When Roots aired in 1976, I kept hearing news stories about how families were naming their newborn boys Kunta and their children Kizzy, after the main male and female characters. However, 35 years later, I have never heard of anybody with either of those first names.
Was it just the reporters turning a few isolated incidents into something approaching Urban Legend status?
Did most of these people just decide to go by their middle names, or change their names outright, as they got older so nobody would make comments about their names?
Or am I missing something?
I’ve been teaching and coaching for 25 years, and not once have I encountered either of those names. At my school that’s not surprising, but I deal with lots of minority/majority schools as well.
My guess is that Kunta started going by his middle name about 15 seconds after he discovered one of the forbidden words in the Pit.
Well sure, but I’m thinking about the mothers who gave their beautiful new baby a special name, one indicative of a fight for freedom, only to have that baby end up in a correctional institute. It’s no less tragic than anyone else, but it just seems sadder somehow.
I work in a university registrar’s office, and I’ve never seen any Kuntas or Kizzys, but we do occasionally see the results of other suddenly popular names.
Around 1995 we started getting a bunch of Farrahs.
A few years later we started getting Fallons (from Dynasty – and wasn’t the character a complete monster? I never even watched the show and I know that!).
In the 00’s we got all the '80s-born Ashleys, Brittanys and Campbells (ABCs).
A few years ago we started getting Jasmine/Jazmin/Jazz (Jasmine was the princess in Aladdin).
Since I live in Australia, most people probably haven’t heard either name. I don’t know if Kunta is a real African name. If it is, some of the African immigrants would use it. Kizzy is a nickname for the Biblical name Keziah, though I’ve never met any Keziahs. (Keziah was one of Job’s daughters. Though the name of his oldest daughter, Jemima, is still used here sometimes. Aunt Jemima of pancake fame isn’t popular here, so nobody really thinks of her.)
I’ve noticed a spike in boys named Flynn in Australia. It’s because Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom named their son that.
Probably the most ridiculous spike is Indiana for girls. Yes, like the U.S. state. In 2010, it was #79 on the New South Wales top 100 (I live in NSW). I don’t get it - it sounds so American, and I’ve never even heard of any Americans named Indiana! Sure there’s Indiana Jones, but he’s not real, and he’s a man to boot. Indiana’s not like Virginia, Georgia, or Carolina, which were girls’ names first. I do know two girls named India, though. But that’s been used in England and other English-speaking countries since the Victorian era. And I’ve heard a few babies here being named Dakota, which I found out is the name of a Native American tribe in that part of the U.S., so it’s like calling your child French or Russian.
What’s wrong with those names? I think Tyrone might be because it’s a name associated with black people over in the U.S., but Robert and Mitchell?
Alex Haley claimed it was. Of course, there are a few shady thuings about the book (some of it was apparently lifted from elsewhere, and there have been accusations about its accuracy), but if “Kunta” as a name was ever an issue, nobody raised it (and I think they would have, if it were a questionable point).
Have any of these people actually BEEN to Indiana? Of course not, because Indiana isn’t the kind of place you go, unless you have family there. It’s the kind of place you drive through to get to somewhere else.
