What colour is your name?

Very interesting article at Slate on the influence of names, and also how "white" or "black" names can be.

What kind of signal does a child's name send to the world? These are the sort of questions that led to "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names," a research paper written by a white economist (Steven Levitt, a co-author of this article) and a black economist (Roland G. Fryer Jr., a young Harvard scholar who studies race). The paper acknowledged the social and economic gulf between blacks and whites but paid particular attention to the gulf between black and white culture. Blacks and whites watch different TV shows, for instance; they smoke different cigarettes. And black parents give their children names that are starkly different than white children's.

The names research was based on an extremely large and rich data set: birth-certificate information for every child born in California since 1961. The data covered more than 16 million births. It included standard items like name, gender, race, birthweight, and the parents' marital status, as well as more telling factors: the parents' ZIP code (which indicates socioeconomic status and a neighborhood's racial composition), their means of paying the hospital bill for the birth (again, an economic indicator), and their level of education.

The list of top 20 "whitest" girls' names includes seven variations on Katherine or Kaitlyn, while the top 20 "blackest" girls' names features four versions of Jasmine. (click here for the complete lists.) The boys lists are far less repetitive - only Jake/Jacob and Luke/Lucas for "whitest" and DeShawn/DeAndre for"blackest". (I know better than to publish any names I may have considered for any prospective kids, but let's just say I'm well within my demographic.)

In the end, they conclude (unsurprisingly) that it's not the name itself that matters:

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 his or her name. 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. DeShawn's name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path.