Black Names, Immigrant Names: Navigating Race and Ethnicity Through Personal Names
By Hewan Girma. 2019
This article explores the naming patterns of a new African immigrant group in the United States to discuss the creative ways that Black immigrants navigate their racialized immigrant identities and their positioning vis-à-vis their ethnoracial compatriots, African Americans. I argue that the significant contention around Black names and immigrant names demonstrates that personal names are a subject worthy of in-depth investigation. Through the case study of the naming practices of first generations of Ethiopian-Americans, I examine the relevance Black immigrant parents attach to first names, their various connotations, and modes of immigrant incorporation into the dominant host society. I highlight the importance of race, ethnicity, and immigration status in naming.
Subfields: Linguistics, Social Sciences & Humanities
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Citations in the corpus
- Hi, my name is Martha: Using names to measure and mitigate bias in generative dialogue models (2021, background): “First names are often the first thing that we learn about each other, and are integral to our identities (Garwood, 1976; Nelson, 1977; Hayakawa and Hayakawa, 1990; Pelham et al., 2002; Maulucci and Mensah, 2015; Ainiala and Östman, 2017; Girma, 2020).”