166. WHAT'S IN A NAME? - What The Trivial Can Tell Us About The Significant
The scholar-activist Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman strikes through their given surname, ‘Coleman’ to symbolise the fact it was given to their family when they were ‘purchased’ in Jamaica. Malcolm X did something similar - the X representing an unknown African name lost to the history of slavery.
I write my name ‘Dan’, with a capital N - as in ‘DaN’ - for far less lofty and important reasons. Though in the reactions I receive for this utterly trivial, personal act, I see a glimpse of both the power of Coleman and X’s refusal to conform to existing naming conventions, and also the frustrations which can come from attempting to cleave one’s own identity in a world determined to impose identity upon you.
My own alternative presentation of my name was something I started doing as a teenager in the 1990s. It began from simply enjoying the pattern of the letters when I was even younger. My surname, McKee, has a capitalised K as its third letter, and people always made the effort to observe it when writing the word. They even told me off if I merely wrote Mckee, reminding me of the importance of capitalising the K. So, once I’d grown comfortable with that, I used to write my name as ‘DaNiEl McKeE’ because it amused me. If they allowed it for that one K, why not every other letter in the name? Then, as a teenager, I liked the way DaN looked. It was around the same time the internet was becoming a serious thing. I thought the weird way of writing the name would act as a sort of digital signature, so you’d always know the ‘DaN’ replying to an email was me and not an imposter! More importantly, I had gotten into anarchism and liked the way that by maximising the other letters it emphasised the little ‘a’ in the middle. A rejection of the usual ways of stylising anarchy with a big capital A or, as the digital revolution rolled on, an @ sign, but still as way to highlight the a for anarchy. Many anarchists with an A in their name replaced it with @ before the @ became a tool for tagging. I didn’t like that though. There were too many of them. DaN did the job uniquely. Big A Little A, just like the Crass song. And most importantly to me, it was a nod to the thinker, bell hooks, who, long before I knew about Nathaniel Coleman or Malcom X, I had discovered in my A-level sociology classes and become a little obsessed with. hooks didn’t capitalise her name out of a desire to ensure her message, rather than her name, got all the focus, as well as a way to distinguish it from the name of her great-grandmother, who’s name it actually was, and whom she was honouring by using it. The mixture of personal and political ideas made about as much sense as my own convoluted reasons for capitalising the N and thus, to my teenage mind, gave me permission to continue with my own weird, personalised ways of name-capitalisation too.
At some point in adulthood, I stopped using the capitalised N for a while. Seeing it ignored most of the time in communications with others made it seem silly and childish. Usually people thought it was a typo. Even cool people. The editors of ‘zines I wrote for. The graphic designers working on albums my band put out. Eventually I ‘grew up’ and conformed to the traditional spelling regime. I buckled under the weight of traditional expectations. I became Dan again instead of DaN. I lost my smile.
But at some point a few years ago, I just started doing it again. Finding myself. Returning to me. A simple signifier of change: DaN became the sign-off once more. I stopped trying to hide the weirdo I was and embraced, again, the true me. DaN the punk. DaN the anarchist. And here is where it became philosophy. Because DaN with the capital N became part of my identity. A silly bit of arbitrary self-expression, yes, but deeply meaningful to me nevertheless. A piece of who I am. Its esoteric personal origins and opaque rationale making it all the more a cherished totem of my story.
And this revival of the capitalised N as an adult in the world soon made me notice something awful: not everybody respected the capitalised N that I used. Many actively ignored it.
It took my publishers at Tippermuir Books to really draw my attention to this. I started chatting to them in 2019, and in every communication, without my ever asking them to, they always wrote to me as ‘DaN’, correctly, rather than ‘Dan’. Without our ever discussing it, when the cover of Authentic Democracy was designed and shown to me, my author’s name was correctly written there as ‘DaN McKee’ too. I knew right away that they were good people. It was so easy and unproblematic. And it made me take notice of all the other people who interacted with me who didn’t use the capitalised N when they wrote down my name. Especially those who had known me for far longer. Why weren’t they using what had now become the ‘proper’ spelling, just because it was unconventional?
On the one hand, I sort of get it. At first you might think it’s a typo. Fat fingers messing up at a keyboard while writing an email in a rush. But such charitable interpretation only withstands a few mis-written ‘Dan’s. When you’ve received email after email from me and I’m always writing DaN this same exact way, the typo theory becomes untenable. To continue to reply to me and call me ‘Dan’ instead is to either assume I am totally incompetent at writing my own name or to intentionally ignore what I am clearly and repeatedly showing you is what I want to be called. It is to aggressively mislabel me and demand I conform with convention.
The more I noticed it, the more I began to take it as a sign of someone’s basic humanity whether they used the capitalised N or not. The best people didn’t have to ask. They just took the obvious cue, assigned me the dignity of assuming I knew what I was doing when I wrote my own name, and followed suit. Whenever I saw a capitalised N in my name on a letter or email, I just knew straight away that this was a good person I was talking to. A thinking person. A kind person. A person who got it. And the more I started thinking this way, the more it actually started to annoy me when people didn’t use the proper spelling. The more I took it as an affront.
Which made me realise that what I have been experiencing as people choose to ignore my self-identification as DaN and not Dan is a very minor, almost silly, version of the far more troubling experiences marginalised people have with the elimination of their identity when the self-expression in question is not so trivial. Say the proper use of a preferred gender pronoun, or the change of name which denotes their new gender identity over their old deadname? Or the change in surname which signifies escape from a bad marriage, or the change in title from Mrs to Ms? Perhaps a reclamation of an alternative name to replace one colonially imposed by oppressors such as Coleman and X? Even the correct use of accents on letters in names with non-English origins, whose absence when written completely changes the pronunciation of someone’s own self-identity.
The more I found myself annoyed, even upset, at the wilful refusal of some people to recognise me by the name I wished to call myself by, the more I realised how important it is that we do so. That if my utterly inconsequential change of capitalisation could not be easily noted and assimilated into the understanding of work colleagues, friends or family, then I could barely imagine what it would be for a far more important identity marker to be so similarly ignored.
Consider Coleman. To not strike that name through when referring to them is arguably to deny them their liberation from a legacy of slavery and to impose upon them an identity they find repulsive. To strike it through is also to act as a reminder of that slavery. To stimulate a conversation, and confront our colonial past, too often swept under the rug. Coleman maintains their three prior names because they were gifted to them by their mother, from love. It is an act of love to properly name someone the way they wish to be named, but an act of aggression to impose an unwanted name.
I think of all the students I have taught over the years who refuse to correct me when I mispronounce their name simply because they are so used to no-one caring or trying to correct themselves and get it right. The ones who have gone through every day of their school-life being called something they don’t really identify with. I think of my former housemate who, long before the current Prime Minister made the name Rishi a household name, used to be given name-badges at work that said ‘Richie’ because it was too much effort for the employer to get it right. How he still has in his possession a book, signed by the author, but made out to him as ‘Ernie’, because the writer wasn’t familiar with his real name.
It should never be too much to ask that we are referred to correctly. By the name(s) by which we identify ourselves. Even if that name seems strange to you. That it is, is just another reminder of the myriad ways in which being one’s authentic self is so difficult in a world so conditioned to enforce unquestioned norms and expectations upon anyone who dares disrupt or question them.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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