SJC, Orpheus is from the Greek, but it was common in antebellum America for slave-owners to give their slaves Classical names, like Hercules, Orpheus, etc. So, there is some black American heritage there, even if it isn't African. I don't think so. Assuming the racism is a latent one, being confronted with the person himself, an interviewer will think of that individual more than his name. I don't know if name-discrimination would go away, but it would likely be lessened (unless of course, the applicant's manner only enforced the stereotypes of the name). That's why they say it's so important to get your foot in the door; they can get to know you personally. I think someone's touched on it a little bit already, but the discrimination is more complicated than just having a black-sounding name. The problem is having a name that invokes the ghetto. There are black-sounding names that don't sound that way. Omari, from the article, is like that (possibly because the stress is not on the last syllable). Loquesha invokes something very different. One imagines this person's parents are hostile to white America and have rejected our culture; that the family is probably less educated and less wealthy because of (or evidenced by) their failure to integrate properly; that even if the kid went to Harvard, she still didn't have the "proper upbringing" (and even if she did, she still grew up around drug-dealers) and only knows the right things for classes, and probably only got in with affirimative action anyway. It's not right, but those are the calculations being made. Omari, on the other hand, sounds more dignified; his father probably did some research to come up with that one; maybe he's a doctor who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps; he'd teach little Omari to do right. But, you still know Omari's black and even that his family took pride in their heritage and that they rejected white names; yet the stigma's not there. I think there's some compromise to be made on both sides. There is something a bit hostile about the rejection of white names. There's a hint of racial hostility to that choice. I think that's what whites (and affiliated others) are reacting to -- that this person (or his family) has purposefully set himself apart from us, he wants to be an outsider. But, whites shouldn't react so negatively to that position; it isn't a personal affront. Being a white guy, I considered while reading this thread naming my children black names. However, my children won't be white, so that won't help.
It would be interesting to see the results if they compared the black-sounding-names with unusual white-sounding-names like Moonflower or Picabo instead of names like Jennifer or Mary. Is it worse to be named Denzel or Juan or Jim-Bob or Wu? I think this study was far too limited and wasted an opportunity for more interesting findings.
Yeah it's not uncommon amongst minorities.. Ralph Lauren used to be Ralph Lifschitz Sumner Redstone used to be Murray Rothstein Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf used to be Chris Jackson
