Jamaal Allan is a teacher in Des Moines, Iowa. His name has taken him on a lifelong odyssey of racial encounters.
People make a lot of assumptions based on a name alone.
Jamaal Allan, a high school teacher in Des Moines, Iowa, should know. To the surprise of many who have only seen his name, Allan is white. And that's taken him on a lifelong odyssey of racial encounters.
Those experiences prompted him to share his six words with The Race Card Project: "My name is Jamaal ... I'm white."
Allan grew up in southern Oregon, in a house on 18 acres with a commune on one side and a llama ranch on the other.
The origins of his name weren't that remarkable, Allan tells NPR Special Correspondent Michele Norris.
"My parents decided they wanted less traditional names for their children. ... My dad was a Los Angeles Lakers fan and they had had a player named Jamaal Wilkes, and that name kind of came up," he says.
His mother — who was pregnant with Allan's sister at the time — fell in love with the sound of the name. Their parents named his sister Madera, and they named their son Jamaal — "just to spice things up a bit, I guess," he says.
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As Allan wrote for a blog called The Poetry Question:
Jamaal means "beauty" in Arabic.
"Learning the meaning behind it and, well, the beauty that comes in the sound of the name, I like that quite a bit," Allan says.
It's also a name that give him an unusual perspective on questions of identity, race and cultural stereotypes.
When he goes out in Des Moines for drinks with friends who are black, the waitress or bartender often hands his debit card to someone else — someone black.
"They're making an assumption based on the name on the card and not paying attention to who handed it to them," Allan says. "They say, 'Jamaal, oh that must be the black guy sitting here.' "
'We Could Use Some Diversity Here'
These kinds of assumptions also spill over into his professional life as a teacher.
"People usually don't bring it up on a first day, but after I've developed a rapport with the students and they feel comfortable having open conversations, they'll say, 'You know, when class started I thought you were going to be black,' " Allan says.
And he uses that as a jumping-off point for more questions: Why you would assume that and what did that mean? And were you disappointed? What were your thoughts when you actually saw me?
What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha
LaKiesha Francis with her mother, LaDeana Diver.
(CNN)When you're a white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman named LaKiesha, life can get complicated.
Strangers burst out laughing when you tell them your name. Puzzled white people ask what your parents were thinking. Black people wonder if you're trying to play a bad joke.
It can be exhausting constantly explaining yourself to white people, even though you're white.
"At least one to three times a week, someone is saying something about my name," says LaKiesha Francis, a 28-year-old bartender who lives in a small town in western Ohio. "It kind of gets old."
We hear a lot about what are known as "black-sounding" names these days. Comics make fun of names like "D'Brickashaw Ferguson" or "Tyrasciuses." Professors conduct studies on the success rate for job applicants with names like "Jamal." Online commentators warn black parents not to give their babies names like "Keisha," while others simply confess -- as one white man did -- "I truly don't get the black name thing."
But hardly any attention is paid to people like Francis and other white folks with distinctively black names.
They are those rare white people who can credibly say, "I'll be black for a minute." Francis says she's glimpsed racial stereotyping, what it's like to face discrimination and even a degree of acceptance from black people that she may have otherwise never known.
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What she has discovered is that the names of Americans are as segregated as many of their lives. There are names that seem traditionally reserved for whites only, such as Molly, Tanner and Connor. And names favored by black parents, such as Aliyah, DeShawn and Kiara. Add into that mix names that are traditionally Asian, Latino or, say, Muslim.
But when you move through life with a name that violates those racial and ethnic boundaries, Francis has found that people will often treat you as an imposter.
"The first thing they'll say is, 'That's not your name,' or, 'That's not a name that suits you,'" she says. "If I go to a bar, they'll say, 'That's not your name. Let me see your ID.'"
How LaKiesha got her name
Francis didn't know much about the baggage attached to her name where she grew up, and still lives: Pitsburg, Ohio. She describes it as a "super-quiet" village of more than 300 people, virtually all of them white. The town has one main street and is surrounded by cornfields.
"I never realized my name was an African-American name because where I grew up we literally had one African-American child during the whole 12 years I had gone there in school," says Francis, a petite woman who exudes a Midwestern friendliness. "No one said anything. I was oblivious."
LaKiesha Francis with her mother, LaDeana Diver.
LaDeana Diver, Francis' mother, says she wasn't trying to make a political statement with her daughter's name. She was trying to settle a disagreement. She and her husband Frank couldn't agree on a name when she became pregnant. They eventually came up with a compromise while vacationing in Florida.
"I brought a baby-name book and that was about the only name we agreed on, "Diver says. "So she ended up LaKiesha."
From the beginning, there was criticism. Diver says her relatives told her people wouldn't be able to pronounce her daughter's name. They said some might think there were black people in their family.
"I'm not prejudiced," Diver says. "A name is a name. To me it doesn't matter. I liked the name. I think it's a pretty name."
Where do distinctively black names come from?
A name isn't just a name, according to history and social science. Give someone the wrong name and it can become a burden.
That belief is partly why many Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who came to America in the early 20th century whitened their children's names to avoid persecution and increase their chances of social mobility. It's part of the reason why the Asian actress Chloe Bennet dropped her surname, Wang, to work in Hollywood.
That thinking was validated in a famous experiment in which researchers sent out fictitious resumes in response to actual help-wanted ads. Each resume had identical qualifications, save for one variable: Some applicants had white-sounding names such as "Brendan" while others had black-sounding names -- such as "Lakisha."
The white-sounding applicants were 50% more likely to get calls for interviews than their black-sounding counterparts, researchers found.
What it's like to be a white woman named LaKiesha | CNN
When you're a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman named LaKiesha, life can get complicated. This Ohio woman with a name that blurs racial boundaries says people often treat her as an imposter.
