Freakonomics Page #3

-TaSha and Shamika -Shaniqua and NaShan and KayShan

I know this girl, her name is "treasure", TREZURE

struck me as typically that's more like an african american name

I like the names that begin with SHA, like Shaheem, Shahee, Shamur

Shakeem, ShaKoor

You know - Oprah. It's popular

It was actually in the fifties

and the early sisties that we saw

huge overlaps in the naming patterns of blacks and whites

So people name their kids John and Michael

and names like that

And what you saw was around 19 ... in the 1968 or so

kind of the black power movement actually

you saw distinct biofabrication

with black names getting more disctinctively black

and a lot of them are islamic names

Because the black power movement is about identity - who are we?

Who are you? Are you part of us?

It wasn't until the late 80s and 90s that we started to get

you know, kind of the ... made up, concatenated names

that you see now

This is generation today, they saw the change the whole name change concept

they have names that are 30 letters long you know

Everybody try to do something, um ... how do you say, unique

they try to name their kids over something different you know

We had 228 unique versions of the name "Unique"

Again, my favorite was ...

UNEQQEE:

another one of my favorite was

UNEEK:

ah ... so there are a lot of people trying to be unique

So what happened to all these uniquely named kids?

Kids like poor little temptress

I think it's not the name that's doing the damage to temptress

It's that they grow up in the type of situation

where someone would name their kids Temptress

The person would actually names their kids that

probably has a host of other issues

that are influcing their kids' lifetime outcomes

Not just the name itself

What kinds of issues?

Let's look at a boy with the most studied white name

and a boy with the most studied african american name

The person who gives their kid a distinctively biased name

on average is more likely

to live in poverty

and to be kind of on the lower wrongs of the socio-economic ladder

You see, this is where Jake lives

and this is where Deshawn lives

The schools are not functiong - the teachers in those shcools aren't the same quality

as would be in Jake's neighborhood

In those neighborhoods, 80% of the households are female headed only

and what we found is that, names don't matter so much

they type of mother you have, the type of family you have

the type of community you grow up in

those things matter a lot

but what they name you, just doesn't matter

So name doesn't define your destiny?

Maybe if you name someone destiny, I don't know

But ... No. I mean your name doesn't define your desinty

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