What's In A Name?

Recently, I happened to run across a black lady whose first name was Kenyatta. When I asked her where she got that name she said her mother had given it to her. She went on to explain that she was named for Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya. She was a nice lady and I’m not sure she grasped the political implications of her first name. I wonder if her mother did. I didn’t get into any of that with her, as I sensed it would not be overly productive, and as I said, she seemed like a nice lady and not a raving radical.

But it made me think. How many White Southerners over the years have named their sons after Confederate soldiers? When our son was born my wife and I had narrowed the choice of names for him down to two–Daniel from the Bible and Thomas Jonathan for Stonewall Jackson. We eventually went with Daniel from the Bible, but had we not, he would have been named for Old Stonewall.

Now admittedly, that was over half a century ago, but I wondered how many Southern folks today would even dare to consider naming their son after any kind of Confederate personality for fear of being labeled “racist”? It’s okay for folks to name their kids after African terrorists, but don’t you dare name your kid Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jonathan Jackson or Jo Shelby because then you’re a racist–and worst of all–a white racist! And we have bought into this two-tiered system of racism just like we’ve bought into the two-tiered system of “justice” in this country.

I’ve mentioned this before in several articles, how one time traveling through eastern Kansas, where you can still smell John Brown, I ran across a lady from some college there, who tried to explain to me why J.E.B. Stuart, a Christian Southern cavalry commander, was a terrorist. Of course she didn’t consider John Brown a terrorist by any means. I’m sure to her Brown was a saint that walked on water. For her, anyone that fought for the South would have been a terrorist. You can begin to see why I don’t care for eastern Kansas! There’s probably lots of good folks in eastern Kansas who have been lied to about our history just like the rest of us have, but some of the more rabid ones you can’t even talk to.

A while back we had a man in our church who had named his two sons after Confederate generals and when we were living still in Illinois, I worked with a man who had named his son Forrest after Bedford Forrest. But I don’t hear about much of that kind of thing anymore. I always felt it was kind of a tribute to our Confederate heritage that folks named their sons after well-known Confederates. I know the political left considers such a sin of “White racism” but, then, the leftists consider anything they don’t agree with as White racism. It would seem the current far left regime in power feels the same way. To them the Confederacy was treasonous and every vestige of it needs to be erased from our memories forever. That’s why they’ve got their “renaming” commissions out there taking Confederate names off everything in sight and renaming things with names they deem favorable to the radical left. I’m waiting for the day when they will start renaming battlefields, especially battlefields where the South won the battle (of which there were many) with the names of some of Abe Lincoln’s Marxist generals! I don’t know if it will happen, God forbid, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

We are in a situation currently in this country where the left is in control and they are busily trying to ram their political and theological sewage down our throats while telling us it is caviar and we’d better learn how to enjoy it. We are supposed to have an election next year. Whether we will or not is an interesting question at this point. Some are saying it won’t happen. Other are saying the Democrats will steal it again like they did in 2020. Or maybe they will just arrest Trump and let the Republican Establishment find another flunky to run in his place–someone who sounds conservative, but who they and the Democrats can control.
​
If either of these scenarios transpires we may have an “election” that is not truly an election, but rather a political dog and pony show. And names being what they are, what name would you give a situation like that?

This article was published at Revised History on July 14, 2023.