What’s in a name?

As tens of millions of people worldwide have taken to the streets over the past six weeks to pronounce that Black lives matter, corporate America has been nudged into action. But instead of marching alongside protesters, it’s eyeing its own shelves.

Quaker Oats spoke up first, announcing in June that Aunt Jemima, the name and face of the brand’s syrup and pancake mix for more than 130 years, would be no more. The company said in a statement that “while work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough.” In quick succession, Grammy-winning country music group Lady Antebellum shed the “Antebellum” — and its glamorization of the pre-Civil War South — to become Lady A. The Dixie Chicks did the same two weeks later when it dropped “Dixie.”

Plantation Rum apologized for using the word “plantation” in its name and branding. Unilever agreed to stop equating light skin with beauty by removing the “fair” from South Asian skin-lightening cream Fair and Lovely. And early this month, the faculty of Virginia’s Washington and Lee University (WLU) voted to rename the 271-year-old institution to exclude its homage to Confederate general Robert E. Lee; trustees are now reviewing the name and campus symbols.

Perhaps most surprising of all is that, after years of efforts by Indigenous activists, the Washington Redskins football team on July 13 announced amid a review that it would drop the Redskins name and the logo, of an Indigenous chief