The Daily Beast had an interesting story, Are Black Names Weird or Are You Just Racist?. Personally, I’ve never understood the fascination that (generally) white people seem to have with the names some African Americans choose for their children. The fact that a personal name may be novel and arbitrary seems to me to be a feature not a bug, and the criticism of certain names seems to ignore that most “white” names would likely seem pretty weird if it weren’t for their common usage in our culture.
As the Daily Beast’s Jamelle Bouie puts it,
On Twitter, riffing off of the Reddit thread, I mused on this double standard with a comment and a joke. “Seriously, I will take your ‘questions’ about ‘weird’ black names seriously when you make fun of Reince Priebus and Rand Paul,” followed by “White people giving their kids names like Saxby Chambliss and Tagg Romney is a clear sign of cultural pathology.” If names like “DeShawn” and “Shanice” are fair targets for ridicule, then the same should be true for “Saxby” and “Tagg.”
Hear hear.
One of the common things I hear people do is make up little stories about why African Americans name their children this or that, which rarely happens with odd “white” names. For example, you’ll rarely hear someone claim that a name like “Saxby” must refer to his parents’ love of the saxophone or that “Tagg” must have been named after a popular children’s games. But you will see people like this commenter to the Daily Beast article make such claims for African American names.
As for the “iqua’s”, that just bugs me. I knew a woman named Aquanetta.. Aqua Net is hairspray!
The reason the woman was named Aquanetta almost certainly had nothing to do with hairspray. Rather, the name was popularized by a Venezuelan-born B-movie actress who used Acquanetta as her stage name long before the hair spray brand was in use.
Acquanetta appeared in several B-grade movies from Universal Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She ended up moving to Mesa, Arizona where she became something of a local celebrity hosting a local television show that accompanied a fright night-style double feature (sort of a Southwestern Elvira).
There was an all-girl band from New York that called itself the Aquanettas and plenty of fans of her movies keeping both her memory and her name alive.
But its just easier to stick with ignorance and assume that a name like Aquanetta must be a silly take off of the hair spray. Such claims tell us a lot more about those making such assertions than it does about people who choose uncommon names for their children.