WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Shaniqua McClendon wants her good name back.

By the time I reached college, there was no longer any ambiguity about how people felt about my name. I was often told I seemed more like an “Ashley,” or “nothing like a Shaniqua.” During my run for president of the Black Student Movement, students left disparaging comments about me. The one that cut deepest was, “And of course her name is Shaniqua.”

It's an instructive column, with an amusing conclusion.  "Prejudice does not end where it’s convenient for you, and one day a name as common as Susan could be subject to this same bigotry."

Karen would like a word.

How, though, did it come to this?

The stereotype tied to my name was too loud to ignore, and it isn’t just personal experience that proves this. Look up "Shaniqua" on Urban Dictionary, and you’ll find definitions like: “a common name used to mock/describe a Black woman from the inner city.” These harmful caricatures turn the name Shaniqua into a punchline, a “safe” vessel for racial judgment.

The basis for the stereotype, such as it is, comes from the Consciousness Revolution of the mid-1960s.  Procedural equality such as voting rights and the end to de jure segregation was not enough.  With do-your-own-thing hippies getting good publicity, and the Pill enabling women to be as randy as men, provided a surgical backup plan was available, and the practitioners of what we knew then as "alternative lifestyles" took their form of do-your-own-thing out of the closets and into the streets, why not create a new cultural identity under the rubric of "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud?"

We are still too close to the origin stories of the Consciousness Revolution to get the sequence of events and the causation, let alone the consequences, into any sort of order.  Black pride, and Black Power, drew on several sources to create that identity.  One of them was Moslem.  Malcom Little became Malcolm X to call attention to the absence of a family name in his paternal line.  Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to call attention to an African faith tradition.  A second source was Kenyan: note the use of Swahili, an East African language, terminology in cultural events and social or political advocacy organizations: never mind that the slave traders operated on the west coast of Africa, far from any Swahili speakers.  The third source was Haiti: in this hemisphere, home to a successful slave rebellion, and speaking a form of French.  And thus came the creation of a new set of baby names, combining those Islamic, African, and Creole French influences.

Years ago, Ann Coulter wrote an incendiary column (does she write any other kind?) questioning Kwanzaa, and calling attention to precisely that blending of overseas traditions in baby names.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the '60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. They did not seek armed revolution. Those were the precepts of Karenga's United Slaves. United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented "African" names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named "Jamal" currently sit on death row?)

That observation, coarse though it is, is germane to the central argument Ms McClendon offers.

Multiple studies show that job applicants with "ethnic-sounding" names like mine are less likely to receive callbacks than those with "Anglo-sounding" names, even with identical résumés. This form of name-based discrimination not only perpetuates racist tropes but also affects our professional, social and emotional well-being.

That sort of research has been going on for twenty years, and there's an instructive discussion of it in Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics.  It's Harvard's Roland Fryer who did the work, and I'll quote at length from pages 183-84 of the summary in Freakonomics.

Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black and white names.  The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than among whites.  By 1980 she received a name that was twenty times more common among blacks.  (Boys' names moved in the same direction but less aggressively ...) Given the location and timing of this change – dense urban areas where Afro-American activism was gaining strength – the most likely cause of the explosion in distinctively black names was the Black Power movement, which sought to accentuate African culture and fight claims of black inferiority.  If this naming revolution was indeed inspired by Black Power, it would be one of the movement's most enduring remnants.  Afros today are rare, dashikis even rarer; Black Panther founder Bobby Seale is best known today for peddling a line of barbecue products.

Let's return to Ms McClendon's column for a moment.  "I even had an ex-boyfriend tell me his mother was concerned about whom he was dating because of my name but felt better after he shared my accomplishments."  Doesn't matter what the ancestry of the boyfriend is, it's his mother's priors that matter.  Back to Freakonomics.

What kind of a parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name?  The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself.  In Fryer's view, giving a child a superblack name is a black parent's signal of solidarity with the community.  "If I start naming my kid Madison," he says, "you might think, 'Oh, you want to go live across the railroad tracks, don't you?'"  If black kids who study calculus are thought to be "acting white," Fryer says, then mothers who call their babies Shanice are simply "acting black."

And thus, the job application from Shanice or Shaniqua or Jamal comes bundled with a signal of a disadvantaged background that may or may not include interactions with the criminal justice system or continued reliance on public assistance.  Ms McClendon doesn't like it, but she notes something that Professor Fryer called attention to.

Ethnic names affect people across races and cultures.  Asian Americans often adopt Anglicized names to avoid being othered. Name changes represent a survival strategy, a way to minimize the bias and prejudice tied to their identities.

But the issue isn’t just about Black people or the names of people of color. The problem lies in a society that tolerates and perpetuates this form of racism. We often hear that racism today isn’t as overt as it was in the past, but name-based discrimination is one of those “quiet” forms of racism that persists. We allow names to become proxies for race, class and background in ways that harm marginalized communities.

Proxies persist because they have value.  Consider the stage names of Hollywood's leading lights of the Thirties and Forties.  Now consider the early-21st century list of boys' names signifying high-education parents:  Dov, Akiva, Sander.  We call survival strategies survival strategies because they facilitate survival.  Dubner and Levitt speculate that anybody who bothers to change his name in pursuit of economic success is highly motivated.  Ask Betty Joan Perske or Bernie Schwartz if you see them.