The name 'draymond' had me sniggering, is there a special book for black baby names?
Ridiculous names: Sure, we all joke about them, but they’re real.
But with creative names, as with all creative enterprises, there is wheat and there is chaff; all too often, the former is cast aside with the latter.
And nowhere is this more true than with the particular case of names given to African-Americans.
That African-Americans have a tendency to buck more common names is obvious.
Take a quick glance down the Olympic roster. It is the black names that disproportionately stand out:
Tayshaun, Deron, Rau’shee, Raynell, Deontay, Taraje, Jozy, Kerron, Hyleas, Chaunte, Bershawn, Lashawn, Sanya, Trevell, Sheena, Ogonna, Dremiel.
You can safely bet that NBC’s commentators practiced these a few more times in the mirror than the name “Michael Phelps.”
And, indeed, black Americans have spearheaded and continue to lead the trend of creative naming in this country, even if they haven’t garnered as many headlines as Gwyneth Paltrow.
Creative naming has reached every race and class, but “it is largely and profoundly the legacy of African-Americans,” writes Eliza Dinwiddie-Boyd in her baby-naming book “Proud Heritage.” Shalondra and Shaday, Jenneta and Jonelle, Michandra and Milika — in some parts of the country today, nearly a third of African-American girls are given a name belonging to no one else in the state (boys’ names tend to be somewhat more conservative).
Such onomastic inventiveness has irked more than a few observers. Not long ago, a news item with the headline “Federal Judge: Enough With the Stupid Names” began to circulate in many people’s inboxes.
The judge, declaring that he was fed up with black children’s “ridiculous names,” apparently issued an order requiring black women to receive approval from three whites before naming their babies.
“They put in apostrophes where none are needed,” fumed the judge.
“They think a ‘Q’ is a must.
There was a time when Shaniqua and Tawanda were names you dreaded.
Now, if you’re a black girl, you hope you get a name as sensible as one of those.” Soon, according to the article, elementary school teachers were expressing relief. No longer would they have to wonder in panic on the first day of school,
“How do I pronounce Q’J’Q’Sha?”From the beginning, many black Americans had distinctive names.
The weirdly classical Caesar was a particularly common slave name, bestowed, it would seem, by slaveholders with a profoundly unfunny sense of irony.
And sometimes distinctive slave names were carried out of Africa and preserved:
Some African societies name children after the day of the week they were born, and “there is a preponderance of day names among the leaders of the very early slave revolts,” writes Joey Lee Dillard in “Black Names.”
From early on, then, some distinctive black names were tied to black resistance against white oppression.
Distinctive black naming persisted through the centuries; the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee.
But by and large, it remained a minority practice within black culture, and most black names weren’t all that different from those given to whites.
Then, in the 1960s, something changed, resulting in an unprecedented spike in black creative names, to the point where just a few years ago, “Freakonomics” authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner noted that “nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among the names of every baby, white and black, born that year in California.”
What happened? The dates, of course, are suggestive.
The ’60s were a time of massive black protest from which emerged an accentuated separatist strain in black thought, epitomized in the Black Power movement. Blacks became increasingly interested in Africa and eager to show pride in their roots. (Indeed, “Roots” — Alex Haley’s book as well as the TV miniseries based upon it — itself had a remarkable effect on naming practices.
According to Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson, the name Kizzy, which belonged to a “Roots” character, skyrocketed from oblivion to become the 17th most popular name for black girls in Illinois in 1977.)
Islam began in these years to have a clear influence, too, most visibly with Cassius Clay adopting the name Muhammad Ali in 1964.
Others followed suit, including two fellows named Lew Alcindor and LeRoi Jones, whom you know as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Amiri Baraka.
Around this time, an American boy named Barack Hussein Obama would be born. His given names, of Semitic origin, mean “blessed” and “good.” Soon, out of these more political traditions grew a new one of creating names whose sounds the parents merely found pleasing.
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By the 1970s and 1980s it had become common within African-American culture to invent new names.
Many of the invented names took elements from popular existing names.
Prefixes such as La/Le, Da/De, Ra/Re, or Ja/Je and suffixes such as -ique/iqua, -isha, and -aun/-awn are common, as well as inventive spellings for common names. The book Baby Names Now: From Classic to Cool--The Very Last Word on First Names places the origins of "La" names in African-American culture in New Orleans.
The name LaKeisha is typically considered American in origin, but has elements of it pulled from both French and African roots.
Other names like LaTanisha, DeShawn, JaMarcus, DeAndre, and Shaniqua were created in the same way. Punctuation marks are seen more often within African-American names than other American names, such as the names
Mo'nique and D'Andre.
