So, it is your position (and his) that all black names are stupid and/or misspelled? Have you checked out the many different versions there are of white girl names, many misspelled if you call the choice of a parent misspelling?
Plus, you think it is a good idea to not look twice at a resume based on the name given by a parent? If so, I hope you disqualify Donald Trump based on the racism of his father. And not just on Don the Con’s own evident racism. A much worse sin than giving a name you don’t like.
I never said all black names were mispelled, nor did I say that all white names are correctly spelled. I have met many white people with plainly idiotic and made-up names. And those people are likely to be disadvantaged at some point in their life, even if subconsciously.
Freakonomics had a chapter about names, and also a nice podcast.
Does this apply to Asians as well? Because I’ve known many Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese people with VERY strange names (to English speaking ears) who have no problem at all getting great jobs.
I think this is at least as much of a class issue rather than a race issue; since upper-middle-class people from these cultural backgrounds often give their children names that reflect their ethnicity, these names don’t carry any particular stigma. Similarly, I think adaher is absolutely correct that someone named, say, Amiri or Nneka is going to have an easier time getting an interview than someone named DaTavious or Sheniquill, just as a white woman named Charlotte will probably have an easier time than one named Shyanne. (Just to be clear, in either case it’s prejudiced and unfair, but it’s prejudice along a rather different axis than people tend to assume, or at least along more than one axis.)
Isn’t it great that we don’t have to speculate about what names were used?
Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakeisha and Jamal?"
The kind of black names the study used:
Aisha, Ebony, Tanisha, Kenya, Latonya, Tamika, Rasheed, Tremayne, Kareem, Darnell, Tyrone, Hakim, Leroy, Jermaine
Call me crazy, but none of these names are “crazy” names. According to the breakdown at the end of the paper, Aisha (a real name, according to you) is discriminated against more than Latonya (a “made up” name, according to you). Poor Kareem loses out to Jermaine. While Kristen and Brad rule the world.
It always strikes me as very sad that people think it is perfectly okay to discriminate names that register as “poor”. And then everyone talks about how it’s not fair that there is no “poor people” Affirmative Action…how it’s not fair a black middle class kid can be given more opportunities by virtue of his blackness than a poor white kid named Bubba. Look, people. You can’t seriously believe that poor people (regardless of color) should be given a fair shot when you favor tossing their resumes in the garbage. Yes, D’Morris and Laqueisha are more likely to be poor. Bu it is just as wrong to discriminate against them as it would be to discriminate against Barack and Michelle.
I used to not think much of the name “Tanisha”. Don’t know why. Maybe I’ve been hanging around too many racist whites or something. But this summer, I took an acting course (very much a stretch for me) and one of the students in the class was named Tanisha. OMG. I really believe that Tanisha is going to be famous one day. She was the best student in the class. A totally sweet awesome girl. So now I think “Tanisha” is a solid name.
Maybe people need to stop hanging around so many “Johns” and “Emilys” so they can see that a name is just a name.
To add to what you’re pointing out. Not only is Aisha a “real” name by Adaher’s standards, but so is Jamal, Kareem, and Hakim, among the ones listed.
For that matter, why is “Ebony” somehow an “outright horrid name” by parents who must have “hated their kids” while Madison(which was popularized by the movie Splash) is considered a fine name for girls.
For that matter, I’ve met lots of white millennial girls with names that I guess could be viewed as “made up” like Breanna and Mckayla(various spellings) which never cause any issues.
Exactly. Every name was, at one point, a wholly invented name. At some point in the past no one had ever been named David before, and it sounded weird to everyone. There’s nothing stupid about making up names - without the practice, no one would have names.
“many”? Literally every white person I’ve ever met has a made-up name. I can’t even imagine what the alternative is. Name your kid some sound from nature, like the whoosh of wind or the cry of a crow? “Hi, please to meet you, my name is WWWWFWFFFFSSHSHHHHHH.”
At the point where you’re saying that making up names for children is idiotic, you may want to double check that there’s not some latent cultural racism involved in your judgment.
Hell, they mostly all are. Tyrone is Irish, Leroy is French, Tremayne is Cornish. That they’ve mostly become to be considered “black names” in the U.S. is a) fairly recent historically and b) pretty regional to the United States.
Those silly negros. Always trying to assimilate by adopting white names. Who are they trying to fool? They can all call themselves Whitey McWhiteface and and they’ll still be black. When will they ever learn?
</racist white person>
If you name your baby girl “Ayesha,” it stands to reason she’ll grow up to be a badass.
http://freeread.com.au/@rglibrary/HRiderHaggard/Ayesha/Ayesha.html
ITT, I learned that the poor Neils of the world are at a significant disadvantage to the Brads of the world. I think we need to work to end Brad-Jay-and-Jermaine privilege.
People can get used to any name. Take “Madison”, one of your examples. Once it was considered silly and trendy. Now Madison Nguyen is a serious politician in California, will likely be elected to the state Assembly in November, and nobody has ever commented about her name.
Not all that long ago obviously Jewish names were also discriminated against. My grandfather changed his name to Harry for just this reason, and Isaac Asimov resisted suggestions that he use a more American writing name.
Bigots gotta big …
And thanks for the list, monstro
I’ve been watching this stuff for six decades now, and I think it’s more complicated than most people want to recognize.
For one thing, the labels have all become so confused by now, that no one can say “conservatives think this,” or “liberal s think that,” without being wrong at least half the time. Both the big political parties have shifted what their leadership has claimed they believe in over the years, and not at all honestly a lot of the time.
“Conservative” is defined as " wanting things to stay as they are, or have minimal change." But most of the people who most loudly proclaim that they are “conservative” these days, want TREMENDOUS changes to take place. If you want an end to affirmative action, you want change. If you want to reverse various Supreme Court decisions that you don’t like, you want TREMENDOUS CHANGE.
Back in the 1970’s, the people who were labeled Liberal Democrats tended to support taxing lots of people, but using that tax money to provide a lot of government services going right back to the people again. Conservative Republicans back then, tended to want no tax increases, and reduced spending on all social programs, and INCREASED spending on the military, and on government subsidies to private businesses.
After the Vietnam War was mostly resolved, the Democrats decided to add environmental concerns to their list of social, for-the-people programs. The Republicans reacted by declaring that the Democrats were making things up to complain about, and wanted nothing to do with anti-pollution measures, mainly because that would mean challenging their own primary constituency, big business, to spend more of their profits on altering how they do business.
The Democrats and Republicans both managed to arrange for pretty much everyone to LINK civil rights and concern for the environment into one big smorgasbord of what the Republicans claimed was “liberalism,” and by the 1980’s under Reagan, we had the situation we do now, with a lot of false connections being made between racism and conservatism, and between high government spending and liberalism.
Here’s one particular focus that shows the total confusion up the best:
the area of PERSONAL FREEDOM.
Republicans today like to PRETEND, that they are all ABOUT individual liberty. But they aren’t. They support individual liberty when it comes to the SECOND Amendment, but not when it comes to voting rights, and certainly not when it comes to marital rights. Democrats like to pretend THEY are all about individual freedom as well, but they still want to be able to tell people how they can and can’t run their personally owned businesses.
In reality, the idea that “conservatives” want freedom, and that “liberals” want Federal control of everything, is a flat out lie. I haven’t seen a 1973-style Liberal since 1984, when Reagan’s complete pummeling of the Democrats finally convinced their leadership to dump the rhetoric of protest, and to come back to more basic actions.
Several of the English-only Hispanics I met were anchor babies; they immigrated inside their mother’s bellies. Others were first generation. They’re immigrants, they’re Hispanic (by self-identification), none of them would have been able to have a two-sentence conversation in Spanish; while one of them knew more Spanish than she’d thought and decided to learn more, the rest had no more interest in learning Spanish than your average non-Hispanic. But in that poll, those people are invisible.
I think researchers often fail to adhere to the scientific concept that when a question is answered it brings up even more questions. Instead, a lot of researchers just seem to want to get to an answer and publish it, because answers are more rewarding than just more questions.
I do think there have been some seperate studies though on the effect of names on job prospects:
The article does address the disadvantages of having a black sounding name, as well as a foreign sounding name, but in general the more common your name, and the shorter your name, the better your chances. So to all those parents out there: keep it simple. Bobs get jobs.
Yeah, but have you also noticed that East Asian parents have a tendency to go for simple names if their kids are born here? They’d figured this stuff out long before Freakonomics, they’ve been naming their kids Bob, Jason, Mary, and Nancy since the 1920s.
I don’t know for sure about kids, but 15 years ago lots of adults had American sounding alternative names which often got used, but very few seem to any more.
As for the Freakonomics data, given the stereotypes I wouldn’t be surprised of Chinese or Indian sounding names got more responses.