What has been the most effective tool for gathering the funds to create and distribute the magazine?

Kickstarter was what we used as a launch funding mechanism, and as a way to build energy and spread the word and (indeed) raise money it was amazing. It was an enormous amount of work and focus and it was worthwhile but HARD; I doubt I will ever want to be an organization that funds all its issues through Kickstarter. I would much prefer to “build it and they will come” than to spend a lot of my time doing intense marketing like this, even though it was such an emotionally overwhelming (in a good way) experience to see so many people put their love and money behind something that hadn’t yet been done. Over time, I really believe that the magazine will fund itself; the need for these stories is obvious and the first three issues are so chockfull of wonderful stuff, I know they will live on. We need something like 2,000 subscribers in order to pay our editors AND print/mail/pay writers and photographers; the best tool to get that is simply to get magazines into people’s hands. It’s a fantastic bargain.

3. What are one or two parenting issues you wish to give voice to with this publication? What do you wish people were paying more attention to?

I think there is a real lack of stories told from the perspective of parents in lower socio-economic classes and immigrant classes. So often in lovely stories by lovely writers, the problems are distinctly middle- or upper-class, and while these deserve their place in our pages too, I want to give voice to the stories that often go untold. And not necessarily those stories of abuse or abandonment; just the everyday struggles of people who are strangers in their adopted countries even after many years, or who have to buy their gas a five dollar bill at a time (or both). So much of our public discourse is either to pity or to stigmatize those who live near or below the poverty line; calling the social supports we give to some of them “entitlements” or calling Obama the “food stamp president” as if that is a bad thing (I won’t even go into how much better he could do for the poor). I’d like to see stories told without that pity, without the judgment for how they got into the lives in which they live, just seeing reality from their eyes. There are many, many parents who are neither living in squalor nor are they sodden with drugs or alcohol; they’re just dealing with different challenges than the parents whose stories are more widely told.

I also am very interested in hearing from parents with a less conventional family makeup, not from the perspective of “here’s what it’s like to raise a child in a lesbian relationship!” or “I’m a stepmom and I’m not evil!” but “here is a parenting situation I’ve encountered along with my partner,” or, “my relationship with my stepchildren is complicated, even though we love each other dearly, sometimes I’m jealous of the parent who came before me.” I want to see the nuanced differences beneath the obvious differences. And the reminder of how alike we all are; and how brave and deep and tearful and loving every parenting relationship can be, no matter what its label.

4. What do you love about Portland, where you are located and from where you also distribute Stealing Time Magazine? 

I love almost everything about Portland, but I think most of all I love how passionate everyone here is; seeing someone moved to tears by riding bicycles, or someone who devotes 30 hours a week to advocating open-to-all scouting organizations, or someone who tirelessly promotes a certain niche of writing, energizes me. And we’re all so supportive of each other. I get knocked over all the time realizing that there’s a whole new artistic circle I never knew existed (history writers! cellists! sock knitters!) and they have this weird, devoted, and thoroughly generous subculture. I’ve been invited in to so many of them and it always makes me want to shake the rest of the world by the lapels and say, “hey! don’t you see how it COULD be?”

I also really, really love the coffee and the food. I’m so lucky to have grown up here, and to have made it again, in adulthood, my home!

5. Favorite under-the-radar writer and/or blog?

There are so many! I have a new crush once a week. I’ve long loved the blog posts and poems of Sarah Piazza. There’s another one that’s like it in so many ways — quiet storytelling. And I happened into Anakana Schofield‘s reading at Wordstock; I was there for the writer with whom she was reading; and fell in love with her voice like a 14-year-old for the cute point guard on the varsity team. Her book “Malarky” lived up to my hopes.

This is part of an on-going series of interviews with activists around the world who are putting their feminism into practice.

If you have any suggestions of people we should interview (including yourself), please write us at flyover[at]flyoverfeminism[dot]com.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Laura. Photo used with permission of author.

Laura is a feminist activist living in the suburbs of DC. She tweets as @crafting_change, is the voice behind the Fully Engaged Feminism Podcast and works locally with grassroots groups. Nearly middle aged and full of privilege Laura simultaneously pursues an undergrad degree at night while seeking to liberate education from traditional academic settings to promote enthusiastic learning in everywhere.

Naming

To be honest, I think the story on how I got my first name is far more interesting, and telling, than that of my last name. See, my father wanted to name me after a sexy “Bond girl” actress, purely because of her “sex appeal.” My mom wanted to name me Nikki (not even Nicole) for some reason she’s never elaborated on.

So when my Mom’s labor began and they still hadn’t decided on a name, they opened a baby names book to a random page and debated through contractions and the bustle of the hospital until ‘Laura’ was picked. As a pagan, it humors me to no end that my first name was found through a sort of reductive bibliomancy, since the last name typed on my birth certificate was one of various deceptions and concessions.

My father acquired his last name through adoption: at age 3, his stepfather gained custodial rights to him, and his name was changed. This identity and history that was kept from him until his teens, and in turn was not shared with my generation until we were old enough to start questioning family history. My mother’s paternal side of the family changed their last name upon fleeing Ireland, to hide their identity from the legal forces in pursuit. Through each name change on both sides of the family, what would eventually become my ‘original’ surname became more generically “white” and “relatable.’”

I wasn’t terribly attached to my birth name. Naming was always a little fluid (depending on what family house I’m at, the nickname used for me changes) and I had seen a series of women before me take a variety of approaches to keeping, claiming or transforming their name. I saw changing my name when I was married as a way to strike out on my own, combining my name with that of my partner’s into something important both acknowledging my past and my current union.

I recognized at the time the privilege that was coming to us through our government-santioned marriage (well over a decade before our state made marriage equality legal). And while at the time I felt as though we were turning our backs to our friends who were being denied equal rights, we were poor and struggling, and the idea of having a little bit of a better chance at sharing health insurance or knocking $20 off of our insurance was too good to pass up.

Photo used with permission of author.

About six years ago, my husband and I were facing a move that we could not afford. We had a slim possibility of moving into an apartment that would allow us to spend less time commuting to our day jobs and put us in a position to save up more money (for better housing, and school). It was embarrassing enough to be almost 30, calling my father to ask if I could borrow a sum of money that would be the bridge from struggling working class to middle class. It was a hustle I had been used to doing with employers, scholarship boards, and volunteer gigs – but doing it with a parent whose combined abuse and neglect sent me to therapy for years felt like the worst concession of all.

To his credit, my father immediately offered to write the check, insisting it wasn’t a loan but a gift to help us “get on our feet.” As he wrote out the check he realized he didn’t know my full name (I had legally married six years before). When I told him my name – both mine and my spouse’s, no hyphen, thank you very much – he said “Goddamn you women libbin’ bitch.” This was a typical insult from my father and the timing was nothing new. For a year after his death I signed all of the emails sent from my phone “the women libbin’ bitch” in his honor.

The reality is we are labeled by our parents at the date of our birth or later, and this label affirmed by the state. How we relate to these given names is highly personal and complicated – and yes, shaped by patriarchy and kyriarchy.

There’s real power in naming oneself. On “the internets,” I have cultivated identities with a singular user name/handle and a podcast that are wholly removed from my name as the state knows it, because my career and educational pursuits could very well be negatively affected by their linking. As a pagan, I’ve delved into the work that is finding a name – not unlike the confirmation process in some Christian traditions. In a society that hurls labels like “woman,” “fat,” and “aging” as insults instead of neutral descriptors, I think any time I’m able to assert how I want to be named – any time I can say “you will call me this because I want you to, I owe you no more explanation than that” – is a fucking victory.

A quick note about images in this series: each essay includes an image of a place that holds personal meaning for the author.

This post is part of an on-going roundtable on naming that Flyover Feminism is doing in conjunction with Are Women Human?

Let’s Talk About Names: Natalie is the previous post in the series.

Let’s Talk About Names: Rawls is the next post in the series.

The entire series is available at the Let’s Talk About Names Tumblr.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.

Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler

Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler was the first doctoral graduate from Northwestern’s African American Studies program. He began his site blac (k) academic while in graduate school and has continued writing there since leaving academia. Receiving much recognition for his work, blac (k) ademic has won a Black Weblog Award, was nominated for a 2012 Transguys Community Award for Best Blog, and a 2013 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Blog.

Ziegler is also a filmmaker. He wrote and directed the first film to ever profile the black trans male community with, Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen. The experimental documentary profiles “six thoughtful, eloquent, and diverse transmen” in which each man discusses “the connections they have to their bodies, social status and the consequences of being black, transgender and men.” Still Black was the Audience Choice for Best Documentary at the Reelout Film Festival in 2009 and the Isaac Julien Experimental Award Winner from Queer Black Cinema in 2008. The film has gone on to show on screens worldwide including countries such as Switzerland, The Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and has an upcoming screening in Jamaica.

In addition, Ziegler is an entrepreneur who has his hand in multiple business ventures, including founding Who We Know, an organization that helps to economically empower trans people of color. From Who We Know’s site: “We work to build alliances between the trans of color community and progressive organizations in the [San Francisco] bay area through a 10-month living wage paid fellowship. We recruit talented transgender professionals of color with a demonstrated ability to launch and lead conceptually driven social justice projects. We then connect them with the resources and networks of progressive organizations to produce innovative products, campaigns, or business models that seek to dissolve barriers to economic access for all trans people of color.”

In 2012, Ziegler was a GLAAD National People of Color Media Institute Fellow. Ziegler also won the 2013 AWARENESS award from Black Transmen, Inc and was recognized on the inaugural Trans 100 list.

1. Why is title of your blog “blac (k) ademic”? What is the importance of those two words to you?

The title is a visual and sonic representation of how I see myself. Its an obvious play on being black and an intellectual figure but the parenthetical k represents my uniqueness and different scholarly approach. Because I am an independent scholar with no ties to an academic institution, I have much more freedom to express myself and be different. blac (k) ademic represents that.

2. You describe yourself as an artist. What role does art play in your activism?

My art is my activism; there is no separation. Whenever I approach new work, whether it is filmmaking, photography, or painting, I always do so with the idea in the back of my mind of how the work can make a social impact–what activist statement or message can I fuse into the art? So, this is how I create.

I also believe that the simple fact of me making art as a trans person of color, is a form of activism. Instead of being invisible, I use my art-making to be visible, to be loud and outspoken in ways that other forms of communication do not allow.

3. What has been your most effective tool for connecting to other black queer activists or people addressing the same issues that you do?

Social networking has been a gift to the black queer community far and wide. We have the ability to connect with so many people doing incredible work that we would not have been able to with such frequency before. Through YouTube, for example, I have met so many black trans people of all ages who have helped me in my journey of coming to terms with my identity. With the work that I am doing now, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many amazing people offline and that is what is so powerful about social media–the possibility of
making real life connections.

4. What are one or two pressing issues that you wish people were paying more attention to? Why?

There are quite a few issues I wish had more people’s attention, one of them being the staggering rates of unemployment amongst trans people of color–this is an issue that deserves so much discussion,
energy and work to begin to change the story.

Lately, however, I’ve also felt an urge to focus attention to the constant devaluing of non-masculine identities within the queer movement. It bothers me that many of us are so quick to replicate the very systems we seek to destroy by celebrating a packaged image of masculinity concerned with attractiveness and youth that dominates discussions of queerness and gender non-conformity. This is super disappointing to me.

5. What do you love about Oakland and/or California?

I am a Cali-boy born and raised in Compton, so California will always have a special place in my heart. I love living in Oakland because of its rich history of activism and black resilience. But I also love it because it has a great art scene that is really starting to take shape. There are so many young entrepreneurs of color that live in the city, too. That is great because as a small business owner and social entrepreneur, I am constantly inspired by all of the innovation happening right around me.

Also, I have to say, I am in love with my neighborhood and the incredible lake in its center that brings together so many types of people in the city.

I just love it so much.

I love Oakland–I am lucky!

6. Favorite under-the-radar writer and/or blog.

He is way above the radar but anything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, I am always in awe, grateful and moved by. He is amazing and I hope we cross paths offline one day.

This is part of an on-going series of interviews with activists around the world who are putting their feminism into practice.

If you have any suggestions of people we should interview (including yourself), please write us at flyover@flyoverfeminism.com.

Please see Flyover Feminism’s comment policy before leaving comments on the site. Comments that violate the policy will be deleted.

Also, if you’d like to be a contributor here at Flyover, please see our submissions page.