Once Teased for Her Name, Marijuana Pepsi Turns Her Challenges into a PhD | Hacker News Reader

Once Teased for Her Name, Marijuana Pepsi Turns Her Challenges into a PhD

npr.org

20 pointsevo_928 comments

>"A lot of other people were thinking [my mom] was smoking marijuana and drinking Pepsi," she tells NPR. "In the black community, we're used to having names that are more cultural."

I'm not a native English speaker, so I might be in the wrong here, but is she using the word "cultural" in a different way than normally?

No, African Americans have a unique culture in America, and whites are notoriously judgmental about it.

The only reason you might find this "different" is if you don't consider Black culture to be legitimate.

We call this "racism".

>No, African Americans have a unique culture in America, and whites are notoriously judgmental about it. The only reason you might find this "different" is if you don't consider Black culture to be legitimate. We call this "racism".

...but he's not American?

It's quite a stretch to arrive at an honest question about the use of a word - by someone outside of your own country's culture - to it being equated to racism, merely because it's from a egocentric (American society) point of view.

The world is a lot bigger than just America.

Maybe tone down the racist accusations until you have some qualitative context to use it. Otherwise, if antagonising people that might otherwise be sympathetic to your plights is your end goal, then by all means, carry on.

As the subject of tfa says, "We all hear things that make us look twice."

Unfamiliarity != delegitimization

Your use of the term racism certainly isn’t lending a hand towards others gaining positive familiarity.

Marijuana is not in the top 1000 names for any year of birth beginning with 1960.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/

I interpreted it to be 'more specific to our culture'

Yes, “cultural” is an adjective and in typical English has a noun to which it refers. In this case the noun may be implied by some other part of the conversation not included in the article.

In Africa children often have names like "Beauty", "Princess", "Precious" (yes, Precious, that's a fairly common boys name)....

I actually love it.

It says what the parents feel about the child.

Hmm, still I think Marijuana Pepsi is a bit different than Beauty or Precious. It’s more like the name of this Sudanese general: Telephone Kuku http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?mot2811

Naming people after flowers is actually incredibly common if you think about it.

Or intoxicants.

"Brandy" is a name, why can't "Marijuana" be a name?

It's a common misconception that the name Brandy comes from the drink. All evidence shows the origin is just a feminine form of Brandon.

The lesson is you can overcome the legacy of your parents bad decisions.

So what's the takeaway here?

Literally the last paragraph:

"We can't always go through life-changing things to make other people happy ... and I had to learn that early on."

You could also spend 10 mins like my brother did and just change your name to something you like, maybe even name yourself after a celebrity, rather than the one assigned to you.

You shouldn't be forced to change your name just to be treated with dignity.

There are many things one is forced to do in life for instance sell most of your time for money so you are treated with dignity. A name is a small price to pay... most of your life spend doing someone else's bidding is something much worse, and yet most people do it.

But your name is something you have the ability to change once you're an adult (and even earlier in some cases if you insist on being called by a preferred name or nickname).

You don't have the ability to change how someone (everyone?) else reacts to an unusual name.

Literally the last paragraph:

"We can't always go through life-changing things to make other people happy ... and I had to learn that early on."

You shouldn't be forced to subject yourself to your parent's poor decisions.

Depending on where you live, changing your name can be much more of a hassle than this. My wife did it recently, and the whole process took several months and cost nearly $1000 all told. It involved filling out a bunch of paperwork, taking ads out in two legal newspapers, and a court date.

Could you elaborate on the ads? Those seem unnecessary.

Some jurisdictions have rules that you need to "publicly announce" important events, and newspaper ads are still considered "the" way of doing so.

Yep; this was in Pennsylvania, which is apparently one of the more onerous states.

The stated purpose is so that you can't change your name in order to (for example) escape debt. So the way to do this is to pay to put an announcement in a legal periodical. She had to do it in two separate places: one was mandated (The Legal Intelligencer, which sounds like something out of Harry Potter), and she had the choice of a few others, of which she picked the cheapest one.

The ads themselves didn't cost $1000, but the whole process (including changing the name on her passport, etc.) came close to that.

The takeaway is that if you judge people based entirely on how "normal" their name is, you're a bad person.

I'm not judging her, I'm judging her parents.

Naming your child after an illegal and, at the time, much less accepted narcotic and an amoral beverage conglomerate seems to be short sighted in the least. At least the man who named his son "Sue" knew it would give him trouble.

I am glad she has come out of it ahead, and I wish her all the best in the world. It is shameful that teachers acted the way they did.

Viral crap making the rounds.

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