{"id":7613,"date":"2020-01-07T07:34:08","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T12:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/faithlens\/?p=7613"},"modified":"2020-01-06T12:44:06","modified_gmt":"2020-01-06T17:44:06","slug":"january-12-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elca.org\/faithlens\/january-12-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"January 12, 2020–Power of Names"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brett Davis, Washington, D.C.<\/b><\/p>\n

Warm-up Question<\/b><\/p>\n

Is there a story behind your given name?\u00a0 <\/span>What is it?<\/p>\n

Power of Names<\/b><\/p>\n

Do our names determine our destiny?<\/a>\u00a0 <\/span>Researcher Steve Levitt has dedicated decades to this question.\u00a0 <\/span>Different cultures have different naming patterns and trends.\u00a0 <\/span>Our names sometimes suggest something about us.\u00a0 <\/span>Every student has had this experience when a teacher calls the roll in a classroom for the first time and and looks up with an expectation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Levitt and his research partners have studied \u00a0whether there is a measurable bias in economic outcomes for people with either unusual or culturally African-American names.\u00a0 <\/span>Using public data of every baby born in California over forty years, they analyzed what influences our names and what influence names have on us.\u00a0 <\/span>They were surprised to find that\u00a0 <\/span>your given name did not impact your economic life as an adult.\u00a0 <\/span>(Meaning it was not statistically proven to show that an unusual or culturally specific name made you less likely to have an equal income level to people with common or culturally \u201cwhite\u201d names.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Levitt found that \u201cit\u2019s not the name your parents give you; it\u2019s the kind of parents you have in the first place.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Our names tell us about our parents, not about us, and the kind of parents one has was the largest factor in influencing opportunities later in life. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, their research and further work continued to suggest that web searches for names are highly biased.\u00a0 <\/span>For instance, typically African-American names are programmed into search tool analytics to produce results about finding arrest records for an individual, even if there are none.\u00a0 <\/span>This could certainly influence someone hiring for a job who searches their candidates\u2019 names, although widespread impact was not shown by the data described above.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing that most of us can probably agree on: Just about every parent thinks that his or her kid is special. Part of what makes each of our kids special is the names we give them. But from what we can tell, your name is not your destiny \u2014 even if your name is Destiny. Or Esm\u00e9. Or Archimedes, or Track.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discussion Questions<\/b><\/p>\n