False Links. The Literacy Site, one of six click-to-donate sites (free to the donor) that I go to via The Hunger Site, is presently displaying the claim "The number of books in the home is directly tied to a child's reading abilities." That implies a cause-and-effect relationship: more books in the home produces greater literacy. But that is not the tie.
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The actual relationship is that parents who value literacy have books in their home, and those parents pass along their concern for literacy to their children. There may even be a genetic component at work: smart parents read; smart parents have smart children; smart children read.
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The presence of books, then, is an indicator of literacy, not a cause. Literate people buy books and keep them in the home. Illiterates do not. In the same way, emaciation is an indicator of malnutrition, not a cause.
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Relationships are too often seen as causal that are only coincidental or companionate. Sometimes the one phenomenon that is suggested as cause of another is actually a result — people get things exactly backward. Or one thing is only casually, not causally, connected to the other.
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Some years ago I saw a claim that children with odd names tend to do poorly in school, which implied that their odd names caused them problems that affected their scholastic performance. I knew immediately, however, that such an assertion concealed a racial issue, because a lot of the people in schools today who have what most people regard as bizarre names are black, and not just black but also from the lowest socioeconomic classes.
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A number of black comedians have used this tendency of lowest-class blacks to give their kids ridiculous names to prompt lafter in their acts: things like "Congolea" (from "Congoleum", a brand name for floor coverings). But it's really not funny, because black parents who give their children bizarre and obviously black names may be setting their children on a course of scholastic difficulty and lifelong economic hardship.

If nothing else, the first paper [study], * * * shows, for instance, that in recent years, more than 40 percent of black girls [in California] were given names that weren't given to even one of the more than 100,000 white girls born in the state the same year.

The paper says black names are associated with lower socioeconomic status, but the authors don't believe it's the names that create an economic burden. * * *

The data do appear to show that a poor woman's daughter is more likely to be poor when she gives birth herself — but no more so because she has a distinctively black name.

To [one study author, Roland] Fryer, that suggests black parents shouldn't be afraid to choose ethnic names. It also, he says, suggests more broadly that for blacks to improve economically, they don't have to change their culture, but should push for greater integration in society.

"It's not really that you're named Kayesha that matters, it's that you live in a community where you're likely to get that name that matters," Fryer said. * * *

The question is whether a distinctive name is a cause or consequence of black isolation.

A baby-naming website evaluated conflicting studies and had this to say:

A name like Dwayne, which was strongly African-American but carried no socioeconomic markers, didn't affect teachers' expectations. [Studies have shown that teachers tend to find what they expect.] But a name like Da'Quan, with multiple signals of economic status, did. Teachers, consciously or not, drew inferences about the child's background and potential based on these naming signals. In Figlio's data, a pair of brothers named Dwayne and Da'Quan could expect subtly different treatment in school, which translated into different levels of scholastic success [which in turn could produce differing levels of success in life after school].

It's a useful demonstration for prospective name-and-number-crunchers that names carry a rich web of connotations. People are extremely sensitive to names' nuances: history, popularity, spelling, punctuation...everything speaks to our mental models of names and culture. There's a reason that parents agonize for months over name choices. It's not just a black or white question.

Now, I don't regard "Dwayne" as particularly black. It's just a spelling variant of the familiar name "Duane". One man named "Duane" (Ausherman) has found 106 different spellings of that one name! There are, however, lots of names we do identify as black, from Shaniqua and Loquanda to Jamal and Deondre. Where do they even get these silly names? Do they go to authentic African sources, or just throw together some syllables they think "sound African"? How about "Boombalahboombah Johnson"?
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Fryer's suggestion ("parents shouldn't be afraid to choose ethnic names") is incredibly bad advice. When the "culture" from which ridiculous names proceed is the Culture of Poverty, which promotes stupidity and despises education, and "ethnic names" are a mark of that Culture of Poverty — which they are — then it is indispensable to black progress that parents refuse suggestions that they give their kids ridiculous names but instead choose names as "white bread" as they can stand.
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Fryer's irresponsible advice mirrors the aggressive stupidity and race-baiting of some blacks. They go out of their way to make a point of being black, then bitch and moan that white people treat them differently! This has been going on for a long time.
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In the Charlie Chan movies of the 1940s, Charlie Chan himself (tho usually played by a white guy) had a thick Chinese accent, but No. 1 Son (played most famously by Keye Luke) spoke absolutely flawless American English. No one speaking to him over the phone would know his race. But a sizable percentage of blacks go out of their way to make their race plain even over the phone, by choosing to speak 'blackese' (an apt term here, given the comparison I'm making to Chinese) — even affecting an accent they weren't born into in order to show solidarity with their "black brothers and sisters" and simultaneously "stick it to the white man".
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They even convert to Islam (out of the insanely wrong notion that Christianity enslaved blacks but Islam liberated them, whereas the exact opposite is true, there being slavery in the Moslem world to this day!), and then give their children Arabic names, refuse to participate in the holidays that the bulk of their compatriots celebrate, and then feign indignation when they aren't "accepted". They reject the society around them but then demand that the society they reject accept them! It doesn't work that way, moron. Nine times out of ten, what you blatantly and offensively reject rejects you with equal vigor.
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Some blacks just love to play the victim, as do some Jews. Essentially all members of other minorities aspire to acceptance and full integration while remaining true to themselves. But blacks and Jews, clutching to their breast ancient slavery (in the case of blacks, in the U.S. South; in the case of Jews, in Egypt), make a chip on the shoulder the center of their being, and spend their entire lives trying to prove that everything that is wrong with their lives is attributable to somebody else.
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To return to the initial premise of this blog entry, what is the relationship here between bizarre names and poor performance in school? Do ridiculous black names (Keshia, Ras) themselves cause the problem, or do they merely indicate a whole complex of problems that produce failure in school and in life? Does it matter if a kid is given a ridiculous name?
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Teasing matters. But not to some people. The successors of the "Ann Landers" column, two women who write "Annie's Mailbox", addressed bizarre names last Saturday, June 3, when someone wrote in:

I recently started working in a pediatric office. I am horrified by some of the names these parents give their children. A 16-year-old single mother just named her baby "Pretty." [In Spanish, "pretty" is our familiar name "Linda". Had that mother simply named her dauter "Linda", there would have been no problem. But perhaps she was a (nativist) champion of English, so wanted to make the point that if Hispanics can name their dauter "Linda", knowing that it means "pretty", English-speaking people can name their dauter "Pretty", since it means to English-speaking Americans exactly the same thing as "Linda" means to Spanish-speaking Americans.]

Don't these parents realize the cruelty they are subjecting their children to, not only in childhood, but for the rest of their lives? When I write to you, I say, "Dear Annie." But I doubt I would have any respect for a columnist named "Dear Cupcake." Such frivolous names compromise credibility and may hinder success.

I think kids these days have a hard enough time growing up without having to defend their names. What do you say? — Jane Smith

The writers of the column responded, blithely:

We agree that some names give children fits and don't improve with age. However, in the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of children with unusual names, which in turn, means it isn't so odd to have one. Gwyneth Paltrow has a daughter named "Apple," and Jason Lee [Who?] named his son "Pilot Inspektor." It almost makes us pine for "Moon Unit Zappa." Such names are distinctive, which is the point the parents are trying to make. If parents also make the child feel special and loved, the name won't hurt them — and if they truly can't stand it, they can always change it later.

But harm done in childhood can stay with people for a very long time, even, in some cases, to the end of their days.
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People should be told not only not to give their children ridiculous names that will cause them endless embarrassment and teasing, but also to think about initials. "Jeremy Richard Klein" may seem perfectly fine. But "JRK"? "Brian Arthur Davidson" = BAD. "Diane Ivette Masterson"=DIM. "Alan Stephen Smith"=ASS.
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In college, I attended some political meeting at which was announced formation of a "Student Union of Concerned Sociologists". Someone had the good sense to tell the organizers that the acronym would be SUCS, and they changed the name.
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What's in a name? A lot.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,484.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:10 AM