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Comment by ebfe | Hacker News Reader

The first study confounds the issues of race and class. Emily is not the white equivalent to Lakisha, Brandi is.

further complicated by the tendency towards aspirational naming, as over time formerly upscale names like Emily / Alexandra / Madison etc become associated with low-end socioeconomics due to overexposure.

however, you'd have to be willfully ignorant to deny the perceptual gap between high-end/low-end Emily/Amber vs. Lakisha

So what is a "high-end" black name?

The richest black Americans are named:

Oprah, Michael, Tiger, Sean, Robert, Mariah, Earvin, Jay, Bill, Sheila, Tyler, Shaquille, Dr, Master, Berry, Russell, Quintin, Beyonce, Prince.

The richest Americans are named:

Bill, Warren, Larry, Jeff, Charles, David, Mark, Michael, Jim, Larry, Sergey (immigrant, didn't change name), Alice (inherited), S. Robson (inherited) Christy (inherited), Sheldon, George, Phil, Forrest, Jacqueline, John, Steve, Carl.

Bill and Michael are on both those lists, but you would not say they are "black" names.

The thing is, there aren't a large group of upper class black people with different names from upper class white people, so you don't have an image in your mind of high-end black names. The rich and famous black people you know have either normal "white" names or very rare names (Beyonce, Prince, Tiger). High-end names default to looking white, since white is "normal" in USA.

By Dr. do you mean Andre and by Master do you mean Percy?

Don't forget also that for many of those black names, those people are celebrities and sports stars: they don't have to worry about getting a job interview at some soulless corporation. Beyonce, Oprah, Shaquille, etc. made their millions in the entertainment business and likely never had to deal with that. However, someone sending in a resume with the name "Shaquille" for a programming job isn't going to get a pass just because he shares a name with a basketball legend; he'll be subject to whatever bias about black people the resume screener has.

Reginald?

im not sure if youre joking but in my experience this is pretty accurate.

it may have been misunderstood: when I am referring to "high-end/low-end" I am referring to Emily as high-end, Amber as low-end --- not Lakisha. I do not know what the equivalent comparison would be using the example of Lakisha, whether or not that is considered upscale or not.

> So what is a "high-end" black name?

The unfortunate implication of parent's statement is that there are no "high-end" black names, and therefore all 'black' names are low-end. Fuck, this is depressing.

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