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"    By now, those of us who watch True Detective are in agreement about its stellar storytelling. The acting, the character development, even those creepy birdcage things--they&amp;#039;re bordering on standing ovation status at the end of each episode. This is HBO putting its boxing gloves on and raging out against all of its competitors.  A friend of mind goes back and forth with me about the show every week. His favorite topic revolves around the names. There&amp;#039;s a Tyrone and a Leroy on the show, and that both characters are white astounds him. He&amp;#039;s a white 30-something, and we&amp;#039;ve talked through this idea with each other for years: Guessing race and judging intent simply from someone&amp;#039;s name is a tricky game. While the consequences for people on TV are soon forgotten, in the real world, it can be much more permanent.  There&amp;#039;s a video of a Houston-area girl who attacked a classmate last year. It trended on Twitter and Facebook for days in December, producing memes and hundreds of thousands of page views. It&amp;#039;s hard to watch. That they were high school-aged girls made it worse. That both girls were black, of course, pushed the story in another direction. Soon enough the narrative began to take its first breath. Of course they would act like this. Look at their names. The attacker&amp;#039;s name was Sharkeisha Thomas. Based on the information, Thomas deserved all the vitriol that came her way. Unfortunately, the victim, ShaMicheal Manuel didn&amp;#039;t escape the scrutiny either. That she was punched and kicked was seen by some as her destiny. It initiated conversations on parenting \u2014 yet another marker of Black America as a failed state. Comment boards went into overdrive. The theme? Neither one of these girls would amount to much of anything. These people are simply not worthy of avoiding a physical fight, as their names so brilliantly illustrate. The debate on what many people call &amp;quot;black names&amp;quot; has been raging for a couple of decades now. It&amp;#039;s been researched and discussed from places like The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names by Roland Fryer Jr. and Freakonomics&amp;#039; Steven Levitt to sketches by Key and Peele. Then there are articles like this one and this one and this one.    We know that people are judged harshly for having these names, with reports chronicling that employers are 50% less likely to call back an applicant who has a black name. Loan applications are impacted as well. We know it&amp;#039;s wrong. And yet we soldier on, mostly disinterested about the collateral damage. This is one of the reasons why Taikeisha Johnson* named her children after U.S. Presidents. &amp;quot;My children&amp;#039;s names were calculated and given to them for specific reasons. My mother had three children. She told me that names were also titles and could help shape the person you wanted your child to be. She named my youngest sister Victoria. We thought that was such a regal name and, as such, we treated her like a princess,&amp;quot; says Johnson. &amp;quot;When I had children, that bit of advice stuck with me and I decided I would name my children Taylor, Grant and Carter.&amp;quot; Johnson, who works in the California courts system, spent her formative years battling negative perceptions about her name. First as a child in inner-city Los Angeles, and later as a teenager in the outer suburbs where she felt ostracized. &amp;quot;The TV show Martin was popular in my high school days. This show exaggerated the stereotypical African-American woman with a character named Shanaynay,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;This character became a euphemism for referencing a certain kind of black women. Especially those with names like mine.&amp;quot; Johnson often just goes by Ty when meeting new people, hoping to draw attention away from what so many think is a fatal flaw.  You probably have some common misconceptions about these kinds of names. Let&amp;#039;s get those out of the way. 1. Black names aren&amp;#039;t respected because they are made up. All names are made up. The only real variable is by whom. Unless you can lay claim to a Pequannock or Cherokee ancestry, there are very few American names. By saying black names aren&amp;#039;t real, American names, you&amp;#039;re implying that something cultivated entirely on American soil \u2014 by American-born people \u2014 is inherently less American than one created in a pre-Colonial, European past. 2. Why don&amp;#039;t black people do what European immigrants did and change their native names to something more &amp;quot;normal?&amp;quot; From 1900 to 1920, millions of Europeans came to America to escape religious persecution, oppressive political systems, or simply in search of a better life. Many kept their traditions, but in order to compete for jobs and prove their American loyalty, names like Liev had to be changed. Problem is, during this boom, black people were already here \u2014 and had been for hundreds of years \u2014 with the same mainstream names as everyone else.    For years, we&amp;#039;ve been having the wrong discussion. Bumping our heads against the wall, wondering why the wall still stands there, triumphant in its integrity. The question isn&amp;#039;t whether or not Taikesha is a black name \u2014 and therefore &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; \u2014 it&amp;#039;s whether it&amp;#039;s an American name. The answer to that is an unequivocal yes. The notion that names like Charles and Sandra are American names is false. These names predate the creation of the Constitution. While fine names, they are no more an American staple than a plate of bangers and mash. For those who claim that it&amp;#039;s logical for an English-speaking nation to prefer English names, it&amp;#039;s still problematic. If having a name like Robert, Mary or any other Downton Abbey name was all that mattered, maybe I could be persuaded. But how do we account for the dozens of the Europeans names that are considered okay? Names like Zoe \u2014 a Greek name that had an almost immeasurably small foothold in America until the late 1980s \u2014 are still deemed superior. Why exactly? To be a truly American name, shouldn&amp;#039;t its genesis happen in America? In this way, black names can find kinship in the beginnings of Jazz music. During the early decades of the 20th Century, jazz was well regarded for its improvisation, its embellished harmonies, its pulsating modernism. It was an original \u2014 a wholly American art form \u2014 created by a wholly American populace and endowed with all the inalienable rights due its worth. These names do not garner the same consideration. They aren&amp;#039;t respected, because for many, black culture retains an option for indifference.   &amp;quot;Messiah, Rickson, Jyrell, Heavenly, Jakim, Kethlyn and Iman.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s the list Mike Lowenstein*, a high school English teacher in Brooklyn&amp;#039;s East New York neighborhood, gives when asked to recall his most memorable student names. Lowenstein, whose district is over 51 percent black, mentioned that although he&amp;#039;s heard negative remarks by his colleagues in regards to these names, they weren&amp;#039;t necessarily racially focused. They were more an indictment of the parents and their priorities, and while it&amp;#039;s true these kids were lacking in class preparedness, &amp;quot;there are also pain in the butt kids with names that could be of any race, like Brandon, Chris and James.&amp;quot; The real test comes after HS (and or college) when a name like Jyrell is entered into a hiring database. And it looks like this to the person reading it. Ask John L. Cotton. He&amp;#039;s a professor at Marquette University&amp;#039;s College Of Business Administration who recently finished a study called &amp;quot;The &amp;#039;Name Game&amp;#039; Affective &amp;amp;amp; Hiring Practices to First Names.&amp;quot; He led a team of researchers in testing for negative stigmas in hiring decisions. One of the more interesting revelations is that job recruiters often were aware that their cherry-picking practices were discriminatory and yet continued the practice.  &amp;quot;Recruiters blamed this on their clients,&amp;quot; says Cotton. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not clear if (recruiters) are responding to what companies are saying to them, or if the recruiters are responding to what they think the companies are thinking. In other words, the recruiters don&amp;#039;t want to shake things up.&amp;quot; When asked how serious the dreaded resume scan is in relation to black names, Professor Cotton didn&amp;#039;t sugarcoat it.  &amp;quot;They are not as comfortable,&amp;quot; says Cotton. &amp;quot;Someone with an unusual name is seen as dissimilar. The difficulty with this issue is that someone may drop out of consideration before the company has looked closely at their resume. It&amp;#039;s not that they are seen as not having the right background or skills or somehow unacceptable; they are dropped before those are even assessed. When skimming a pile of resumes, one thing that people will read is the name. So this probably happens early in the winnowing process.&amp;quot; This is the reality: The process is broken. Social scientists can debate all they want about why, but the tangible impact remains: It&amp;#039;s not really about the name, it&amp;#039;s about whom they think it belongs to. And it&amp;#039;s someone whom a hiring manager assumes, entirely on paper, they can&amp;#039;t get a drink with after work. The National Bureau of Economic Research states in a recent piece that many &amp;quot;distinctively black&amp;quot; names can be traced into the 19th Century. It has less to do with the &amp;quot;Black Power Movement&amp;quot; of the late &amp;#039;60s and &amp;#039;70s than many believe. By connecting these names to that era, they can be easily tied to perceived militancy and thus pushed out of the mainstream. That&amp;#039;s where the lack of comfort makes its presence felt. The assumption is that too much is different, that they can&amp;#039;t imagine talking about their problems, the news, their families at work. Somewhere down the line \u2014 recruiters, hiring managers, or hiring managers thinking they&amp;#039;re doing what&amp;#039;s best for their employees \u2014 are just not comfortable. And it&amp;#039;s bad for business if you happen to have one of those names.  The animus of this debate isn&amp;#039;t entirely racially one-sided. In some black enclaves, it&amp;#039;s a point of emphasis: Avoiding connectivity to negative perceptions is paramount. In this context, names like &amp;quot;Shalonda&amp;quot; just aren&amp;#039;t cutting it. Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, an expert in onomastics (the study of proper names) and a professor at Florida State University, talks about the conditioning that takes place in certain environs where class division take place. She remembers working on graduation commencement materials with a black colleague who commented with disdain on the black names on the sheet. Surprised at his stance, she replied &amp;quot;Yeah, but they&amp;#039;re graduating!&amp;quot; as a way to keep things in perspective. &amp;quot;When the migrations started, some Northern blacks discriminated against Southern blacks. What happens is that often the tendency of the oppressed is to sometimes become oppressors themselves. You want to push yourself to the top of the ladder,&amp;quot; says McGregory. &amp;quot;Some in the middle class have always thrived to be the most assimilated and sometimes do the bidding for the larger society.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s not yet a happy ending to this story. When a group is caught between the maelstrom that is both race and class, it can be an ordeal to find daylight. We can advance a conversation that can be quickly advanced. All we have to do is look past the first line on a resum\u00E9. It happened to jazz. Can it happen to names? *Some names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a32796/why-do-we-still-have-unhireable-names/>