I really do hate it when I'm proven right on just this very issue. Kudos to Sergio of the Bloodsport blog (as well as his gig with Ebony/Jet Online) for emailing yours truly this story. I have stated on numerous occasions, it is my estimation that many African-American parents (but this can be applied to non-Blacks as well) do their children a grave disservice when they give their offspring dismissive or questionable names. Actually, I narrowed the name issue to what I coined as ghettocentric, pseudo African monikers. You know the type-Trykeisha or Rayquan-names that one will undoubtedly see on a police blotter in a number of urban centers. I noticed this pattern and yet for the sake of political correctness, a discerning observer can expect to receive a verbal beatdown from the Black progressive thought police for uttering such a critique. Enter a woman named Marijuana. And mind you, this woman's tale is the exception and not the rule. Read about her story and then I'll leave it up to our Afronerd commenters to decide for themselves.....is it worth it to keep such a foolish name?
Excerpt courtesy of JS Online:
Police years ago pulled over a young woman who rushed through an amber traffic light. "I'm about to arrest this person right now," the irritated officer radioed to a dispatcher. "She's telling me her name is Marijuana Pepsi Jackson."
It's the truth. Marijuana and Pepsi are her legal first and middle names, and the Beloit woman embraces them as a symbol of her struggle to succeed and to help other children overcome obstacles.
No Mary or Mary Jane or Mary Wanda for her. It's Marijuana, thank you, she's told bosses, co-workers and friends over the years, and even wore it on nametags at work.
This tall, striking, self-assured, motorcycle-riding woman is a schoolteacher with a master's degree in higher education administration. Soon, she'll start work on her doctorate.
All of her achievement came despite that smoky, carbonated name. And partly because of it. No one named Marijuana Pepsi gets lost in the crowd.
"Everybody I meet says this: You're nothing like I thought you'd be," she told me when we sat down for an interview in Beloit last week.
These days she goes by Marijuana Sawyer, the surname of her ex-husband from Georgia, where she spent 10 years before returning to Beloit in 2008 to fulfill a promise to make a difference in her hometown. She has a 6-year-old son named, mercifully, Isaac.
Sawyer's mother, Maggie Johnson, picked her name. Her father objected but lost the argument. To this day, a lot of family members and best buds call her Pepsi.
"She said that she knew when I was born that you could take this name and go around the world with it. At the time as a child, I'm thinking yeah, right. You named my older sister Kimberly. You named my younger sister Robin," Sawyer said.
I've tried several times over the years to find Marijuana - the person, that is. When I was a cub reporter at the Beloit Daily News in the early 1980s, there was a rumor around town about an elementary school girl named Marijuana Pepsi Jackson or maybe Jones.
Some people swore that pot and Pepsi were her mother's two favorite things. Others claimed a mix of both coursed through her bloodstream when the child was conceived or born or both. You'll find chatter about this on the Internet.
For more Marijuana (ahem....I couldn't resist the pun), click on the link below:
A woman named Marijuana plays it straight - and wins
And in homage to the above story, let's take a stroll down memory lane:
I abhor drugs but this was the jam. Rick James is another one that didn't get his Rock cred either. Funny how both D'Angelo and RJ professed their love for canibus in the guise of the female form.
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