Name Discrimination: Who thinks this is OK?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Answering your question, it’s not okay. Discrimination of any sort is not okay. But let’s face it. We all do it. And before I hear it…YES YOU DO. It can be based on so many different things. Race, Sex, Religion, Nationality, Sexual Preference, Transgender, names, clothes people wear, weight, etc…

I do. Sadly, I do. I make snap judgements about many different things. But it’s what we do with the initial thought that defines us. I’m not a racist, but I am an additudist. If you’re dressed in all baggy clothes and talk like you have a bag of marbles in your mouth you’re instantly pegged as a knucklehead. And pretty much not much will change my opinion. Yes, I assume that anyone with an apostrophe in their name is black. I make the assumption because that is what I am conditioned to. It doesn’t make racist. And it doesn’t mean I assume ignorance with the name.

22

[QUOTE=Manda JO]
I couldn’t agree more. Though I think it’s as much about class as about race–middle-class African American names don’t seem to have the same stigma.
[/QUOTE]

Can you give some examples of middle class black names? I can’t think of any name that would make me think “black, but middle class” instead of just “black”.

Paragod22510, we all make snap judgements based on the things you’ve listed, but that’s not the same as discrimination.

There were people in the other thread saying that they wouldn’t even bother calling D’Brickshaw in for an interview. That’s a lot different than thinking “who in their right mind would name a child D’Brickshaw?”, then giving him the same chance to prove himself that you’d give to Dennis.

23

[QUOTE=monstro]

A very close person to me has an unusual first name and has “Leshawn” as their middle name. You might assume such a person is uneducated, poor, inarticulate, and welfare-leeching, but they’re actually a doctor, making a considerable amount of money, and is doing quite well for herself all around. It angers me that people think she’s pitiable simply because her name is too “black”, as if blackness is a bad thing to be. It actually angers me a lot.

[/QUOTE]

The only thing I assume when I see someone named LeShawn is that their mother didn’t care who assumed they were black when reading their name. LeShawn may be well educated, wealthy, bright and an all around great guy. LeShawn may even be WHITE.

I find it to be naive to not care who assumes your kid is black based off their name. Black is not a pitiable condition - being identified as a member of a group that has faced historical systemic discrimination based on your name - without anyone getting the chance to meet you and make a judgement is a pitiable condition.

24

[QUOTE=Omega Glory]
Can you give some examples of middle class black names? I can’t think of any name that would make me think “black, but middle class” instead of just “black”.
[/quote]

“Temika” and “Keisha” are so common in the black community that I think “middle class” when I hear them.

Names of true African origin–like “Aisha”, “Bakari”, and “Kimani”–always ping middle-class to me, maybe even more so than names of Arabic origin like “Jemilla”, “Latifa”, “Jamal”, “Khalil”, and “Omar”.

Then there pre-existing names of European origin that are simply common among blacks, like “Darnell”, “Tyrone”, “Jerome”, “Charmaine”, “Malcolm”, and “Yvonne”.

My coworker(white) said that when she found out our boss was named “Darryl”, she automatically figured he was black. I’ve met a number of “Darryls”, all of them black, so I guess she wasn’t being too crazy. And she did guess correctly.

25

[QUOTE=TWDuke]
I also did not mock any foreigners for their weird names.* The examples I used were those of (as far as I know) native-born Americans. And since you implied that my post was racist, you should realize that of the three specific examples I gave, one person is white, another is Asian, and another is someone whose ethnicity I don’t know.
[/QUOTE]

I’m sorry, I need to apologize because in responding to your post, I was using the “generic” you and really not singling you out in particular. I don’t think you’re racist and your reply was very reasonable but this topic always gets me a little heated.*

But I really do think this little topic is a sneaky little hidden bit of racism most people have never thought about. I know many people who would be horrified to be considered racist who still think it’s OK to mock non-traditional African-American names. New immigrants to this county used to think they had to pick an American name to fit in. Now we’re at a point where a foreign isn’t automatically something to mock; I’d like us to reach that point with these names as well.

To reply to the people that think the parents are morons for handicapping their children, they’re not. They’re giving their children names they think are pretty and in accordance with their culture. Which is different from yours. I don’t see why Tondra should have to change her name if she wants to get an MBA and an investment banking job. Plus, this whole traditional name thing is a actually fairly recent. Go back and look at census records for the turn of the century. Plenty of people had odd names. From the 1900 Tyrell county census (using only white names):

Genora
Affa
Corinthia
Cotanny
Dizelle
Elexena
Isoline
Malissie
Nalsana
Reber
Labin
Arcena
Tecoie
Zilphia
Angnora
Pender
Kohloss
*I have a “made-up” first name (loosely inspired by the hobbit) despite being utterly in the majority with solidyl upper middle class parents.

26

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
I find it to be naive to not care who assumes your kid is black based off their name. Black is not a pitiable condition - being identified as a member of a group that has faced historical systemic discrimination based on your name - without anyone getting the chance to meet you and make a judgement is a pitiable condition.
[/QUOTE]

So they should just totally ignore THEIR heritage in order to conform? Foreign born parents used to do this all the time; they’d pick an American name so their kids wouldn’t get discriminated against. I think that’s a sad situation.

27

[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
The only thing I assume when I see someone named LeShawn is that their mother didn’t care who assumed they were black when reading their name. LeShawn may be well educated, wealthy, bright and an all around great guy. LeShawn may even be WHITE.

I find it to be naive to not care who assumes your kid is black based off their name. Black is not a pitiable condition - being identified as a member of a group that has faced historical systemic discrimination based on your name - without anyone getting the chance to meet you and make a judgement is a pitiable condition.
[/QUOTE]

Does this extend to other groups too? Are you prepared to change your name so that anti-white bigots don’t discriminate against you?

Just where should this concern end? If people are going to have a problem with me because my name is too “black”, then they will have a problem with me showing up to interview looking like a black person. I can change my name, but I’m not going to bleach my skin and put on a wig. Why would I want to work for someone who is biased against the ethnicity of my name anyway? Why should I accomodate their stupidity?

Black people can adopt the most traditional names out there. As long as those names are associated with them more than others, those names will be stigmitized. The problem isn’t black people choosing names that they like (within reason, of course). The problem is that people still don’t like black people.

28

[QUOTE=Omega Glory]
Can you give some examples of middle class black names? I can’t think of any name that would make me think “black, but middle class” instead of just “black”.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t speak for Manda JO, but she may mean people whom she has come to know to be middle class and then looking at the variety of names afterward.

I do not think it is okay to discriminate on the basis of names, but I myself have done it. I’m black and when my cousin ended up naming her daughters “Rita, Vita and Kita,” I thought “Oh, my god, beyond Rita, how low class.”

We all know Rita is a commonplace name, but it wasn’t until years later that I learned about Vita. The jury’s still out on Kita; no wait, it’s not. In this country, her parents have a right to name their offspring anything the want (some countries have laws about this). When parents opt for an “unusual” name, I guarantee they didn’t reject any valid (to them), deeply-rooted future issues that might actually have occurred to them.

29

tremorviolet, thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t sure if I was reading too much into that or not. I think we’re in agreement on the most important point: that discriminating against people on the basis of their names is wrong. I don’t care what tradition a person’s name is from, but I do have a preference for names that are easy to spell upon hearing and have some history behind them – and that’s all it is - a personal preference. In the unlikely event that I ever reproduced, I wouldn’t want anyone telling me what to name my kid.

30

[QUOTE=monstro]
“Temika” and “Keisha” are so common in the black community that I think “middle class” when I hear them.

Names of true African origin–like “Aisha”, “Bakari”, and “Kimani”–always ping middle-class to me, maybe even more so than names of Arabic origin like “Jemilla”, “Latifa”, “Jamal”, “Khalil”, and “Omar”.

Then there pre-existing names of European origin that are simply common among blacks, like “Darnell”, “Tyrone”, “Jerome”, “Charmaine”, “Malcolm”, and “Yvonne”.

My coworker(white) said that when she found out our boss was named “Darryl”, she automatically figured he was black. I’ve met a number of “Darryls”, all of them black, so I guess she wasn’t being too crazy. And she did guess correctly.
[/QUOTE]

Okay, so I’m guessing things like Tyquan or Moesha would make you think lower class black?

That’s my take on it too. You’d be setting your self up to deal with someone who was just waiting for you to show yourself to be “just like the rest of them.”

31

[QUOTE=monstro]
My coworker(white) said that when she found out our boss was named “Darryl”, she automatically figured he was black. I’ve met a number of “Darryls”, all of them black, so I guess she wasn’t being too crazy. And she did guess correctly.
[/QUOTE]

Interesting. For me, it has an urban Appalachian connotation. There used to be a running joke among folks in my neighborhood about Darryl, the roofer, and his brother Darl, the housepainter.

Anyway, I’m a 30-year-old white guy of Irish extraction who grew up with a first name that explicitly referenced my heritage. I went to a predominantly black elementary school and a heavily black high school. I remember a ton of taunts about my name, but oddly, they all came from white kids.

I guess I’ve grown up with a diverse enough background that while I might make snap judgements about superficial things based on a name - eg, broad ethnicity - it’s never occured to me to make prejuidicial judgements, or even class judgements, based on a weird name alone.

That is, with one exception. When I handled the child support caseloads of parents who had children in the foster care system, I came across one child with the first and middle names “Mari Juana.” Given the nature of my caseload, I wasn’t terribly inclined to be sympathetic to non-paying parents in the first place, but that choice of name didn’t help the mother in my mind.

It didn’t actually influence my handling of the case, other than the brief “WTF” moment and sharing it for some laughs among my (predominantly black female) coworkers, and any bad vibes I got were directed at the mother, not the poor kid. But still, looking back on it, my reaction bothers me a bit. I made all kinds of assumptions - that she was obviously a junkie of some kind, that she didn’t give a shit about her child - that, while perhaps not entirely unfounded given that the kid was in foster care, I didn’t tend to make about the parents of the Ty’Nishas and Susans who came across my desk.

Then again, Mari Juana is an extreme example, so YMMV.

32

[QUOTE=Omega Glory]
Okay, so I’m guessing things like Tyquan or Moesha would make you think lower class black?
[/quote]

Yes, because these names are unusual, and the more unusual a name is, the more likely it is they belong to a person of a low socioeconomic group. (According to the authors of Freakonomics, which has a whole chapter on names).

It also occurs to me that surnames can be similarly marked. Black people frequently have Welsh last names (Thomas, Jones, Evans, etc.) as well as presidential names (Washington, Jackson). Should Charmaine Washington change her name to Carol Wilson just so she can get a job?

33

[QUOTE=FaerieBeth]
Agreed.
I wanted to name my son Christopher and call him Kit, but my husband very kindly pointed out that most people would think of a cheesy, talking car from the 80’s rather than an icon of English Literature.
[/QUOTE]

For what it’s worth, upon meeting a boy named Kit, my first thought would be of this wiener-kid named Kit that lived next door to me when I was twelve.

My second thought would have been of Kit Kats.

Also, this is neither here nor there, but as people are tossing out some of the unusual names they have encountered, I once knew a kid named Hitler. This was in Zambia, where children were routinely named after nouns (Fuel, Meat Pie, Pilot, Motorcar), verbs (Waggin’, Jokin’, Praise), body parts (Anus), and dictators (Castro, Saddam), but even then, ‘Hitler’ kind of stood out from the crowd.

love
yams!!

34

[QUOTE=Omega Glory]
Can you give some examples of middle class black names? I can’t think of any name that would make me think “black, but middle class” instead of just “black”.

[/QUOTE]

Pretty much exactly what Monstro said. First names have class connotations as clearly as they have race connotations.

35

[QUOTE=Manda JO]
Pretty much exactly what Monstro said. First names have class connotations as clearly as they have race connotations.
[/QUOTE]

Thanks, and yes I know that first names can have class connotations. I just think of the names **Monstro ** listed as simply being black though.

36

I’ll take the complete devil’s advocate approach here and say that I think name discrimination is valuable and probably intelligent. That a parent chose to give their child a certain type of name reveals the parent’s attitude and mentality toward raising the child and therefore the kid’s nurture; trust me when I say that you can pretty much assume that DeShauntre and Kadiskie were named in ignorance and raised in ignorance. Likewise, Pashleigh (actual example I’ve encountered) is going to be a waspy, entitled little toilet raised in a trust-funded stuffed animal fantasy land.

37

And some names just sound stupid. You wouldn’t want to hear a squeaking door or a creaking chair all day long at work, so why would you want to hire someone with a name that sounds ridiculous and annoying to the ear?

I’ve never been able to take Tavis Smiley seriously because I just imagine his mom looking at the first thing in the medicine cabinet and going “yessir, that SHORE do sound PURTY!”

38

[QUOTE=Omega Glory]
Thanks, and yes I know that first names can have class connotations. I just think of the names **Monstro ** listed as simply being black though.
[/QUOTE]

Are there names amongst whites that make you think “middle class white” versus “poor white”?

“Barbara” strikes me as a middle class white name.

“Betty Jo” strikes me as a lower class white name.

Just curious.

39

Yes, there are some white names that make me think “poor”. Thinking about it more, some black names strike me as being ridiculous, instead of normal, and the normal-ness is probably partly based on how often I’ve heard that particular name. It’s also based on the sound of the name itself though, so it’s not quite the same thing of which you and Manda Jo speak.

40

The thing about some of these people with odd names is that they are bad people. For instance I once had to work with a woman named Michelle. Okay, but it was pronounced MY-shell, and she had a shitfit if anybody mispronounced it, even if they’d never heard it before, like they ought to just know that it was pronounced MY-shell, not me-SHELL or anything else.

If it had been up to me I would have fired Michelle’s ass.* Not because of her name. Because she was an asshole. Had nothing to do with her race. She was on the phone. People called and said, “Am I speaking to mi-SHELL?” and she would say, “No. You are speaking to MY-shell.” In a very snotty tone.

And that’s been my experience with a lot of people with odd, nontraditional names, so much so that now, they have to prove they’re worthy people if they start out with this name, rather than the opposite.

(*which it wasn’t. The only two people I have actually fired were named Vicky and Judith.)

Living while black in America