Becoming Jessie

On Changing My Name and Healing from White Supremacy

I’m still listening to this protest song several times a day. Partly, I have this song on repeat because every time I hear the line “white supremacy is finally on blast,” it heals me a little from the legacy I inherited. All of us who are white-raised in this culture get this unwanted gift of white supremacy, and I believe it’s necessary - indeed required, if we want to be fully alive human beings - to refuse that inheritance. And, I think real self-care means finding ways to heal from the damage that legacy has done to us. Long before listening to this protest song, I started to heal from white supremacy by changing my name. Here’s the story (an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir.)

"Why do you have this book, Aunt Marie?"  I hold up a copy of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, and wait for her response.

To her, I am Suzanne. My last name, Harper, is the same as hers (until she married), and the same as her brother, my grandfather. I read the inscription, “Geo. F. Harper,” and recognize his handwriting. I was 14 when he died. Ten years on, I am still glad to be rid of him and his nighttime visits to my bedroom. But here he is again, reanimated by this book.

“Well, he probably had a copy of that book because he was a member of that group,” Aunt Marie says.  

Visits to Aunt Marie’s house with the wrap-around porch and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves have been a magical place for me as a child, but since she lives in Missouri and we are in Texas, we don’t see her as often as I wish we could. At 91, she was still in good health but this trip had all the heightened awareness of something near the end. 

“A member of what group?” I ask  

“The Klan, honey. Your Granddad was a member of it.”  

I try to make sense of what she is saying. The Klan is not unfamiliar to me. I am in the middle of a PhD dissertation in sociology on the KKK and related groups. These groups follow the same script as Dixon’s novel. This is what I’ve come to regard as the central mythology of race in America: a rapacious black man, a virginal white woman, and the terror unleashed to defend the myth. Even so, I’m not prepared to find this artifact of white supremacist pop culture on my Aunt Marie’s bookshelf. It’s not like I’ve grown up around white hoods and robes. 

“Did you know this?” I ask my father, J.T., a dark-haired, oil and gas man from Houston.  He signs his name with a flourish, one long line to form the “J” and then three straight lines hashed across the long, looping tail to mark “T” and “H” for “J.T. Harper.” He even has his distinctive signature stitched into the cuffs of his dress shirts and into several pairs of his cowboy boots.

In contrast to my granddad’s sour demeanor, my father is genial and charming.  When I was little and had girlhood friends over, he would always kiss their hands upon greeting them, eliciting a giggle from each one. J.T. identifies as Native American, an idea confirmed for him by the somatic proof of his high cheekbones, skin that easily turns a deep brown in the sun, and a lack of chest hair. The emotional proof for him: it just feels true. His refrain, “what’s this we, white man?” is the punchline of a bad joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and it provides him a way to identify with Tonto, not the white man. My father is the one who told me about the Trail of Tears as if it were our ancestors who had been dispossessed of their land and sent on a death march. I believed him. In fact, until I started graduate school just a few years ago, I had thought I was part Native American. That is, until I read Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins, and learned that the “Cherokee grandmother” story is about as common among white people as moving to all-white neighborhoods. 

My father’s embrace of a Native American identity does not impede his casual anti-Black and anti-Jewish ideas. Regarding Black people, “I don’t have anything against Black people, I think everyone should own one,” he would say. He could not utter the name of the city where I now live without calling it “Jew York City.” He moved our family to an all-white school district after a judge issued a school desegregation order that would have bussed me to another school. Our fictive Native American family story is tied up with a deep and abiding white supremacy, a Gordian knot I am still trying to unravel.

“Sure, it was no big deal, just sort of a club he joined. They were trying to help people,” my father continued.  “Like if some woman’s husband was giving her a hard time,” he meant beating her, “they would go by and convince him to stop.”  I shudder at the violence his answer implied.  

In defending my granddad’s stint with the Klan, my father sounds exactly like the historical accounts from the 1920s I’d read in which white people tried to minimize the terror that they caused. But to hear these words now coming from my father feels like a betrayal. I don’t know what I expected. Shame, maybe. A hint of chagrin, at least. I did not expect his blithe dismissal. I also cannot understand how my father, who knew about my research, has failed to mention this to me at all. Perhaps he really didn’t see how the two were related but I couldn’t see anything else. My father might not have felt any shame, but I do. Knowing that my granddad had been in the Klan, this group I was studying as if from outside, I now feel personally implicated in that violent history.

“Oh, that’s just what people did then,” Aunt Marie gives half a grin, as if to shrug off their hatred of Black people, of Jews, of Catholics like her and queers like me.  

I know that the sins of the father, in this case the grandfather, are not the sins of the granddaughter. I understand well the argument for leaving the past behind, yet I cannot do this, leave the past behind. And I cannot shake my desire to step outside this family history.  The shock of this revelation stays with me. While I had begun to doubt the Native American fan-fiction version of our family story, until I slid The Clansman off of Aunt Marie’s shelf I had never once heard a whisper of this truer, but harder to hear, version of us.

After my visit to Aunt Marie’s in the early 1990s, I returned to Austin to finish my PhD, and my father went back to what was left of his oil and gas business in the post-boom economy of Houston. For long months, I try to sit with the discovery from her bookshelf and not let it bother me, but it does.

My last name becomes a constant, clanging noise in my head, always distracting me, reminding me of my granddad. He had been an incubus when I was a little girl, a menacing presence I tried to avoid. Was there no escaping him after all? It feels as though my grandfather’s affiliation makes me a hypocrite and a fraud, or at the very least, an unreliable critic of white supremacy. When I returned to Aunt Marie’s for her funeral, the year of my post-doc in Cincinnati, I took that copy of The Clansman with me. 

In Cincinnati, with time and space to reflect, Dixon’s novel sits on my bookshelf, humming with the awareness of my granddad’s legacy and mine. The more time I logged researching white supremacist publications, the more I began to see how their words resonate with those of mainstream politicians and popular culture. In fact, the writers of these publications sound a lot like my own family. I am at the University of Cincinnati to study with Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought, and I live in fear that she will discover this truth of my family history and I will lose my post-doc. As I read the latest theory books alongside Collins and our ad hoc reading group, I do the work of reshaping the dissertation into a book. I secure a contract with a reputable academic press, eventually get an offer for one of those terrible, exploitative, one-year academic jobs in south Florida, and I keep any mention of my personal connection to this work quiet. Half-way through my year in Florida, I land an academic job just outside New York City, at a small, private, liberal arts college. When I tell my advisor at the University of Texas about the job, he says, “Never heard of it.”

As the book’s publication and the move to New York draws nearer, I stew in the shame I feel about my family’s Klan connection. After years spent reading extremist newsletters, my dreams morph into nightmares of hooded men on horseback holding torches aloft while I hide in marshy ditches to evade them. My waking nightmare was that someone would see me as one of those Night Riders, rather than their adversary. By bearing my grandfather’s last name, I feel as if I am one of those torch-bearers.

It’s during this time when I’m stewing in shame that I discover an essay in a popular magazine by Carol Ascher about her process of choosing a name for herself as a feminist, as a Jewish woman, and as a writer. I read her essay over and over. Although I was familiar with the feminist critique of patriarchal naming conventions, and the history of Jewish-sounding last names being washed out by assimilation, until I read her essay, I have never thought about how choosing a different name for myself might give me the power to write. As she describes it: “One thing I felt sure of: with my own name, I would give more energy and courage to my writing…” Reading her words, I realize that this is what I want more than anything, to give more energy and courage to my writing. I began to see my given name as a millstone. 

It isn’t only my (his) last name that bothers me. My given name means ‘lily,’ the symbol of ‘white womanhood’ in the south, the mythological foundation for lynching. The more I think about both my names – Suzanne, white womanhood, and Harper, the Klan granddaddy and my father’s racism and lies about being Native American – the more I wanted to peel those names off of me, like a layer of burned skin.   

I want a new name, but I don’t want to compound my karmic debt by lifting one, whole cloth, from a different culture.  If I took an African name (Nkechi Amare Diallo) or a Jewish one (Carol Ascher), it would have been a kind of theft. And it would mean trading one kind of lie for another.  So I start compiling names of white women who have resisted racism. It is a very fucking short list. There were abolitionists like Anna and Angelina Grimke, and Lucretia Mott. During the civil rights movement there were a handful, such as Anne Braden, Viola Liuzzo and Lillian Smith.  And, there were living examples: Mab Segrest, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Dorothy Allison. These women, all dykes just a decade or two older than me, who had understood their oppression as lesbians as connected to the destructiveness of inherited white power.  Nine righteous white women in four hundred years of U.S. history, and none of those names suit me. 

Then, I remember the white woman from Texas who had organized against lynching: Jessie Daniel Ames. A fellow early November Scorpio, born in Palestine, Texas, she founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL), an organization I’d become fascinated by when doing my master’s thesis on lynching. It was why I wanted to do a dissertation on the Klan in the first place; I’d wanted to understand how that corrupt ideology (Black male rapist-virginal white woman), was getting retold in the contemporary U.S. For me, Ames was the closest exemplar I could find, a white woman who had stood up to white supremacy. 

I made the decision to take her name, or at least the first part of it: Jessie Daniels (I’d never had a middle name and didn’t see the need for one), and thought it fit me, or my idea of who I wanted to be.

Moving to New York offered me a series of fresh beginnings that made it easier to change my name. I told my new employer at the liberal arts college, then I called the book publisher and told them to update the author’s name on this book I was still finishing. In the days and weeks that followed, I filed a notice with a local paper, got a court date to make it official and began introducing myself as Jessie. I sent handwritten notes to a few friends and colleagues in other places. Some of my white friends were puzzled or angry. Most of my Black and Jewish friends, who came from traditions where name changes were tied to politics, were more blasé.   

After my year spent studying with Collins, I understood her concept of “positionality.” This is simply the idea that objective social science is never possible because every researcher comes from a specific social position that shapes their relationship to the thing being studied. The way to handle this as a researcher is to simply to state clearly at the outset one’s positionality, that is, one’s relationship to the thing being studied. (Now, positionality statements have become commonplace - even in engineering - but they still haven’t caught on in most writing about the far right, but I digress.)

Taking my clues from Collins, I decided that the best way to avoid future humiliation about my Klan granddaddy was to declare my positionality. Of course, this meant telling family secrets, but I was (perhaps naively) unafraid. So, I found a way to situate myself in relation to the work I was doing — critical of white supremacy —- and to my family’s legacy of white supremacy. And, I didn’t skip over the part about the fact that he bothered me as a child. Several decades in to studying the far right, I’ve noticed a pattern where these (white supremacy and abuse of children) consistently overlap. For me, the overlap of these in my personal history spoke to the kind of entitlement at the heart of white supremacy and settler colonialism: I feel entitled to this land, to this child’s body, to gratify my own desires no matter who is harmed. This, then, is the corrosive heart of what we’ve inherited when we inherit white supremacy. And it is my deep desire - my need, really - to step out of this lineage, to interrupt this intergenerational curse, that prompted me to change my name. 

Changing my name was an act of civil disobedience against my family and an unwanted birthright.  Becoming Jessie Daniels made me feel that I am in alignment, with my purpose in the world, with the writing I do now and aspire to do in the future. Changing my name helped me to see beyond the limitations of my ancestors, the world they created, and the one they imagined for me. And, changing my name helped me to see my liberation from white supremacy as always tied to the liberation of the collective, the liberation of all of us.

So, then let me ask you, dear reader: what are you doing to heal from the legacy of white supremacy you’ve inherited?