Damn, BabyNames.com made a hell of a Black Lives Matter statement
Brands are not your friends. Sassy tweets from fast food chains might make it seem otherwise, but they are not. They exist to make money; when they take a stand, it’s often at least in part to raise their bottom line and/or profile. On the other hand, brands (and corporations) are made up of people, and sometimes people are good. So even as we maintain our skepticism, we have no problem reveling in British tea companies matter-of-factly dunking on conservative blowhards, or even more surprisingly, a baby names website finding a way to use its very specific function to make a deeply affecting statement. We could not possibly put it better than The Verge’s Bijan Stephen did on Twitter: “ok baby names dot com go off.”
It’s incredibly simple, which is what makes it so affecting. The site has turned over a significant portion of its homepage to a list of dozens of names (that’s the whole BabyNames.com raison d’etre, after all). Each of those names belongs to a Black American who was murdered, either at the hands of law enforcement or a civilian. Each of them, the site notes, “was somebody’s baby.”
It’s a powerful statement—powerful enough that the response appears to have occasionally crashed the site—but equally as impressive is the way in which the brand’s social media team has responded to feedback.