Very interesting discussion; thanks, everyone, for bringing a lot to this sensitive topic.
I think the issue here involving names is that the selection of these names by white slaveowners for African slaves was in fact racist: They chose Biblical and classical names that would both show off their own educations yet WERE NOT USED FOR WHITES. In other words, white slaveowners did not want their black slaves to have the same names that whites had. At the deepest level, the choice of these names was a racist act: these whites believed blacks were not equal to whites, were not fully human, and should be given names that marked them as separate and different.
These names were then passed down within African-American slave families and established as “black” names.
Many of these names are indeed lovely with fascinating history but their sad association with American white-on-black slavery might be too difficult to overcome – especially with a name like [name_f]Jemima[/name_f] which has further associations with post-slavery racism, whites making fun of blacks by ridiculing everything from their movements to their speech patterns to, yes, their names.
In fact, there’s a modern equivalent of this that someone sent me the other day, thinking (mistakenly) I’d be amused, about “football names,” with two white comedians introducing a roster of “football players” played by black actors introducing themselves with names like [name_m]Daquan[/name_m] and Jamiracle. “Football names” is code for “black names” and the real agenda of the video is to ridicule.
There’s another element to racism around the names widely used for slaves that I don’t think anyone has mentioned, which is that until the Age of Nameberry (I interpret that loosely), white people would not have DREAMED of using those names because they were “black names” and so inferior, unattractive, undesirable. In the U.S., names like [name_f]Jemima[/name_f] and [name_m]Amos[/name_m] that have more recent associations with black characters in racist popular culture venues may be a special case, but enough time has gone by that names such as [name_f]Sadie[/name_f] or [name_f]Dinah[/name_f] or [name_m]Cato[/name_m] are no longer associated with slavery by most people and have acquired other associations. [name_f]Oprah[/name_f] Winfrey’s dog is named [name_f]Sadie[/name_f]!
That doesn’t mean that racism and a racial divide (two different things, sometimes connected but not always) in naming is dead, just that the specifics have changes. Few whites name their children [name_u]Kenya[/name_u] or [name_f]LaKeisha[/name_f] or [name_u]Amadi[/name_u] – though they may be honoring older black heroes with names like [name_f]Ella[/name_f] or [name_m]Booker[/name_m] – while black parents in general don’t use such names as [name_f]Emma[/name_f] and [name_m]Jacob[/name_m]. There is a fascinating recent study by [name_m]Eric[/name_m] [name_m]Oliver[/name_m] on name choice by race, education, and political belief – Baby Names Reveal Parents' Political Ideology | Live Science – and of course Freakonomics also looked at parents’ name choice by race.
