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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.

Fryer Jr., while discussing his names research on a radio show, took a call from a

black woman who was upset with the name just given to her baby niece. It was

pronounced shuh-TEED but was in fact spelled “Shithead.” Or consider the twin

boys OrangeJello and LemonJello, also black, whose parents further dignified

their choice by instituting the pronunciations a-RON-zhello and le-MON-zhello.

OrangeJello, LemonJello, and Shithead have yet to catch on among the masses,

but other names do. How does a name migrate through the population, and

why? Is it purely a matter of zeitgeist, or is there some sensible explanation? We

all know that names rise and fall and rise—witness the return of Sophie and Max

from near extinction—but is there a discernible pattern to these movements?

The answer lies in the California data, and the answer is yes.

Among the most interesting revelations in the data is the correlation between a

baby’s name and the parent’s socioeconomic status. Consider the most common

female names found in middle-income white households versus low-income

white households. (These and other lists to follow include data from the 1990s

alone, to ensure a large sample that is also current.)

Most Common Middle-Income White Girl Names

1. Sarah

2. Emily

3. Jessica

4. Lauren

5. Ashley

6. Amanda

7. Megan

8. Samantha

9. Hannah

10. Rachel

11. Nicole

12. Taylor

13. Elizabeth

14. Katherine

15. Madison

16. Jennifer

17. Alexandra

18. Brittany

19. Danielle

20. Rebecca

Most Common Low-Income White Girl Names