Glen Beck                     Barack Obama

Glen Beck – that champion of American idealism and identity – has spoken again.  This time the “red meat” to his base of lap dog conspiracy theorists has to do with President Obama’s name and just why he changed from the much more acceptable “Barry” to the decidedly “un-American” Barack.  “He chose to use the name Barack for a reason,” Beck said on his radio show,  “not (to identify) with America.”  Why?

Because in Glen Beck’s small, monolithic, homogeneous world it’s all part of a theory linking the president to “radical” elements including his Kenyan born father and all kinds of “other” political, religious and social contacts outside of the “American mainstream.”  Certainly begs the question of just what is in a name and who decides how American or un-American it is?

Name changing has a lot to do with this country’s colonial and genocidal past.  Millions of Africans were kidnapped  from their homes, held in European owned “slave castles” and just before they passed through the “door of no return,” they were baptized – given a “Christian” name as they were led to slave ships called “Grace” and “Jesus.”

In one of the most aggressive policies of assimilation ever conceived, 100,000 Indians were taken from parents on reservations, driven to boarding schools from the 1870’s to the 1960’s.  And  part of the process was the gift of a “mainstream” American name and often Christian baptism and instruction in the faith.  The moral and philosophical underpinnings for all this was to “civilize” savages, part of “white man’s burden,” “manifest destiny.”

So what happens when you change a name in this context?  You strip a person of their identity, their connection with culture and history, their value as a person and their sense of self.  You marginalize and diminish their ethnicity by placing yourself as the standard of truth, beauty, power and control, placing people of color in a matrix of assimilation complete with self hatred and under achievement.  You see Mr. Beck, “the world in which you live is just one model of reality.  Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you.  They are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” (Wade Davis)

In your profound, deeply rooted, fear driven ignorance, sir, you rarely listen to “others,” but maybe it’s time to let the president speak for himself.  He actually addressed the name change in a Newsweek interview recorded during the campaign.

It was not he said “some (racial) assertion of my African roots …  It was much more that I was coming of age, comfortable with the fact that I was different and that I did not need to try to fit in  – in a certain way.”  In fact it was this comfort in his own skin that first drew me to Barack Obama in addition to intelligence, intellectual curiosity and empathy.

What’s in a name?  The Tea Baggers, the Birthers, Deathers and Schoolers all think they know and they’ll listen to anyone  – Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin – to fear their way through a perpetual cycle of poison and venality.  What about the rest of us?  Aren’t we all “others,” a nation of immigrants and aren’t we a whole lot stronger when we all come to terms with that?