Steven Dubner - Freakonomics

As with the ECLS study, Fryer went looking for the answer in a mountain of data: birth-certificate information for every child born in California since 1961.

The data, covering more than sixteen million births, included standard items such as name, gender, race, birth-weight, and the parents’ marital status, as well as more telling factors about the parents: their zip code (which indicates socioeconomic status and a neighborhood’s racial composition), their means of paying the hospital bill (again, an economic indicator), and their level of education.

The California data prove just how dissimilarly black and white parents name their children. White and Asian-American parents, meanwhile, give their children remarkably similar names; there is some disparity between white and Hispanic-American parents, but it is slim compared to the black-white naming gap.

The data also show the black-white gap to be a recent phenomenon. 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 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—probably because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys’ names than girls’.) Given the location and timing of this change—dense urban areas where Afro-American activism was gathering 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.

A great many black names today are unique to blacks. More than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black, born that year in California. (There were also 228 babies named Unique during the 1990s alone, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.) Even among very popular black names, there is little overlap with whites. Of the 626 baby girls named Deja in the 1990s, 591 were black. Of the 454

girls named Precious, 431 were black. Of the 318 Shanices, 310 were black.

What kind of 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 and ballet are thought to be “acting white,” Fryer says, then mothers who call their babies Shanice are simply “acting black.”

The California study shows that many white parents send as strong a signal in the opposite direction. More than 40 percent of the white babies are given names that are at least four times more common among whites. Consider Connor and Cody, Emily and Abigail. In one recent ten-year stretch, each of these names was given to at least two thousand babies in California—fewer than 2 percent of them black.

So what are the “whitest” names and the “blackest” names?

The Twenty “Whitest” Girl Names

1. Molly

2. Amy

3. Claire

4. Emily

5. Katie

6. Madeline

7. Katelyn

8. Emma

9. Abigail

10. Carly

11. Jenna

12. Heather

13. Katherine

14. Caitlin

15. Kaitlin

16. Holly

17. Allison

18. Kaitlyn

19. Hannah

20. Kathryn

The Twenty “Blackest” Girl Names

1. Imani

2. Ebony

3. Shanice

4. Aaliyah

5. Precious

6. Nia

7. Deja

8. Diamond

9. Asia

10. Aliyah

11. Jada

12. Tierra

13. Tiara

14. Kiara

15. Jazmine

16. Jasmin

17. Jazmin

18. Jasmine

19. Alexus

20. Raven

The Twenty “Whitest” Boy Names

1. Jake

2. Connor

3. Tanner

4. Wyatt

5. Cody

6. Dustin

7. Luke

8. Jack

9. Scott

10. Logan

11. Cole

12. Lucas

13. Bradley

14. Jacob

15. Garrett

16. Dylan

17. Maxwell

18. Brett

19. Hunter

20. Colin

The Twenty “Blackest” Boy Names

1. DeShawn

2. DeAndre

3. Marquis

4. Darnell

5. Terrell

6. Malik

7. Trevon

8. Tyrone

9. Willie

10. Dominique

11. Demetrius

12. Reginald

13. Jamal

14. Maurice

15. Jalen

16. Darius

17. Xavier

18. Terrance

19. Andre

20. Darryl

So how does it matter if you have a very white name or a very black name? Over the years, a series of “audit studies” have tried to measure how people perceive different names. In a typical audit study, a researcher would send two identical (and fake) résumés, one with a traditionally white name and the other with an immigrant or minority-sounding name, to potential employers. The “white”

résumés have always gleaned more job interviews.

According to such a study, if DeShawn Williams and Jake Williams sent identical résumés to the same employer, Jake Williams would be more likely to get a callback. The implication is that black-sounding names carry an economic penalty. Such studies are tantalizing but severely limited, for they can’t explain why DeShawn didn’t get the call. Was he rejected because the employer is a racist and is convinced that DeShawn Williams is black? Or did he reject him because “DeShawn” sounds like someone from a low-income, low-education family? A résumé is a fairly undependable set of clues—a recent study showed that more than 50 percent of them contain lies—so “DeShawn” may simply signal a disadvantaged background to an employer who believes that workers from such backgrounds are undependable.

Nor do the black-white audit studies predict what might have happened in a job interview. What if the employer is racist, and if he unwittingly agreed to interview a black person who happened to have a white-sounding name—would he be any more likely to hire the black applicant after meeting face-to-face? Or is the interview a painful and discouraging waste of time for the black applicant—

that is, an economic penalty for having a white-sounding name? Along those same lines, perhaps a black person with a white name pays an economic penalty in the black community; and what of the potential advantage to be gained in the black community by having a distinctively black name? But because the audit studies can’t measure the actual life outcomes of the fictitious DeShawn Williams versus Jake Williams, they can’t assess the broader impact of a distinctively black name.

Maybe DeShawn should just change his name.

People do this all the time, of course. The clerks in New York City’s civil court recently reported that name changes are at an all-time high. Some of the changes are purely, if bizarrely, aesthetic. A young couple named Natalie Jeremijenko and Dalton Conley recently renamed their four-year-old son Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley. Some people change names for economic purposes: after a New York livery-cab driver named Michael Goldberg was shot in early 2004, it was reported that Mr. Goldberg was in fact an Indian-born Sikh who thought it advantageous to take a Jewish name upon immigrating to New York. Gold-berg’s decision might have puzzled some people in show business circles, where it is a time-honored tradition to change Jewish names. Thus did Issur Danielovitch become Kirk Douglas; thus did the William Morris Agency rise to prominence under its namesake, the former Zelman Moses.

The question is, would Zelman Moses have done as well had he not become William Morris? And would DeShawn Williams do any better if he called himself Jake Williams or Connor Williams? It is tempting to think so—just as it is tempting to think that a truckload of children’s books will make a child smarter.

Though the audit studies can’t be used to truly measure how much a name matters, the California names data can.

How? The California data included not only each baby’s vital statistics but information about the mother’s level of education, income and, most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers dream about, making it possible to identify a set of children who were born under similar circumstances, then locate them again twenty or thirty years later to see how they turned out. Among the hundreds of thousands of such women in the California data, many bore distinctively black names and many others did not. Using regression analysis to control for other factors that might influence life trajectories, it was then possible to measure the impact of a single factor—in this case, a woman’s first name—on her educational, income, and health outcomes.

So does a name matter?

The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—

whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn’t the fault of their names. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don’t tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that’s why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. A DeShawn is more likely to have been handicapped by a low-income, low-education, single-parent background. His name is an indicator—not a cause—of his outcome. Just as a child with no books in his home isn’t likely to test well in school, a boy named DeShawn isn’t likely to do as well in life.

And what if DeShawn had changed his name to Jake or Connor: would his situation improve? Here’s a guess: anybody who bothers to change his name in the name of economic success is—like the high-school freshmen in Chicago who entered the school-choice lottery—at least highly motivated, and motivation is probably a stronger indicator of success than, well, a name.

Just as the ECLS data answered questions about parenting that went well beyond the black-white test gap, the California names data tell a lot of stories in addition to the one about distinctively black names. Broadly speaking, the data tell us how parents see themselves—and, more significantly, what kind of expectations they have for their children.

Here’s a question to begin with: where does a name come from, anyway? Not, that is, the actual source of the name—that much is usually obvious: there’s the Bible, there’s the huge cluster of traditional English and Germanic and Italian and French names, there are princess names and hippie names, nostalgic names and place names. Increasingly, there are brand names (Lexus, Armani, Bacardi, Timber-land) and what might be called aspirational names. The California data show eight Harvards born during the 1990s (all of them black), fifteen Yales (all white), and eighteen Princetons (all black). There were no Doctors but three Lawyers (all black), nine Judges (eight of them white), three Senators (all white), and two Presidents (both black). Then there are the invented names. Roland G.