A mother in Tennessee is allowing her teenage daughter to change her name, Dixie, after she was bullied for it.
Danielle Remp made a TikTok video in which she announced she was letting her 16-year-old change her name after other teens targeted her because of it, Today reported Wednesday.
In her TikTok post, Remp stated “My 16y/o daughter hates her name because she gets made fun of for it. She asked me if we could change her name. I said yes no questions asked!”
@barefooted_beauty89 I’ll always stand by her side no matter what #standbyyourkid #doitforthem #foryou #fyp #stopbullying
The teenager now prefers to be called Skye, which she said was the name her mother originally wanted to give her when she was born, but her father chose Dixie. The teenager said she has been bullied with names such as “Dixie Dust” or “Dixie Normous” and other monikers with crude meanings. In addition, her mother claimed those teens accused her of racism because of the name’s link to the Civil War-era South.
According to History.com, musician and performer Daniel Decatur Emmett wrote the minstrel song known as “Dixie” in 1859. It became a huge hit, and President Abraham Lincoln deemed it “one of the best tunes I have ever heard.”
The website said the tune “later became the de facto national anthem of the Confederacy during the Civil War” and eventually became a nickname for the South. The site then explained one of several theories on how it originated:
The most straightforward explanation for the South-Dixie connection concerns the Mason and Dixon Line, a boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that was drawn in 1767 by English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The line was originally crafted to settle a border dispute between the two colonies, but it later became an informal demarcation point between the southern slave states and the free states to the north. With this in mind, it’s likely that “Dixie” and “Dixieland” first emerged as slang terms to refer to the territory south of Jeremiah Dixon’s boundary line.
Remp is now working to save the $200 needed to cover the legal fees for her daughter’s name change. Her daughter said, “Skye feels like me. It’s who I am, and it makes me feel happy to go by that name.”
It is important to note that bullying can have detrimental effects on a person’s well-being. The stopbullying.gov website defines it as “unwanted, aggressive behavior among school aged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance.”
“Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose,” the site continued.
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