Have You Looked Up Some Baby Names Today?

By Shannon Melero | June 9, 2020 | 7:30pm

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Have You Looked Up Some Baby Names Today?

Babynames.com is a fun website I like to visit several times a week to look up names for the imaginary baby I’ve been saying I’ll have next year for the last four years. But apparently, the website that only posts information about baby names is branching out to other things, like reminding users that names are attached to real human people, specifically murdered black people. In a show of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, the website posted on its homepage a graphic listing names of black people who have been killed by cops acting within a larger system of racist violence. The top of the list reads, “Each one of these names was somebody’s baby.”

“The statement we’re making is that these are not just names on a page, but loved ones,” a representative from babynames.com told Jezebel in an email. The graphic was inspired by a similar one shared by NPR, the representative said, which NPR described as a “non-comprehensive list of deaths at the hands of police in the U.S. since Eric Garner’s death in July 2014.” Babynames.com pinned a tweet to their Twitter account directing users to donate to Black Lives Matter via ActBlue, and the representative told Jezebel the site is “planning on making a donation to BLM in honor of those names.”