What's in a Name?

[MineralMan]

My 91 year old mother has a twin brother. When they were born, their mother, like all mothers, put her mind to deciding what to name them. Here's what she decided:

Lavaughn and Lawanda.

I cannot tell you how many times someone has expressed surprise that my mother is not a black woman.

I've always found that interesting, somehow...

[Bucky]

1. I was working at an office in the 1980s and the boss was giving me a tour...

When he introduced me to the company's receptionist, a young black woman, he actually pulled out that old cliche, "and customers on the phone can't even tell by her voice that she's black."

I was shocked, but without missing a beat, the receptionist shook my hand and said, "Sho' nuff"

Blending different peoples & races into one nationality is going to cause moments of shocking culture blending and the destruction of many expected stereotypes. This is a healthy process, over the long haul, but sometimes the shock can be pretty brutal on the victims of stereotyping.

[MineralMan]

2. Judging people by any sort of stereotype is

common, but a bad idea all around. My grandmother just liked the sound of those names and wanted names for a girl and boy that sounded similar. Others attached different significance to her naming choices. It's been interesting to see over the years.

[Igel]

4. It's a correlation.

I have kids in class whose names "sound" white to the students and kids whose names sound "black" or Latino. When it's a new kid who doesn't show up on the first day or two of school, or who transferred in from a different school, sometimes both white and black kids are surprised.

Many of the white kids with "black-sounding" names are from families that have been low SES Southern in recent generations. That's shared with low SES Southern families that migrated from the South even decades ago and who stayed sequested from upper class or Northern middle/upper-class society and who didn't harbor high hopes of being upwardly socially mobile. Yes, that's awkwardly put, but putting it bluntly would probably be offensive to both sides of that particular cultural non-divide. More recently the sets of names have been separating out a bit more, but the overlap still happens.

That kind of generalization the basis for the resume-discrimination that is observed in research surveys, where it's not so much just the race that's assumed but some sort of socio-economic status associated with naming conventions. Like all other associations and correlations, it's not 100%, but that doesn't keep people from acting as though it is (because the alternative is to assume there's no correlation, which is also false). The media just report such studies as "racial". Even if some of the resumes involved do openly state the applicants' race and blacks and whites are treated about the same for names viewed as ethnically neutral, it's still "racial". A self-identified black "John Smith" is treated very much like a self-identified white "John Smith," while a "Laquan Smith" is treated quite differently from a self-identified black "John Smith."

[Kalidurga]

3. There are a lot of names like that in my family tree

But, I not having DNA samples I couldn't tell you what ethnic group they belong to.