Giving Children "Ethnic" Names?

Our sons unintentionally share first names of the patron saints of Wales and Scotland.  Middle names were from grandfathers for the oldest and a great-grandfather for the youngest. We wanted to avoid names where the children would have to spell them for the rest of their lives. 

Any chance of moving this to another forum? i don't see the anti-racism link.

Thanks, Makwa except for the last two words.

My personal philosophy is that as long as parents are naming their kid with their kid's identity/welfare/future in mind, and not the parent's childhood experience, then go for it.  Any name can be a great name.

I find that many parents these days are giving their children names that are very difficult to spell/pronounce/understand to the average joe - without a thought to the impact this will have on the child as they grow up, let alone the adult identity the child will need to develop under that name.  That's their right, but it's not particularly considerate, in my opinion.

So these parents they give their kid incredibly unique names, often beautiful and special to parents and family and friends; but also destined to be a total pain in the ass for the kid as they grow up.

I can understand that many of today's parents grew up wishing they had a more unique name, or changing the spelling in grade 8 to make it more unique, or wishing that they weren't one of six Jennifers/Meghans/Daves/Mikes in their grade five class.  Fair enough.

But give a thought to the fact that your kid many not want to have to spell her or his name out each time on the phone, or correct people's pronounciation, or explain the meaning to everyone they interact with, or have to deal with tech help when the computer doesn't recognize the c cedille and it messes up their email address, or have to re-send forms where they've excluded the slient 'g' or 'f' in their name.

And they may not want to have to worry about hurting your feelings or offending you should they want to shorten it, anglicize it, use their middle name instead, or abandon it and choose a completely different name when they grow up.

I know my partner, whose parents gave her a beautiful French name (but is not of French background), has wished her whole life to be a Jennifer or a Meghan, as she has had to explain and correct her name's spelling and pronounciation each and every single time she has filled out a form, spoken over the phone, or met another human being.  And this is in a country where French is an official language!

I thought Jamal was of middle East origen, but Tyrone???  I had no idea.

My son's name is David, which is I suppose Jewish, but not anymore.  Christians are children of the book too, and if he moved to Saudi Arabia maybe he'd be called Dawit.

Are there some names which are proprietary and it would be disrespectful to use them outside of a specific culture?  Possibly Mohammed or variations thereof.  Were I to name my kid Thanabalasingham it may be seen as more peculiar than offensive to Tamils.

Ciabatta2 wrote:

I find that many parents these days are giving their children names that are very difficult to spell/pronounce/understand to the average joe - without a thought to the impact this will have on the child as they grow up, let alone the adult identity the child will need to develop under that name.  That's their right, but it's not particularly considerate, in my opinion.

I couldn't disagree more. Young people today are inifinitely more accepting of names they haven't heard before than they were in my day. And, in "my day", the lack of acceptance stemmed from intolerance and xenophobia. One way of combatting xenophobia is facing it and staring it down. Our children have nonstandard names, and not from "my heritage" either (which is Jewish European). Of all the problems they face in life, this is not one.

I have great difficulty with your concern about the "impact this will have on the child as they grow up" and the "adult identity the child will need to develop under that name". And I have even greater difficulty with your invocation of the "average joe" as the yardstick for what it means to be "considerate" to your child. Pardon me for reading fear of the "other" in your entire post - if not your own fear, then at least capitulation to the "average joe's" fear.

I repeat, our youth are way beyond that.

Or, we can just name all our kids John and Jane and then (to be really considerate of their future) try to give them up for adoption to rich white families. Why make them suffer unduly?

Time to move this back into the anti-racism thread. It doesn't take two seconds, does it.

I dunno; this guy looks fairly white.

Makwa wrote:

In any case, do chat about white names all you like, and no, it is not to my mind an anti-racism theme, thank you Unionist.

You're ever so welcome, drop by for tea, ta.

Maysie wrote:

And a P.S. to Unionist: yes, while names can be an indicator of one's racial or ethnic background, it's not 100%.

Maysie, what are you responding to? I've been ridiculing the notion of naming people to indicate their race or ethnicity. I've also ridiculed the notion that "Jamal" means "black". I find this entire discussion offensive. The reason I suggested it be moved to the AR forum was so that people would watch their words a bit more.

Names mean [b]nothing[/b] about race, ethnicity, religion - and we should all intermarry and give our kids whatever names we like, and let them change them when they're older if they want.

It's like saying: "Oh, she lives on such-and-such street? She's probably Aboriginal." It's stereotyping and marginalizing people under the phoney guise of neutral statistical observation: "Hey, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that name/address/suburb/style of dress - but can you deny that it statistically fits more with Group X than others? Just sayin', eh?" This is offensive. It's also known as "profiling".

Of course, that's just my opinion, and I do hope I'm entitled to it.

Maysie wrote:

[To SSC:]

But you began the post from a perspective of a parent, or parents, of non-identified ethnicity, and you spoke fairly typically about names that are fairly typically stereotyped about.

Your point is still unclear to me.

What's clear to me is that some people in this thread are advocating (sometimes under the guise of "observation") that you shouldn't burden kids with strange names - or you should "understand" that kids will be stereotyped because of their names. Underlying this thesis is the view that parents should be reproducing, not just the human species, but their racial/ethnic/religious/economic groupings in the way they tag their offspring. Oh no, not "advocating", just "recognizing reality!!"

Philosophers have long gone about "recognizing reality". The point, however, is to change it.

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

Unionist wrote:

[What's clear to me is that some people in this thread are advocating (sometimes under the guise of "observation") that you shouldn't burden kids with strange names

Was that directed at me, Unionist.

Actually no, it was directed at Ciabatta2.

Star Spangled Canadian wrote:

In medicine, "caucasian" isn't really considered valid as a racial classification.

I agree wholeheartedly that "race" is bs as a category - but I know of no usage which would categorize most "Europeans" and most "Persians" as being of different races. Hungarians and Finns maybe are different, but not (say) French, Germans, Russians, Brits, etc. You might with equal authority say that Berlusconi marrying Queen Elizabeth would produce "mixed race" offspring. Pardon the image.

SSC wrote:

Edited to add that skin tone among Persians is quite varied and can range from practically white to very dark.

Whereas you wouldn't find that in Italy, right?

Unionist wrote:

Hungarians and Finns maybe are different...

Actually, Hungarians and Finns have a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples]common linguistic heritage[/url], and, except for the Sami minority in Finland, "ethnically and genetically [Finns and Hungarians] do not differ from their Indo European speaking neighbors." - [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples]ibid.[/url]

M. Spector wrote:

... except for the Sami minority in Finland, "ethnically and genetically [Finns and Hungarians] do not differ from their Indo European speaking neighbors." - [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_peoples]ibid.[/url]

I'm not sure why you seized on this piece of trivia, but one danger of using Wikipedia as a source arises when you don't actually read the source that Wikipedia is relying upon. Your quote is the opinion of one scholar (Markku Niskanen) on what is still a disputed and controversial thesis, as Niskanen himself notes on pp. 124-125 of [url=http://www.mankindquarterly.org/samples/niskanenbalticcorrected.pdf][col... paper[/u][/color][/url].

But perhaps we can get back to the topic.

My parents named me for my grandfather, but feminized the spelling.  I love my name, but have learned to spell it out, and if not fast enough will often just let the misspelling go. 

I am from an anglo-celtic background and the blond guy is scandinavian, so we tried to pick names that would give our girls a sense of that heritage.  Both wound up with celtic names because there weren't a lot of nice Norwegian ones that wouldn't either be impossible to spell or didn't sound sort of odd - we did have two on the list when Ms T was born, but they just didn't fit her.  One of the wild girls has a scandinavian middle name, though. 

Neither name has a complicated spelling, but the blond guy's family still spells Ms T's name wrong (she's 8 yrs old) and my name as well (been part of the family for over 12 yrs).  I can understand strangers, but family?  Very aggravating.

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She thinks a strong name with an unusual spelling was a character-builder, and it seems so far she was right.

I know a mother who said just about the same thing.  In commenting on one of her sons, who is named Yussuf, she said he would grow into the name.

My mom's an anglophile, and she has complained to me that none of my kids has an English name.  I dunno, my brother and I have  British names that don't match our last name, which I think is weird.  Anyway like Frank Zappa once said, first names don't matter, it's the last name that gets you into trouble.

Speaking of last names, my grandfather had a cousin named "George Harris," which I could never figure out, until someone told me  he had changed his last name from Nasrallah to Harris.  I think it's too bad he thought he had to cover his heritage by anglicising his identity.  Speaking of "Harris," I once worked with someone named "Becky Harris."  She was Jewish.  Maybe we're related.

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I can understand strangers, but family?  Very aggravating.

I once was acquainted with a couple who wanted the same surname for them and their (as of yet nonexistent) kids, but they did not think it appropriate for one to take the other's name, and they didn't like double-barrelled names. So they both changed their surnames to "Gandhi", since they admired Gandhi.

Well, I guess we'll have to disagree. I don't like ghettos.