Freakonomics

As it happens, Loser and Wi

Every generation seems to produce a few marquee academics who advance the thinking on black culture. Roland G. Fryer Jr., the young black economist who analyzed the “acting white” phenomenon and the black-white test score gap, may be among the next. His ascension has been unlikely. An indifferent high-school student from an unstable family, he went to the University of Texas at Arlington on an athletic scholarship. Two things happened to him during college: he quickly realized he would never make the NFL or the NBA; and, taking his studies seriously for the first time in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate work at Pe

Fryer’s mission is the study of black underachievement. “One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well,” he says. “You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst-performing ethnic group on SATs. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period. I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this.”

In addition to economic and social disparity between blacks and whites, Fryer had become intrigued by the virtual segregation of culture. Blacks and whites watch different television shows. (Monday Night Football is the only show that typically appears on each group’s top ten list; Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms in history, never ranked in the top fifty among blacks.) They smoke different cigarettes. (Newports enjoy a 75 percent market share among black teenagers versus 12 percent among whites; the white teenagers are mainly smoking Marlboros.) And black parents give their children names that are starkly different from white children’s.

Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?

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 Co

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. Je

12. Heather

13. Katherine

14. Caitlin

15. Kaitlin

16. Holly

17. Allison

18. Kaitlyn

19. Ha

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. Co

3. Ta

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.