Real audio link from BBC Radio 4's Today programme

I heard this report while driving into work this morning. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a transcript, nor any reference to the underlying poll data on Google or anywhere else.

The gist of the thread is that a recent survey into names and employment prospects by race showed that the names that black and white Americans give to their children are becoming increasingly segregated. Names like Tonisha are increasingly exclusive to black children, and names like Molly are increasingly exclusive to whites.

As part of the report, Evan Davies (the BBC reporter) found a study that showed that CVs (sorry, resumés) with "black" names on had to be sent out to many more companies to get an invitation to interview than exactly the same resumé information with a "white" name on it.

So, a side-effect of the understandable desire of black Americans to be culturally distinctive is to give another outlet for racism that does not even involve see the colour of someone's skin.

My questions for debate are:
Why the urge to further cultural segregation by choosing "black" names or "white" ones?
Where do the names themselves come from? Have all the "-isha" endings for girls, and Islamic-sounding names for boys, and the other stereotypically "black" names, always been part of the black American experience, or is it more recent?
What benefits does moving black and white cultures further apart bring, over integration and intermingling (the 60s "coffee coloured people" notion)?

Lastly, a non-racial point:
Is the urge to spell names "distinctively" (a euphemism for "incorrectly", in my opinion) a hoped for signal of individuality, or evidence of the increasing functional illiteracy of some parts of American civilisation?

PS If anyone does find a text link to the study(s) in question, please feel free to post them here.

Here is a study which looked at the effect of having a "white-sounding" name or a "black-sounding" name on a resume:

Employers' Replies to Racial Names

Here is the bottom line:



Why the desire to create "black-sounding" names? Well, I suppose it would go back at least as far as the Black Power movement of the 1960's, with the desire to take pride in one's culture. Children were often given names that were of African origin, or which "sounded" African. (Names with apostrophes in the middle, for one example.)

The "Islamic" names you mention most likely came out of the Nation of Islam movement, which began as far back as the 1930's. I can only assume these represent an expression of religious faith. A Christian African-American parent is unlikely to name a child "Mohammed" or "Fatima." I can only guess that the "-isha" type endings are based on African roots. (Maybe someone else can find more information on this.)

Like you, it rather worries me that there should be a growing cultural gap between African-Americans and European-Americans. Trivial things like the fact that the Top Ten television shows are quite different in African-American and European-American homes make me wonder why there should be such a gap. On the other hand, I can certainly understand the concern that many African-Americans might have that the European-American culture is the "default" culture, and that they must conform to it. The notion that "Rudolph" and "Hermione" (to pick two random, uncommon first names which I believe are European in origin) are "normal" names, that might belong to any American child, but that "Jamal" or "Lakisha" are strictly "black" names is disturbing. One can only hope for a future in which lots of people of mixed ancestry feel free to use names from a wide variety of cultures.

Your question about "distinctive" names is very complex. Names seem to go through fads. Some years ago there seemed to be a lot of Jasons around. Now there seem to be a lot of Dakotas and Madisons. Some parents are trying very hard to be creative, with mixed results. The desire to spell names in "unique" ways ("Arika" for "Erica") is a misguided attempt to be different, in my opinion. Some of it may be due to inability to spell, as you say, but much of it is deliberate.

For what it's worth, here is a site with hundreds of "different" names:

Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing

Where do the names themselves come from? It is common to name a child after a parent, a grandparent, or even a distant relative. Children are named after politicians, heroes, movie stars, and usually... after a great deal of thought.

This is hardly a new issue. I was taught in school that as slaves, black mothers were not allowed to name their own children. With freedom came the right to name children as they wished, and they did not wish to continue to foist "slave names" on their children.

I was raised in a predominately black neighborhood, and while I don't really recall my classmates' names; they were more likely to be Letisha than Sally. I recall laughing my head off when a comedian on a late night show attacked a Volkswagen ad campaign. "Farfegnugen (likely misspelled) is not a word that is going to sell cars in America; it is a name that is going to be given to some poor defenseless black baby." I laughed because it seemed so on target based on my personal experience.


I believe it was Mark Twain that said, "I have no respect for a man who only knows one way to spell a word."

There are a number of baby name books on the market, all of which list variant spellings. There are variant spellings listed for instance for Aaron, such as Aron, Erin, Aran, etc. I don't see the urge to spell names "distinctively" as a euphemism for "incorrectly," so much as it is a decision made by parents that understand their child will be asked all their life; "How do you spell your name? Is that Cathy with a C, or Kathy with a K?" When we named our daughter, there were variant spellings listed, and in the end we noticed that if we wanted to purchase pre-printed pencils, stationary, etc.; there was only one "commercial spelling" of the name.

My own last name has a strange family legend behind its spelling. Supposedly, it is a variant spelling restricted to the direct lineal descendents of the illegitimate sons of the kings of England. (Ergo, I am by birthright a royal bastard.) I always heard my father tell me that, and took it with a grain of salt. Then at my older brother's wedding, a guest came up and said, "I used to be a Dean at Oxford in England. This is the first time that I noticed how you spell your name." He then went on to repeat the same story my father had told me for a lifetime, embellishing it a bit from what I had been told.

I never did learn what my first name was supposed to be. The doctor who delivered me died immediately after I was born. My mother had been his office nurse, and was accustomed to signing his name to various forms. The nurse who brought my mother the birth certificate tried to explain that the doctor was deceased, and his signature would be missing from the birth certificate. She then pointed to the line where the baby's name was to be entered, and my mother signed the doctor's name...

It probably came from the movement for black pride and black identity started in the 1970's. Jesse Jackson was very active in it ("Say it good, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud!"). African Americans could not become white, and why should they strive to emulate whites when they had heritages of their own? The television series "Roots" also lent impetus to blacks exploring their ancestry.


European-American names were given to slaves (who had African names) and to the children of slaves and slave/master unions. Many African Americans, as a means of rejecting their slave backgrounds, have chosen instead to honor the "free" part of their heritage. That is fairly recent as far as our history goes.

It's part of the culture of individualism, a move away from being identified as part of what a person of a different race would describe collectively as "you people." To many, it is also a deliberate move away from being identified with Christianity, which was the avowed religion of the slave owners in this country.


I hate misspellings. The first time I saw and heard the name "Condoleezza" I rolled my eyes. It was probably a reflex. To tell you the truth, though, I had never heard the name before, so I haven't a clue about how it should be spelled.

Some of these names have variant spellings to distinguish them from others, but others are obviously misspelled. So who's going to tell the new mother that she is wrong if she doesn't ask? That's okay--weird, strangely-spelled names are endemic to people in all cultures. One of my bosses, a middle-aged white man, had the first name "Trellyon," a family name for generations. His son was Trellyon the Fourth. I have never heard that name again.

What about black surnames? Where does the origin come from? The most common black names off the top of my head are Jackson, Johnson, Brown, Jefferson, Smith, Miller, Sanders. Do black surnames come from the names of their last slave owner? I notice that most black American surnames are mostly British in orgin with the occasional Irish surname. I assume some German or Dutch or Polish or Italian Americans owned slaves but I have never met a black Utterback, Van Hoeven, Bartowski, Ciprione etc etc. Is it simply that most European migration happened after slavery had ended thus limiting the surname variance of freed blacks? I saw a 1990 poll where 70 million Americans claimed German heritage while 39 million claimed Irish and 32 claimed English. I am simply wondering why black surnames never seem to be anything other then British more specifically English or Irish. I am predominately German and my family came over in 1832 and in 1848. I know a great deal of Germanic people fled during the first Schleswig-Holstein conflict (1848-51) but why is it that blacks do not have Germanic surnames?

All I can figure is that most Germans did not own slaves in this country. Were there many Germans who settled in the Southern United States? I think they mostly stayed in the industrial North or were subsistence farmers above the Mason-Dixon line.

Yes, the last names of the slaveowners were used for the slaves. For most legal documents (if not all), a first and last name are required. It was probably easier to just take the former slaveowner's name, or a President's last name, than to make up one for the white man who was drawing up the papers.

But there might be someone on this forum with better information.

I figured that was the answer I was just hoping someone would do the research for me and give a little more info on the way black names were chosen and etc etc. The US had a wide variance of European heritage in the 1700's and 1800's. Yet, the people in power in America were generally WASPS. The same is true today. When I think of the southern names I know basically just beacuse of the civil war I basically see on British and Irish last names. Davis, Stephens, Calhoun, Johnson, Johnstone, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Forrest, Armistead, Hood, Pickett. However, I guess French Americans were not big on slavery either. Alot of French Americans were in the south but again I havent met any non caribbean blacks who had French surnames.

Interesting points all.

I read a really interesting article on the origin of Black American surnames, with a particular emphasis on the Welsh ones. Far from being taken from their slave owners (which were not appreciably more Celtic than the rest of nineteenth century America), it seems to be more a tribute to the non-conformist preachers in the churches and chapels where many soon-to-be-ex slaves worshipped.

These preachers were disproportionately Welsh or Scottish (NB not Scotch, which is a drink), which explains the preponderance of Celtic surnames among Black Americans more elegantly (and, I admit, more flatteringly to Celts) than the slave-owner idea. It is only a theory, though. Doubtless the reality is a mixture of any number of explanations.

Here's a link to the article

I've heard of the idea that, since the Black Power movement, black Americans have taken African names - the same thing has happened (to a lesser extent) with black Britons.

For example, there is a prominent thatre and TV actor and writer called Kwame Kwei-Armah, who, and I quote, "did a genealogical study and traced my family tree back through slavery in the Caribbean to Ghana in West Africa and decided to adopt my ancestral name." Whether he has changed his name in private life, or just uses his heritage name for his profession, I do not know. I suspect he really has changed it, to be fair to him.

(As an aside even "Jamal" sounds Islamic, or at least Moorish, to me. Wasn't there a "Jamal" in Arabian Nights?)

This may indeed be the root of the "Latisha" thing - a quick look at http://www.swagga.com/fname.htm shows that females ending in "-sha" seem quite common in traditional African names. Though, interestingly, it seems that old-style Biblical names like "Mary", "Ruth" or "Daniel" are more common in modern Africa than these more traditional ones.

I guess this, coupled with the modern tendency towards individualisation, has driven forward the black names thing.

Fashion is as much of a factor, though. Almost nobody called their daughters "Wendy" until JM Barrie's Peter Pan was published. Many of the African names just sound pretty, which I would guess has more to do with their popularity than any political effects

So much for origins.

What remains unanswered, though, are the cause and effects of the increased cultural polarity driven by the segregationist desire within white and black America.

Is it confidence, bloody-mindedness, naivety, or all three, that drives Black Americans to make themselves ever more distinctive, in the face of a white society that has clearly not come to terms with its private racism, whatever improvements it has made to its public policy?

This links to the "Bill Cosby on Education" thread, too, in that black Americans, especailly young poor urban black American males, seem somewhat averse to doing anything that might be seen as "acting white". this might be fair enough, if it didn't often include having a career in something other than crime or entertainment, getting an education, and so on.

I really can't add too much to the comments on black v white sounding names as I generally agree with the comments.

I do, though, think I can add some thoughts to'

Lastly, a non-racial point:
Is the urge to spell names "distinctively" (a euphemism for "incorrectly", in my opinion) a hoped for signal of individuality, or evidence of the increasing functional illiteracy of some parts of American civilisation?

My name, KimberlEE, is one that most would think is spelt incorrectly. Although I would say that it is not. The correct spelling is the one on my birth certificate. There were several reasons my parents decided to be different. One of them was individualism and their desire for me be different from other Kimberly's (Kimberley, I think is the common spelling in England) in the world. The other reason, though, they opted for a different spelling was because they feared that I would be made fun of, associated with Kimberly Clark. Only 1 person while I was growing up referred to me as Kimberly Clark, and since I didn't know the company made toilet paper (and other, not so desirable, products that you would not like to be associated with) that reference went completely over my head. Illiteracy never played a part in determining my name. I never thought that any other parent, that opted for spelling their children's names differently then the norm, showed the slightest bit of reference to their possible illiteracy. As I said in the beginning of my post, your name is spelt correctly if that is the way it appears on your birth certificate. Your name is YOUR identity not what other people think your identity should be, and that includes the spelling.

Is the urge to spell names "distinctively" (a euphemism for "incorrectly", in my opinion) a hoped for signal of individuality, or evidence of the increasing functional illiteracy of some parts of American civilisation?

What a fun subject. Names are what identify us, and hopefully make us unique. The intentional “misspellings” are attempts to make a person stand out. Who’s to say what is a misspelling, though?

Here’s a fascinating site about the origin of names. It might change your mind about some “black-sounding” names. While some are just plain made-up, some of them are variations on very old names. Here’s a couple of examples:

“Latoya” has an English origin
“Latisha” is another spelling for Leticia, which comes from the Latin name Laetitia which meant "joy, happiness"
“Jamal” is Arabic and means “beauty”
“Aliyah” means "to ascend" in Hebrew or Arabic
“Kwame”, which is a true African name means “born on Saturday” (!)
I would think you’d have to be careful with “Abdul”, which means “servant of”

My first name is of French origin (Suzanne), but when you go back further, it is from Sousanna, the Greek form of the Hebrew name Shoshannah which was derived from the Hebrew word shushan meaning "lily" (in modern Hebrew this also means "rose"). Sheesh! And people have been misspelling and mispronouncing it my entire life (Soo-ZAN, not SOO-zun)!

As for the targeting of “black-sounding” names for discrimination, I think what Julian says is unfortunately true.

And as for Scottish preachers, don’t forget that the majority of “overseers” in slave days were Scottish, too, and many slaves adopted their surnames, also.