You can't have a young black women named Martha!
Yes, the Doctor Who fandom has done it again - and it isn't the shippers, this time around.

What it is however, is an extremely tl;dr debate about the suitability or lack thereof of the name "Martha" for a young black women.


So, just last night it was officially announced that to replace the departing Billie Piper, the new companion would be played by Freema Agyeman, and would be named Martha Jones.

And, as is fairly obvious, she's black.

Naturally, everyone in fandom is all over this news. And thus the wanking begins.

Over at poor calapine's LJ, secretive_bus and redstarrobot get very tl;dr about whether, you know, black women can be called Martha. And if saying they can't is racist.

secretive_bus: Martha just isn't the sort of name I'd associate with the young, black actress playing the character! It'd be like calling a really white guy "Sanjeev".

redstarrobot: Um, with that analogy, are you saying that Martha's not an ethnically-appropriate name for a black woman? What should black women be called, then? Only very African things?

Wow, that was an offensive analogy.

secretive_bus: Knowing the popular distinctions between cultures isn't offensive or racist. The fact that "Martha" is also an extremely old fashioned British name that has passed almost into archaism also backs up the point - there would have been few black people in Britian at the time that it was popular.

redstarrobot: Your analogy deals entirely with race and cultural appropriation, and to say that the British need to worry about cultural appropriation from racial minorities inside Britain is... disturbing.

secretive_bus: To be honest, I'd say that the name "Martha" probably wouldn't "suit" a white girl of the same age, simply due to its archaism. I've never known anybody called Martha.

Because if he doesn't know about it, of course it doesn't exist.

And it just goes on and on...

Watch as secretive_bus tries to pin the blame on everyone else!

secretive_bus: But instead you immediately deemed it offensive, and then disturbing. This cat and mouse about history and historical involvement is going nowhere at all as it seems to be based on your overreaction to my poor example of a comparison.
...
Go on, type in "Martha" into a Google image search; aside from Martha Reeves, almost every picture that comes up is of a white person. Martha appears to be a name most likely to be given to a white person, if used at all.

Marvel as redstarrobot manages to pwn completely at googling!

redstarrobot: Type "Martha" and, for instance, "Jamaica", and you learn that Jamaica has a major river called Martha Brae, named after a non-white native woman, and there's a major Carribean port of Santa Martha in Aruba, making it very likely that the religious groups established in the area promoted the name a lot....so you also get Dr. Martha Kahirimbanyi, an AIDS specialist from Uganda; Martha Drummer, an Angolan missionary (although she's historical, not current); Dr. Martha Moss, an American mathematician...

And for the grand finale, secretive_bus prostrates himself humbly because he is so weak and insignificant and foolish, and yet still manages to pin the blame for the debate on someone else:

secretive_bus: I bow wholeheartedly to your superior research and am glad that you have the time and inclination to compile this (probably not even exhaustive) list of names and occupations to thwart my generic and totally ignorant viewpoint that took a few seconds to type. Of course, if you'd simply said "Actually, quite a few black women are called Martha," several hours ago, right at the beginning of all this - that one simple sentence, in fact, without the examples - I would have believed you.
...
I'll be honest here: you scare me. This is the strangest argument I've ever had with somebody and I'm bailing out before I inadvertantly make an offensive remark about half of the world's major religions. Doubtless you think I'm either socially-inept or a bigot by now (after this post you almost certainly will) but I'm past caring.


With thanks to anne_noonlight for pointing this out to me, and finding some good quotes.