The Names We Carry

Notes from the Long Arc offers a candid, narrative-driven look at the unseen mechanics, inherited myths, and emerging possibilities within philanthropy and wealth work. Through stories, analysis, and movement-grounded observations, Sadé Dozan examines how resources flow—or fail to flow—through our social change ecosystems, and what that reveals about power, belonging, and democracy.

Naming has always been a site of power.

Across cultures, we name conditions. Colonized lands were renamed—mapped and claimed through the colonizers language and a framing that pervades the masses even today—in an attempt to erase what came before them. And still, original names remain in oral tradition, in land acknowledgements, in cultural memory, in Indigenous resistance movements that refuse to let them disappear. This is the power of naming.

Democracy often centers debates over naming, because naming is how societies decide what is real, what demands a response, and who belongs.

There are things we feel in our bones—not just through stories, but through naming. Through the body that carries those names forward. Through the ways we return to ourselves and our communities, even when the world attempts to rename us.

For me, I learned something early, not just about my name and the lineage it carries—but about how to move through spaces that are not built with people like me in mind.

I learned early that there is power in the act of naming. A name can help us see ourselves in relation to one another. It can reclaim a story, expose a condition that we have been taught to accept, or give people language for something they may have felt but could not yet articulate. And sometimes that shared language becomes the beginning of belonging, resistance, or an entire movement.

Here, I offer my personal reflections and analysis on the importance of leveraging the act of naming to fulfill the promise of democracy, belonging, and freedom. Because this is what this moment calls for.

The future of our movements—and our democracy—will be shaped by those willing to name what they know, challenge what has been handed down, and build something truer, even before the rest of the world has language for it.

Naming as Lineage

Some of my earliest childhood experiences were about whether people would learn to say my name: Sadé Nicolasa Dozan—it’s Sha-Day Nico-lah-sa Doh-zahn.

Sadé. Pronounced sha-day.

Four letters, an accent mark doing subtle but important work, and an invisible “h” doing its best to become visible.

From a young age, despite my saying it repeatedly to every teacher, every day it became something else.

Sadie.

Saday.

Sarah…

The future of our movements—and our democracy—will be shaped by those willing to name what they know, challenge what has been handed down, and build something truer, even before the rest of the world has language for it.

Sometimes, not even an attempt to pronounce it—just a pause. A hesitation. A question mark in someone’s eyes where recognition should have been. Sometimes, I didn’t correct it at all. I let “Sadie” sit in the room, even though she was not me. I let “Sarah” pass, even though it was a ridiculous attempt to call my name. I let the question marks remain unanswered. I was often so quiet. I hated having to fight for the correct pronunciation of my name every single time. I spent years defending, correcting, sometimes swallowing in silence.

For many of us, we learn early in life when to correct others and when to let it go. You learn to weigh the cost of being fully seen against the cost of constant correction. We often learn that sometimes, survival looks like letting something pass. Other times, it looks like insisting on being seen—being named correctly—no matter how uncomfortable it makes the room.

Nicolasa. Pronounced Nico-lah-sa.

My abuela’s name. A Taino woman, stout and firm. Born in Bayomón, one of the few strongholds in Puerto Rico that still holds its Indigenous name. That matters. Because retaining Indigenous naming, especially in places shaped by colonization, is never neutral or incidental—it’s reclamation.

Puerto Rico itself is a renamed place—four times in fact. Before it was Puerto Rico—or Porto Rico . . . or San Juan Bautista— it was Borikén.

And Borikén still lives—in the people. In language, in memory, in the taste of cassava on our tongues. People still call themselves Borinquen as a form of refusal. A refusal to forget, and to be fully renamed, a refusal to allow identity to be dictated solely by what is imposed.

And finally, there is…

Dozan. Pronounce Doh-zahn.

A name I chose. A blend of the last names my partner and I inherited—we formed a new name when we married. A creation of our own; a refusal to accept that inheritance must be static. We rename when inherited language no longer holds who we have become.

Over time, I’ve learned that naming is not just what we receive, it is about what we shape—what we choose to carry forward and the names we choose to lay down.

What we are able to collectively name through our shared experiences shapes what we can challenge, imagine, and ultimately change as we pursue our freedom.

When Language Is Strategy

In liberation movements, naming has been central.

The Civil Rights Movement did not start with fighting for rights—it began with naming conditions. Segregation. Discrimination. Suppression. Words that made something visible—and, therefore, actionable.

What our predecessors built in their fight for democracy was so effective that we are now watching those very same practices—organizing, storytelling, explicit naming—be weaponized in this moment. The very language constructed to protect against discrimination is being reinterpreted, repurposed, and redeployed to dismantle progress towards equity and the continued efforts to advance it.

Language itself is contested terrain.

And so, I think about what it means to not just inherit names, but to defend them. To expand, challenge, and create new ones when the old ones fail us.

At the center of any social sector mission, democracy must live. At its core, democracy requires something many of us—and our institutions—are still learning how to do: to move through discomfort.

A couple of years ago, I created a name for a pattern I could not unsee. During the most intense periods of 2020–2021, Black women were moving into leadership roles during compounded moments of crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic, a recession, intensifying coverage of racial injustice, severe natural disasters, and intense political volatility. These leaders, committed to channeling their energy to fulfill these new roles, were expected to stabilize, to repair, to lead through conditions others had not even dreamed solutions for—and then quickly blamed when those longstanding conditions did not immediately resolve. This act of blaming was not new, but the language we had did not fully hold it. And by 2024, I had named it explicitly.

The Ebony Edge.

An extension of the glass cliff, but sharper, more specific. Grounded in a moment when Black women were being pushed out of leadership in droves, once collective efforts toward racial equity across institutions stalled, and equity initiatives were demonized.

While the glass cliff describes the challenges women face when promoted during times of crisis, the Ebony Edge is about how these challenges are amplified for Black women, who are navigating leadership under the weight of additional expectations, racial bias, and fewer resources.

The Ebony Edge, drawn from lived experience and shaped by observations that resonated with shared identity and its history—and still I had to defend the naming.

I simply saw something. I offered language. And hundreds of people engaged—including Black women—not because the phenomenon was new, but because it had finally been named in a way that felt true.

And yet, some LinkedIn warriors explained to me that White leaders struggle too. That naming a specific group was unnecessary. That perhaps these women were simply, not qualified.

That is what naming does. It brings something into collective recognition. It shifts what we recognize . . . and, therefore, what we can change. But naming is also where the tension intensifies. Because once something is named, it can be challenged, distorted, dismissed, and sometimes rewritten. The same way a name, like mine, can be mispronounced.

The same way reality is debated instead of addressed—especially for Black women.

And this plays out in the social sector. We too are in the business of naming. What counts as impact, what counts as leadership, what counts as readiness.

The Inheritance of Legibility

We inherit a lot of things. I inherited my abuela’s name. My mother’s eyes. My father’s sharp sense of efficiency. And like so many of us, I inherited lessons from childhood that follow into adulthood—the lessons we reinforce and sometimes spend a lifetime unlearning.

For me, one of those lessons was learning to determine whether someone was worth the correction of my name. As part of my inner work, I regularly ask myself: What would it mean to stop editing myself—and others—before we are fully understood? I am still unlearning how “undeniable” my armor must be—to protect myself from being dismissed before I am seen and understood.

The more I work in philanthropy and share my story, the more I realize my story is not unique. Recently, my friend and colleague, Yolanda F. Johnson, and I laughed over our shared connection. She told me people have spent years trying to remove the “F.” from her name—a single letter. A leader in the sector, she founded Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy (WOC)® and has transformed how many of us understand leadership. The shift in the spelling of her name is small enough to seem insignificant to others, but important enough that she once refused to let a concert program be distributed because it omitted it. “Yolanda Johnson” was someone else. The “F.” wasn’t decoration—it distinguished her identity, her work, her brand.

Explicit articulation gives people language to recognize themselves—and one another. And that’s what naming does at its best. It transforms isolated experiences into shared understanding and shared understanding into collective action.

The more conversations I have like these, the more I realize that these simply aren’t stories we collect. We are watching people do something profoundly democratic. Collectively, we give language to conditions that had long existed without names to hold them. When we name our shared experiences, we aren’t inventing new realities; we’re making existing ones visible.

And that visibility creates opportunity for collective action.

There is a long history of this kind of work.

What we now call “giving circles” often began as small, informal groups—friends or community members pooling, sharing decisions, and resourcing what mattered to them long before the practice had a formal name or framework for it. Organizations like Asian Women Giving Circle and Latino Community Foundation later helped codify and scale what had already been happening quietly; alongside more recent efforts like Geaux Girl Giving, which are modernizing approaches to responsive, community-driven capital.

The model is clear: the naming came after the practice. The practice of gathering. The practice of listening. The practice of exchanging. The practice of doing. It simply made it easier to see—and, in turn, easier to strengthen.

The Conditions of Belonging

At the center of any social sector mission, democracy must live.

At its core, democracy requires something many of us—and our institutions—are still learning how to do: to move through discomfort.

Democracy is not about ease. It is about belonging.

If we are serious about belonging—if we are serious about building something that holds all of us—then we cannot continue to ask those most impacted to translate themselves into something we can easily name, into something more palatable for our institutions, before we respond. This is often what the social sector does, and collectively we must shift this behavior to create real change.

Democracy requires adjustment. Not just in language and strategic plans—but behavior. In how we move resources, share institutional power, define who is ready, and determine whose knowledge counts.

Belonging requires us to sit with what we do not immediately understand. To challenge our own assumptions in real time and to remain in relationship even when clarity is not instant.

Belonging enables democracy, which requires that we tell the truth about what we see—even when it disrupts how we have learned to understand ourselves.

I truly believe we are capable of that.

We can interrogate our biases and still build. We can sit in discomfort and still move resources. We can question what we have inherited and still reshape it.

We can hold multitudes—and here are some steps we can take to do so. 

1. Philanthropy, change how you define the work itself. For my philanthropy folks reading this, if you recognize the ways in which the field’s definitions of impact, readiness, and leadership have been inherited without interrogation—then the work is not just to fund differently.

We must ask ourselves: Who decided what “readiness” looks like? What would be needed to fund efforts that are already working—even if it does not yet fit our current frameworks or theories of change? What would it mean to name winning differently?

Democracy requires adjustment. Not just in language and strategic plans—but in behavior. In how we move resources, share institutional power, define who is ready, and determine whose knowledge counts.

2. Nonprofits, notice where you have been asked to shrink to be understood. For my nonprofit leaders, if you have learned to translate, to over-perform, to shape your work to fit what is fundable, then the work is not just to survive the system.

We must ask ourselves: What have I renamed to remain acceptable? Where have I prioritized legibility over truth? And what would it look like to name my work fully without these constraints—even if it risks misinterpretation before it is embraced?

For those who feel discomfort reading this—that is okay. If parts of this feel unclear, challenging, or difficult to immediately grasp—then the work is not to move past that feeling. It is to stay in it.

Resist the instinct to dismiss what is not immediately legible. Listen more closely when something feels difficult to name. Recognize that discomfort is not a signal to disengage; it is often a signal that something important is being revealed.

For all of us working in service of social good, we must ask ourselves the question: What have I avoided naming because it felt too risky?

Where can I disrupt the notions of legibility? 

Naming What Already Exists

Naming has always been one of our first acts of power.

Naming is not neutral. It shapes what we see and what we fund; it shapes who is trusted to lead.

The question now is whether we are willing to name the sector’s practices that must shift—clearly enough to understand, honestly enough to challenge them, and boldly enough to create change.

Before we can ever get to something that resembles liberation, we must be honest about what democracy actually requires of us. Not the version we often reference in frameworks that live on our shelves or on our websites, but the versions that live beyond the academic refrains—the version that demands something more of us.

Because this is what this moment is asking of us. Not just to name what we see . . . but to change in response to it.