If you casually mention at a social gathering that you think little boys are more destructive than little girls, most people will probably agree. Even those who do not will probably give scant notice to the fact that you were making assumptions about behavior based on a physical attribute—a practice more commonly known as stereotyping. Now, what if you said something like, “There’s a new boy in my kid’s class named Da’Quan—I bet he’s poor and black.” Assuming you run in a politically correct crowd, you will be called a stereotyper, a racial profiler, or worse.
Yet whether we openly admit it or not, we do conjure certain images for certain names. I admit that when I hear “Demetrius” or “Marquis,” I do not expect to see a kid with blond hair and blue eyes.
What’s in a name? Plenty, according to economists Steven Levitt, who is white, and Roland Fryer, who is black. They decided to see if African-Americans with distinctively “black” names like DeShawn or Precious had harder lives than others. The researchers used birth certificate data from the sixteen million children born in California since 1961, including name and gender, along with the parents’ marital status, ZIP code, and education. They discovered that in the early sixties, blacks and whites drew names from the same general pool. With the advent of the black power movement, that quickly changed. In 1970, girls born in black neighborhoods received names that were twice as common among blacks than whites. Today, four out of every ten black girls born in California receive a name that none of a hundred thousand white girls receives. And a third of the black girls born there have a unique name.
Levitt and Fryer concluded that a person with a distinctively “black” name does indeed have a worse life outcome than a Claire or a Luke. They reasoned that the demographic profile of the parents of uniquely named children—who themselves are unmarried, poor, undereducated teenage mothers with distinctive black names—doomed these kids to lives of poverty. However, they blithely attributed the mothers’ willingness to bestow “black” names as an attempt to show “solidarity” with the black community.
That may be true, but there is perhaps another factor at play. These young, single mothers cannot give their children the security, education, and material comfort of more successful families. Perhaps bestowing a unique name on their children is a naïve attempt to leave a legacy—an asset, if you will—to kids to whom they can give little else.
As far as I know, no one has yet analyzed the kinds of names that relatively affluent, educated black parents give their children. Among my family and close African-American friends, there is a Joseph, two Alexanders, and a Quinn, a Brooke, a Carson, a Colin, a Melanie, a Mitchell, and a Johnny. None of their names makes the California top twenty “blackest boy” or “blackest girl” name lists. And, though it may make me sound like an assimilationist, I take comfort in that. I thought long and hard about how my sons’ names would play when they were adults. In fact, I used to joke that they would make a great impression on letterhead, or being read aloud at a college graduation. I did not want their names to broadcast their ethnicity to the world—or camouflage it. I also did not want them to be unfairly judged before they ever recited their first alphabet in class.
Another study, from the University of Florida researcher David Figlio, confirms what African-American parents have long suspected—that teachers’ expectations of their students are based in part on names. According to Figlio, black students with unusual (i.e. “black”) names are less likely to be placed in gifted programs than black students with more mainstream (read “white”) names. He also found that students with Asian names were more often placed in gifted programs than siblings with similar test scores and common American names.
In other words, there is an academic pecking order in our schools that appears to be linked to students’ first names, but is really tied to expectations. What self-respecting teacher would admit to doing this? Can you imagine an employer conceding that it screens prospective employees based on their names? There is empirical proof that it does happen—both in education and, according to several resume-screening studies, on the job.
I think stereotyping based on names is wrong. I also think we all do it. Given that reality, the efforts of poor, single mothers to leave a legacy by giving their children “black” names are sadly misguided. Unwittingly, they are making an already tough road for their kids tougher yet.
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