“Selling the Farm to Buy the Cow”

Abstract

This article examines how “Black names” have become a trope for deficit beliefs about Black people in the United States and about Blackness more broadly. In data from two qualitative studies conducted with one group of African American secondary students and second group of African American alumni from a historically black college, participants’ narratives of everyday life reflect the impact of racialization and the extent to which members of both groups attempt to circumvent racialization in their personal and professional lives. The authors identify naming as a cultural right that is threatened within the Black community. They use the principle tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) alongside discussions of “race” in a sociolinguistic analysis of participants’ discussions of race and naming. The authors take up CRT’s call for narrative as a critical component for revealing and analyzing the significance and impact of race. Findings from the study illustrate that African Americans struggle with naming and the implications for Black names that influence personal choices they make regardless of their age, education level, and socioeconomic status. There is a consequential aspect to Black names that imposes challenges in refracting the deficit constructions of Blackness that are attached to them.