Black Names, Immigrant Names: Navigating Race and Ethnicity Through Personal Names

Abstract

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.

Names and Selves: Transnational Identities and Self-Presentation among Elite Chinese International Students

“…By switching back to Dawei and foregrounding his Chineseness, his name both avoids cultural mismatch and creates symbolic boundaries between himself and many American born Chinese called David Wang. The maintenance of ethnic identity tied to the home country is shared among contemporary Black immigrants in the United States, as they similarly distance themselves from African Americans, their "proximal hosts" (Imoagene 2017), by drawing distinctions through personal names (Girma 2020;Waters 2001). To add more nuance, Dawei goes by David, or Dà Weì as a nickname, among his Chinese friends in college (but not among Americans) because in the Chinese context some would assume his English name is David.…”

“Maybe One Day I Will also be Almito”: Ethiopian Israelis, Naming, and the Politics of Immigrant Identity

“…Historical analysis of naming and renaming (Girma 2020) among Black Americans shows how patterns of naming reflect changing relationships of power and perceptions of a minority group's identity (Neal 2001;Brown and Lively 2012). Anthropological research has studied name choices as reflecting cultural practices, as well as societal and kinship systems, and as related to both personal and societal identity (Alford 1987;Bodenhorn and Vom Bruck 2006;Yangwen and MacDonald 2009).…”

“…Names can also tell us about social position, cultural and social identity, and kinship (Bodenhorn and Vom Bruck 2006;Girma 2020) and can reflect social class, education, and race (Lieberson and Bell 1992). As Girma (2020) writes, "the process of naming has been a battleground of sociocultural and political consciousness" (18).…”

“…Naming and re-naming practices among immigrants, on first glance, may be viewed as personal and familial processes, but they can also reflect the wider social and political context in which immigrants exist (Bodenhorn and Vom Bruck 2006; Girma 2020). For example, how people name their children can tell us about their personal and their community's integration in a given society (Sue and Telles 2007); pressures on immigrants to change names can reflect their social positions, including power relationships, minority status, and levels of discrimination (Kim 2007;Pennesi 2016); and immigrants adopting new names can represent their efforts to assimilate and avoid discrimination (Norquay 1998;Kim 2007).…”

“…Despite the central role a person's name can play in their sense of identity, especially following immigration (Tummala-Narra 2016), almost no academic studies have examined the experience of immigrants reclaiming heritage names (Reynolds et al 2017). This article begins from the premise that reclaiming a name given to an individual by their parents, family, or community but changed during the immigration process is a unique experience, different from name changing or renaming (i.e., taking on a new socially or politically meaningful name; Girma 2020). We believe reclaiming a name to be a special, barely studied, case that allows us to examine the interplay between personal, communal, and socio-political processes following immigration.…”