What’s in a name? Why Ketanji Brown Jackson’s matters so much

By Robyn Autry, chair of the Sociology Department at Wesleyan University

The addition of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court doesn’t alter the body’s conservative majority as the court opens its new term on Monday. But she does change the court’s makeup in fundamental ways that go beyond ideology.

That transformation begins with the first name she bears and now adds to the high court’s pantheon. While she is the third Black person to become a justice, she is the first Black woman and the only one to have an African name. The significance of that lone African name being listed among the 115 others since the court’s inception cannot be understated. It represents a powerful twist in the history still unfolding since the first enslaved Angolans arrived on the coast of Virginia in 1619.  

During Jackon’s confirmation hearings, we heard accounts of her career as a federal judge and public defender, her judicial track record and philosophy. But we also heard more personal stories from Jackson about her family, including her parents, who she said gave her an African name to demonstrate their pride and hope in who she might become. Elsewhere, she recounted that an aunt who was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa suggested Ketanji Onyika, telling her parents it meant “lovely one.” 

Jackson was born in 1970, and the name she was given by her parents was part of a trend in the Civil Rights era in which African Americans chose ethnic names as a mark of racial pride and self-determination. Along with wearing one’s hair in braids, Afros or other “natural” styles and donning African garb, it was an especially loud way to celebrate one’s African heritage and challenge respectability politics dictating how Black people should present themselves, including the names they go by.

Learn why names are significant.

Last names also tell a person’s history.

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