What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha

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What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha - CNN

When you're a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman named LaKiesha, life can get complicated.

Strangers burst out laughing when you tell them your name. Puzzled white people ask what your parents were thinking. Black people wonder if you're trying to play a bad joke.

It can be exhausting constantly explaining yourself to white people, even though you're white.
"At least one to three times a week, someone is saying something about my name," says LaKiesha Francis, a 28-year-old bartender who lives in a small town in western Ohio. "It kind of gets old."


But hardly any attention is paid to people like Francis and other white folks with distinctively black names.

They are those rare white people who can credibly say, "I'll be black for a minute." Francis says she's glimpsed racial stereotyping, what it's like to face discrimination and even a degree of acceptance from black people that she may have otherwise never known.

What she has discovered is that the names of Americans are as segregated as many of their lives. There are names that seem traditionally reserved for whites only, such as Molly, Tanner and Connor. And names favored by black parents, such as Aliyah, DeShawn and Kiara. Add into that mix names that are traditionally Asian, Latino or, say, Muslim.

But when you move through life with a name that violates those racial and ethnic boundaries, Francis has found that people will often treat you as an imposter.

"The first thing they'll say is, 'That's not your name,' or, 'That's not a name that suits you,'" she says. "If I go to a bar, they'll say, 'That's not your name. Let me see your ID.'"

Francis says she has experienced this bias firsthand.
"There's been more than one time that I've been very qualified for a job and I didn't even get a callback, and I think it had to do with my name," she says.
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Francis had to learn how to not apologize for her name as well. She says she didn't become aware of its significance until she got married and moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, for a while with her husband Jarrett.

She began waiting tables at a Ruby Tuesday in the city, which has a sizable black population.
That's when she started getting double takes at the mention of her first name. Sometimes the reactions stung.

Once when she approached a table of black women and told them her name, they looked at her in disbelief.
"They took their menus and put them in front of their faces and started laughing," she says. "They were laughing at me saying, 'She's not one of us.' ''
Francis says she stepped away to compose herself before returning to take the women's order.
"I was kind of angry because I felt like they were making fun of me, like I was trying to be part of their group," she said. "And I wasn't."

The constant explaining became so much that Francis actually stopped telling customers her name unless they asked.

"I was joking with my co-worker one day and said, 'I'm just going to tell them my name is Emily so I can avoid all of this,' '' she says.

Yet in odd ways, the name allowed her to briefly step outside her whiteness. Some of her black co-workers even adopted her as one of their own.

They start giving her "dap," the elaborate handshake rituals that some blacks use with one another to signal solidarity.

:snoop:

"I would not know what I was doing at all, but I would just go along with whatever they were doing," she says.

They also defended her from rude customers as if she was the one being racially profiled.

"They would say, 'She's one of us.' Or, 'You don't talk to her like that. She's one of us.' They were awesome. They were so nice."

Despite the strange looks and tiresome comments, Francis has no regrets about her name. And she and her husband now have two kids, both with nontraditional names. Their son is Jace, and their daughter, Serenity.
Francis has learned to live with being black for a minute, and she has no plans to change.

"No, not ever," she says. " I love my name. I know it's different. It would be so strange for someone to call me something different."
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Kiyoshi-Dono

Kiyoshi-Dono

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Petty Vandross.. fukk Yall
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