Issa Rae Is Taking the Lead

The day before I meet up with Issa Rae, a thing happens. Rae is in Brooklyn, New York, at CultureCon, a conference created to engage people of color across culture and business. She was invited as one of the keynote speakers to discuss her efforts in diverse storytelling. Rae is sitting on stage in white ankle boots and a bomber jacket when the interviewer pronounces Rae’s name incorrectly, referring to her as “Ih-suh.” (It’s “Ee-suh,” but you knew that, right?) The packed crowd immediately corrects the moderator’s mistake, eventually breaking out into a cheer: Issa! Issa! Issa! In a video that has since made its rounds on the internet, Rae can be seen breaking out in a giant grin as the room gets louder.

The fumbling of her name has happened before, as it’s happened to many other Black women: Zendaya, Rihanna, Kamala. As Rae once said in a 2016 interview with the Chicago Tribune, “That’s the one I hate the most. ‘Eye-suh’ I can deal with, but ‘Ih-suh’ sounds incomplete, like it should Mel-issa. Like you think my name is incomplete.” 

Jo-Issa Rae Diop, her full name, was born to a Senegalese father and American mother with Louisiana roots. The family moved from Los Angeles to Senegal, then back to Los Angeles by way of Maryland, all before Rae was a teen. She chronicles the ups and downs of the moves—including the severity of people mispronouncing her name—in her 2016 book The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. The introduction explains how Jo-Issa became Issa Rae after her aunt Rae Hayward, a visual artist and activist to whom she was close, passed away in 2008. Rae started to include her middle name on social media as a way to pay homage to her, when a friend unexpectedly put Issa and Rae together. It just clicked. It also just seemed simpler to say. “It’s so funny because I went by Issa Rae so that my name would be easiest,” she says.