Steven Dubner - Freakonomics

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.