I was at the eye doctor last week. As he leaned in to get a closer look at my left eye (the worse one), he asked the question so many ask but later regret the origin of my last name.

I looked at Dr. Koh dead in the eye or as well as I could given the circumstances and optometric apparatus, and replied, “Oh, it’s a slave name.”

Really it’s always a conversation ender.

I had a similar conversation a few months ago when one of Adam’s high school friends asked the same question.

Are these folks kidding? Have we so quickly forgotten our American history? My family didn’t come over on a lovely boat, sail into Ellis Island, and melt into the American pot.

Rather my history is the middle passage, hundreds of years of slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, and of course, continued oppression.

Yes, my last name is famous and memorable but not because my family did anything more memorable than work hard for no pay but because the family that owned mine and exploited free labor purchased land that continued the United States’ expansion.

Time and again I’ve considered changing my last name but I could never find a suitable alternative. I considered names from my mother’s family, Cobb, Franklin names from my father’s family like Austin . . . but they’re all names of prominent southern slaveholders. It’s not exactly a moniker I want to carry.

X, as in Malcolm was short, taken, and well, later rejected for El- Shabazz.

In a culture that values last name as an indication of heritage, culture, or history I have plenty in abundance. It s a history however that many would like to forget or just don t want to remember. I may not like my last name but writing it almost every day lets me not forget mytrue history in this country of ours.