After many years of hearing the unique, albeit often strange names of African American youth (names that I am apt to mispronounce), I was fascinated by the premise made by Steven Levitt http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=s_levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s in two of the chapters in their New York Times best selling book Freakonomics http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/006073132X .
Essentially Levitts and Dubner surmise that the creative names held by many African American youth today are key indicators of the parent’s socio-economic background. In a paper by Roland Fryer http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4751829 and Steven Levitt entitled The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/FryerLevitt2004.pdf the authors found “no negative relationship between having a distinctly Black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child’s circumstances at birth.”
Theoretically the authors’ argument might be true; however, in the real world United States, there is a strong stigma attached to certain names that deviate from certain cultural and ethnic majority norms. If you are from India, the African continent, Japan, Russia, Germany or some other country, and have a name unique to that countries culture(s) then your “unique” name may be overlooked—and in some cases celebrated! A name that is difficult to connect to land, culture continuity is often ridiculed and viewed the way most people viewed the artist Prince–when he revealed his symbol of a name.
So what does Maniqwa or Delayshawn mean if you are an African American to another person of African ancestry throughout the Diaspora? The cultural nationalist that came of age in the 1960s might ask the question: What ethnicity, language, culture, land mass or food does the 21st century African American names connect to? I believe the only time that people with “interesting names” are not stereotyped and not looked at with indifference is when they are wealthy, popular and influential—not necessarily in that order.
According to Levitt and Dubner there is discrimination towards job applicants that have uniquely black, low socio-economic sounding names. Even though the applicant might be highly qualified his or her name sends out an indirect signal of inferiority.
In 1960s America there was very little difference between the first names of black and white children, regardless of the socio-economic disparities and segregated neighborhoods that separated them.
However, as the country trudged through the rutted road of the Civil Rights Movement on to the more overt, militant, Black Power/Vietnam War protest era 1970s, personal names of African Americans (or at least the names people identified them by) took on new or greater significance. African Americans of diverse socio-economic backgrounds adopted the names of their continental African ancestors. Because most black people throughout the African Diaspora were unable to connect to a specific ethnic group, geographical area or language the entire African continent became a point of ancestral connectivity.
Noted black American professionals and public figures took on African or Islamic names to convey their cultural transformation and new mindset as an independent thinking citizen. Thus, the writer/poet Leroi Jones became Imamu Amiri Baraka http://www.amiribaraka.com/; the radical sociologist and theorist Gerald McWhorter became Abdul Al-Kalimat http://www.africa.utoledo.edu/faculty/alkalimat.html; the educator/social activist Howard Fuller http://www.marquette.edu/about/faculty/fuller.shtml became Owusu Sadaukai, and the activist/politician Frizell Gray became Kweisi Mfume http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kweisi_Mfume.
These names, like names that originate from other ethnic populations throughout the world, have a particular meaning. The Akan http://www.ushaka.com/akanpeople2.html peoples of Ghana http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0107584.html name believe that your name indicates your purpose and mission on earth. The Akan child also has a name that indicates the day that the ‘Soul’ incarnated the body, e.g. day of birth. So, you might have the European name Samuel but the society would know you by other names, e.g. Kofi Mensah. Kofi tells everyone that a male child (that has the character traits of the adventurer/campaigner) was born on Friday and is the third born child in his family. Though geographical locale, language and cultural variances divide most of the planet’s human inhabitants there are marked similarities when it comes to names, e.g. the act of naming human progeny. Tibetans believe that illness is caused by an inappropriate name and that the acquirement of a new name was the cure. In ancient
Egypt, a person’s name was so important that it was believed the blotting out of a name would cause the person and their after life to be destroyed. In Ashkenazic Judaism—much retained by American Jews—parents would not name a child after an older living resident as a precaution to prevent the “Death Angel” from taking the younger person’s life before its time. The other uses of names throughout human history have had to do with description, location, occupation and relationship. In the western world examples of descriptive surnames would be Young, Black, Roundtree, Small or Whitehead. Location names are denoted by names such as Hill, Radcliff or Poole. Occupation surnames refer to human work endeavors (usually practiced for generations) and can be seen in names like: Cook, Miller, Taylor, Smith and Carter. Relational names are exemplified by names such as Williamson (son of William), Wilson (son of Will) or Robertson (son of Robert). According to anthropologists names also evolve over time; particularly after they have been translated from one language to another: i.e. Cameron once meant “crooked nose,” Kennedy was given to a man that had a “big head” and Burke ostentatiously meant “killer”.
An excellent book for the lay social scientist or just plain curious is Murray Heller and Newbell Niles Puckett’s Black Names in America: Origins and Usage. Dr. Puckett’s book’s primary fous was to “serve as a study of the social role of names in general.” In the context of the African slave trade enslaved Africans were often renamed by their captors. In the book Slave Ships and Slaving Edward Manning, a sailor on the slaver Thomas Watson says:
“I suppose they…all had names in their own dialect, but the effort required to pronounce them was too much for us, so we picked out our favorites (slaves) and dubbed them Main-stay, Cats head, Bulls eye, Rope-Yarn, and various other sea phrases.”
Only favorites had names; the other slaves had no names at all. Thus, the true meaning of the adage: “To name a person is to recognize their existence.” The specter of slavery had a dehumanizing effect on its victims and perpetuators alike. In his autobiography, Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X, tells the reader why he and others in the organization use X for a last name. The little known historian and scholar Raphael Powell wrote a book in 1937 entitled Human Side of a People and the Right Name in which he said “free people name themselves, slaves and dogs are named by their masters.”
One of the most substantive and interesting chapters in Puckett’s book is chapter IV ‘Conformity vs. Individuality’. The author’s data is derived from name samples from black southern colleges and geographical locales. The most striking passage in chapter IV reads:
“We can assume that in 1935 Blacks attending college constituted the portion of the Black community most fully attuned to White values and most able to participate in activities which reflected white values. Whatever arguments may be voiced in 1974 questioning the desire for a college education as reflective of white values, all indications suggest that in 1935, a college education represented a major value for white America. Thus, most Blacks desirous and able to attend college must have been highly attracted toward some aspects of the white value system. Name usage reinforces this assumption.”
However, Puckett’s research also contends initially, black slaves had a higher rate of unusual names than free Blacks, but a reversal takes place in the 19th century when free blacks utilize a higher percentage of unusual names. During the period of time that the bulk of Puckett’s research data comes from, namely the 1930s, there is significant data that implies white Americans also used unusual naming conventions—albeit to a lesser degree than African Americans. In my or anyone else’s attempts to understand current naming conventions among Americans in general, and a younger generation of African Americans specifically, it must be remembered:
“However strong the pressures of social life, however powerful the demands upon an individual to accept the values, tastes and judgments of his culture, human beings have always managed to somehow avoid complete subjection to group desires and whims.”
