Lisa Dumelow.
My children are multi-cultural (their father was a refugee from Cuba). When our only son was born, his father wanted to name him after himself and his father – Remberto. But I knew that although the girls may not be affected by a Latina name, my son would be judged and negative assumptions would be made (he was born in ’92 and the Marial boatlift was in the recent past – not to mention “Scarface” which made people assume all Cubans were drug dealers). Even though his last name was Hispanic, we gave him an Anglo Saxon first name, “Christopher” to “counteract” the assumptions that would be made if both his first and last name indicated his Latin ethnicity. He ended up being much lighter skinned then his three sisters and in the end, no one believed he was anything other than “white”. But it always made me sad to have to worry about how he would be perceived in life just because of a name.
