Le nom des immigrants francophones, source d’erreurs bureaucratiques

2023/04/04 Leave a comment

Understand the frustration but how is this different from passport limitations which have to conform to international standards? Errors are, of course, another matter:

Plusieurs immigrants africains rencontrent des problèmes bureaucratiques en arrivant au Canada parce que leur nom est mal inscrit sur leurs cartes officielles par les autorités gouvernementales, déplorent des intervenantes du milieu communautaire. Ces dernières dénoncent l’« inconsidération culturelle » des autorités canadiennes.

Les cartes d’identité canadiennes, comme dans plusieurs autres pays, utilisent le modèle « nom et prénom ». Mais certains États, dont le Djibouti, en Afrique francophone, y font exception. Les Djiboutiens ont trois prénoms sur leur passeport : le premier est le leur, le deuxième est celui de leur père et le troisième appartient à leur grand-père. Lorsque certains obtiennent leur première carte de résidence permanente au Canada, l’espace prénom est manquant ou leur nom est inversé. Ainsi, une femme peut se retrouver avec un nom masculin, par exemple.

L’erreur peut causer plusieurs maux de tête. Si un résident permanent devient citoyen canadien, il devra par exemple changer son nom légal afin d’obtenir un passeport en raison de l’erreur sur la carte. Dans d’autres cas, une erreur est introduite dans le deuxième ou troisième permis de travail obtenu par un demandeur d’asile, disent des intervenantes. Lorsque la personne se présente au comptoir de Service Canada, permis en main, pour renouveler son numéro d’assurance sociale, sa demande est refusée en raison de l’erreur, expliquent des intervenants.

La solution pour les immigrants djiboutiens est souvent de modifier leur nom auprès des instances provinciales, ce qui leur permet, par la suite, de changer leur nom sur leur carte de résidence permanente et d’autres documents officiels. Mais le processus est coûteux : un adulte doit débourser 137 $ pour le faire, tout comme un enfant, à moins que ce dernier le fasse en même temps que son parent. La nouvelle carte de résidence permanente, elle, coûte 50 $.

Le ministère ontarien des Services au public et aux entreprises ne recense que quatre changements de nom officiels faits par des Djiboutiens en 2021 et 2022. Mais Sana Khalil, une agente de la Clinique juridique francophone d’Ottawa, qui vient en aide à des Djiboutiens, estime que les données provinciales « n’ont aucun sens » et que le nombre de changements de nom est plus élevé. L’une de ses collègues à la clinique, dit-elle, a fait « plein de demandes ».

Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada affirme faire de son mieux pour s’assurer de l’exactitude du nom sur les documents qu’elle délivre, mais que des erreurs peuvent survenir. L’agence utilise le nom tel qu’il apparaît sur la zone de lecture automatique du passeport — la section au bas de la photo de l’individu — pour créer des documents tels que la carte de résidence permanente. Au Canada, le nom de la famille du citoyen y est inscrit en premier, mais au Djibouti, c’est souvent le premier prénom de la personne qui y figure.

Source: Le nom des immigrants francophones, source d’erreurs bureaucratiques

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Dodek: Mispronouncing names isn’t okay, and it has nothing to do with being ‘woke’

2022/06/10 Leave a comment

Agreed. Wonder how the citizenship judges and staff manage to ensure this:

Trouble has hit Canada’s largest law society. Each year the Law Society of Ontario welcomes several thousand new lawyers into its ranks. The new barristers and solicitors don lawyer’s black robes for the first time in a ceremony that dates back more than 200 years. For each new lawyer and their family, the highlight is when they ascend the stage. Their name is called out and projected on the screen as they walk across the stage. Sometimes their name is mispronounced. That’s wrong and every step should be taken to make sure that doesn’t happen.

To its credit, staff at the Law Society of Ontario have recognized that they need to do better. In a report to the Law Society’s governors – still archaically called “benchers” because once upon a time they would sit on benches – Law Society staff recommended hiring a professional name reader for these “call to the bar” ceremonies.

The policy rationale is straightforward. As the legal profession has become more diverse, so too has the list of candidate names being called to the bar. A lot has changed since John White, Robert Gray, Bartholomew Beardsley, and seven other white men were called to the bar in 1797.

Each new lawyer’s name is called out by a bencher. Despite its best efforts, each year the Law Society receives complaints from disappointed candidates about their names being mispronounced. For some, having their name mispronounced is embarrassing to them and to their families who attend this momentous event. This is understandable, regrettable and completely avoidable.

Hiring a professional name reader would, well, professionalize the process. Who can be against progress and professionalization? Apparently, some of the benchers, that’s who. Last month, they brought a motion to ensure that names continue to be announced only by benchers, on the grounds of, among other reasons, opposing “whacky wokism.” The opposition and the rationale are self-centred and wrong. Fortunately, the motion was defeated.

There are few things more important than one’s name. It reflects one’s identity, individuality and human dignity. That’s why international human rights instruments have long recognized the right to a name, the right to choose one’s name and the right to retain one’s name. Enslaved people often did not have the right to choose their name. Oppressive regimes often target people because of their names. And here in Canada at residential schools, Indigenous children were stripped of their Indigenous names and given Christian names in their place.

I have a last name that is sometimes mispronounced but what sticks in my mind is something that occurred in my first year of high school in Vancouver in 1983. On the first day of school, our shop class teacher read out the roll and after each name quipped: “Canadian, Jew, Indian, Chinaman …” The message could not have been clearer to this multicultural group of 13-year-olds: for some people, there were still insiders and outsiders and your name gave you away.

In Canada, many immigrants changed their names in order to better assimilate into Canadian society. Others did not. Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker became a lifelong champion of civil rights, in part because of his childhood experience of being mocked and harassed for having a German name.

As dean of the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, I had the responsibility and the honour of reading the names of each of the more than 350 graduates every year. I worked hard to practise the names. I got the phonetic pronunciations and even had a pronunciation coach. When I read out a graduate’s name and they walked across the stage and had their 10 seconds in the limelight, I envisioned all the hard work that they and their family had done to reach that day.

I will never forget some parents thanking me for pronouncing their family’s name correctly. “No one has ever pronounced our name right before.” It made me tear up and it also made me proud. For me and for them.

I was good at some types of names and not so good with others. I realized and regretted making mistakes. I know I could have done better but perhaps even more importantly, I know the university could have done better than me. I may be many things, but a professional name caller I am not.

We owe it to everyone to get their names right. It’s not about political correctness or wokeness. There are a lot of reasons why but at the end of the day, it just comes down to one: respect.

Source: Mispronouncing names isn’t okay, and it has nothing to do with being ‘woke’

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Ontario Human Rights Commission seeks input on derogatory street, building names

2021/09/24 Leave a comment

Strikes me among all the human rights issues, this one has to be one of the least important.

Not optimistic that this exercise will result in sensible recommendations that acknowledge historical wrongs but don’t erase our history and historical understandings.

And of course, focussing on names and monuments is easier than addressing economic and social disparities between and among groups:

The Ontario Human Rights Commission is seeking the public’s input as it develops a policy statement on the display of derogatory names, words and images, including the names given to streets and landmarks.

The commission says it wants to address what it calls a “quickly evolving issue” that has increasingly seen Indigenous and racialized communities call for the removal of statues of historic figures “perceived as colonizers, slave owners or who advances racist policies.”

It also points to growing calls for officials to rename roads, buildings and other institutions named after historic figures, for the same reasons.

The organization notes such concerns are not new, noting it was involved in a 2018 case that required the City of Mississauga to remove all Indigenous-themed mascots, names and images not related to Indigenous sports organizations from its sports facilities.

It says human rights law has found that images and words that degrade people because of their ancestry, race, or ethnic group may create a poisoned environment and violate the province’s human rights code.

The commission says the policy statement will focus on the legal obligations of organizations to prevent and address discrimination against Indigenous peoples, racialized communities and possibly other protected groups in situations involving the display of derogatory names and images.

“What’s in a name? Often, everything,” Chief Commissioner Patricia DeGuire said in a statement.

“We continue to hear about communities disturbed by the name of a street, a sports team, a building or a monument. This policy statement is being designed to help foster better understanding of the human rights issues involved, and to prompt communities to work together in a respectful way to overcome these issues.”

Those who wish to weigh in on the issue can complete an online survey or email the commission before Oct. 22.

Source: Ontario Human Rights Commission seeks input on derogatory street, building names

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She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier

2021/07/06 Leave a comment

Of interest:

For as long as she can remember, Danita Bilozaze knew that the name on her birth certificate, “Danita Loth,” didn’t reflect her Indigenous identity.

From the stories her mother recounted to her, she knew that Catholic missionaries had changed her family’s name. Her great-grandfather, a man known as Lor Bilozaze, was written into priests’ logs as “Loth Bilozaze.” Government record books in Canada ultimately dropped the “Bilozaze,” and Loth became their surname.

She never felt a connection with that name. But “Bilozaze,” which means “the makers” in her native Denesuline language, she said, is integral to the preservation of her identity and culture as a member of the Cold Lake First Nations.

“It means everything to me because it lines up with who I am,” she said. “I am an educator, I am a teacher, I am a baker, I’m an artist. I’m always, always, forever making things. So when you have something that was taken away from your family, like your birthright or your name and you have a chance to make that right for future generations, it means everything to take back what is rightfully mine.”

“Loth Bilozaze,” the name of Bilozaze’s great-grandfather, was changed to “Lor Bilozaze,” according to a photocopied document found in the Provincial Archives of Alberta. “Bilozaze” was later dropped from government records.

Provincial Archives of Alberta

Last year, the 49-year-old began an emotional and frustrating nine-month-long journey to officially change her name.

new policy that promotes name reclamation promises that those following in Bilozaze’s footsteps won’t have to face the same hurdles.

A step toward reconciliation

Earlier this month, federal officials in Canada announced a new policy process that allows Indigenous citizens to restore their names on government-issued identification, including passports, for free until May 2026.

It’s unclear how many Canadians, 5% of whom are Indigenous, will pursue name reclamation under the new policy.

Frank Deer, a research chair and associate professor in Indigenous education at the University of Manitoba, says that most First Nations tribal members have lost their original Indigenous names to history as a result of forced assimilation and poor government record-keeping.

Among native people who can’t reclaim their names because of inadequate records, Deer says there’s a growing interest in acquiring new Indigenous names that carry a meaningful connection to their communities.

“Many are actually not reclaiming a lost name,” he says. “They’re simply claiming a name.”

A history of “cultural genocide”

The new policy implements a six-year-old recommendation from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It’s known as Call to Action No. 17: An appeal to all levels of government to allow residential school survivors and their families to reclaim names changed by the residential schools.

The policy was unveiled against the backdrop of last month’s harrowing discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children in a mass grave at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

“It was a very harsh reminder that as a country, we have to come to grips with the fact that the residential school system was something that could have and did occur in a country that prides itself on our diversity and our relationship with Indigenous peoples,” Citizenship Minister Marco Mendicino told NPR.

Between 1830 and 1998, Canadian governments and churches separated more than 150,000 native children from their parents and confined them to mandatory boarding schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the effort amounted to “cultural genocide.” There — at Indian residential schools like Blue Quills in Alberta, which Bilozaze’s grandmother attended — students were given Christian names, had their hair cut and their clothes replaced with uniforms, suffered physical and sexual abuse, and punished for speaking their own languages.

The commission estimated that over 4,000 children died while at the schools. The shocking discoveries have continued. A week after leaders of Indigenous groups said that at least 600 bodies, mostly those of children, had been found in unmarked graves outside another shuttered residential school near Grayson, Saskatchewan, 182 more human remains were found near a another former church-run school in Cranbrook, B.C.

In March 2020, Bilozaze was as immersed as ever in that history of cultural erasure. She had just completed her master’s degree in education after studying the revitalization of Indigenous languages and the reclamation of native identities. Yet when she was awarded her degree, her diploma did not reflect her roots. She wanted it changed to her Indigenous name.

She met few who understood what reconciliation should look like

Bilozaze thought the commission’s call to establish a name reclamation policy would make the process easier.

Yet, at every step she described in getting her name changed, she found ignorance around reconciliation.

“Instead of just going and doing this work, I now have to educate people along the way,” she said.

Her first step began last September with a visit to get her fingerprints taken at the federal police station near her home in Comox Valley, British Columbia. A clerk asked her to explain why the fees should be waived for her application.

So Bilozaze pulled up documents on her phone and began teaching the clerk a history lesson.

“Then I went and I sat in my car and cried,” Bilozaze said.

She would go through nine months of delays, anguish and repeating her story. Altogether, application fees can run upward of hundreds of dollars. Eventually, through petitions, she managed to get most of the charges reimbursed.

By winter, her pursuit stalled. Her certificate of name change — the document she needed in order to make revisions on official IDs — was held up at the Land Title and Survey Authority. When the document did arrive in her mailbox three months later, it appeared singed and wrinkled — rendering it void.

“At that point, I’ve got nothing to prove who I am,” she said.

So she went through the process again. She proceeded to get her land title as well as her three university degrees changed to her Indigenous name.

Then came the passport. Instead of enjoying their spring break this year, the teacher and her daughter drove the three hours from their home in Comox Valley to a passport office in Victoria to get their names changed.

That’s where she met Samantha MacPhail, a supervisor at Service Canada’s Citizen Services Branch. For the first time in the entire process, Bilozaze says she started to see things turn around. An apologetic MacPhail gave Bilozaze’s application her full attention, Bilozaze said.

Following daily updates from MacPhail, Bilozaze finally got her official passport on May 26.

A harrowing journey offers a crash course on cultural sensitivity

MacPhail worked to ensure her colleagues could learn from Bilozaze’s experience. Bilozaze’s fight to legally change her name has provided a teaching opportunity for some 1,000 employees within Service Canada as a part of workplace training programs on reconciliation.

According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Bilozaze is the first person in the country to have her fees waived to get her passport changed to reflect her Indigenous name. Her 15-year-old daughter, Dani, is the second.

In an email last month, MacPhail thanked Bilozaze for letting her share her story, including on a call with leaders at the national level.

“Your story has continued to move others, both to tears and to action,” MacPhail wrote. “Because of your action and your bravery, Indigenous Canadians across the country will no longer walk into our offices and be met with a non-answer.”

Bilozaze said that other people in her Comox Valley community want to legally reclaim their names. “But of course, there’s fear,” she said on June 21, Canada’s Indigenous Peoples Day. “No one wants to have to push that hard.”

She’s a reluctant poster child in the protracted pursuit of Indigenous reconciliation. As Bilozaze said she told Service Canada when asked to share her experience: “If it’s going to help people like me, definitely use my story — only if it’s going to help those that are coming behind me to do the same thing.”

Source: She Struggled To Reclaim Her Indigenous Name. She Hopes Others Have It Easier

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In inclusivity push, workers reject prods to allow mispronounced or ‘whitened’ names

2021/03/30 Leave a comment

Of note. Just ask – not a microaggression:

When Janani Shanmuganathan was in law school, she remembers hearing some misguided professional advice.

“You should take your husband’s name,” Shanmuganathan recalls someone telling her, because her own name was hard to pronounce. Her colleague speculated it would make it harder to get clients.

Shanmuganathan says she remembers being angered by the comment, not only because she was proud of her name, but because it is spelled phonetically — and she doesn’t mind helping people who ask her how it’s pronounced. Plus, she says, she wants up-and-coming lawyers to see Tamil women represented in the law community.

Shanmuganathan has indeed faced professional challenges over time. She says that it was not uncommon for a judge to refer to other lawyers by name, but refer to her only as “counsel,” and her racialized client as “the accused,” raising questions about differential treatment from clients and their families.

“There is something more dignified in a name,” says Shanmuganathan.

Research suggests that “whitened” names have historically made job candidates more likely to be hired. But as many employers claim to be changing course and trying to attract diverse talent, experts say companies must also do more to respect whatever name a worker chooses to identify with.

Shanmuganathan wrote about her experiences with her race, including being mistaken for the interpreter in court, in a publication sent out to other criminal lawyers. Her assessment — which described courts skirting around her name as one of many symptoms of bias in the legal system — resonated with people.

The Federation of Asian Canadian Lawyers began a social media campaign to “make hearing Asian names more commonplace” and help lawyers who were being passed over for opportunities because someone else was uncomfortable with their name pronunciation. Several years ago, law firm Borden Ladner Gervais added a clickable blue megaphone buttons on its staff’s web pages that play a recording of each person pronouncing their name in hopes of levelling the playing field for incoming lawyers.The feature on BLG’s website came out of concern that when summer students joined the firm each year, senior lawyers would be more likely to reach out and assign work to the aspiring lawyers they could comfortably call by name, says Laleh Moshiri, national director, diversity and inclusion at the firm. While it’s far from the only answer to diversity and inclusion issues at the firm, the pronunciation tool shifted some of the onus of learning students’ names to the lawyers.

LinkedIn last year added a similar tool to its website, in an announcement that said “correct pronunciation is not just a common courtesy — it’s an important part of making a good first impression and creating an inclusive workplace.” A tool made by NameCoach is also used for MBA students at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, says Sonia Kang, Canada research chair in identity, diversity and inclusion at the university.

Kang says that the pressure for people to “whiten” their names in many industries can stem from discrimination that begins as early as the hiring process. Resumes with whitened first names and extracurricular experiences led to more callbacks than the unwhitened resumes for both Black and Asian applicants, according to a paper Kang co-authored. Similar findings have been repeated in multiple studies.

“When I’m talking to hiring managers about this — put aside for a second discrimination, which we know exists, for sure. But some of the time, the reason that they might not call someone is because they don’t want to offend them by saying their name wrong,” says Kang. “It’s this kind of benevolent racism.”

Shanmuganathan says things have improved in the legal world, but the issue persists. Last month, Vancouver immigration lawyer Will Tao wrote an essay on how his work with immigrants and community organizers has reinforced to him how many Biblical names have roots in colonialism and, for Indigenous colleagues, the residential school system.

“I am in a profession where marketability, presentation, professionalism, and competency is everything. Why is Will Tao more competent and presentable than Wei Tao?” he wrote.

In a recent talk explaining her perspective as a woman in banking, Laurentian Bank chief executive Rania Llewellyn cited her name as one factor that has motivated her to raise diversity and inclusion expectations at her company.

“My first job in Canada with my degree from a Canadian university was working at Tim Hortons. My last name was not Llewellyn. It was very Middle Eastern. No one would even call me for an interview… inclusive hiring is really, really important,” said Llewellyn. “Nobody ever asked me about where I’m from anymore … When I introduce myself, I always say Rania, like Tanya, and all of a sudden people are like, ‘Ah.'”

Shanmuganathan says that she urges co-workers to refer to her and introduce her by name, so others get used to hearing it. Moshiri, meanwhile, says that she encourages her colleagues to write down phonetic spellings in their notes so they don’t forget name pronunciations.

Kang says that no one can be expected to know every name in the world — and she says asking for name pronunciations should be seen as normal, not awkward. At the same time, learning the sounds and spellings that crop up commonly in your line of work is a skill that will continue to be valuable in building relationships, says Kang.

Encouraging authenticity — whether that is a name a worker was given at birth or one they choose to identify with — can reap benefits for employers, says Kang.

“It’s just about having a choice, and not feeling pressured either way,” she says.

Source: In inclusivity push, workers reject prods to allow mispronounced or ‘whitened’ names

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Research shows biases against US immigrants with non-anglicized names

2019/01/08 Leave a comment

Similar to blind cv studies in Canada where foreign sounding names receive fewer call backs for interviews compared to English names but in a broader context:

Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges, including figuring out how to be part of a new community. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants.

The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination,” says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. “This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one’s self-concept.”

To detect bias, the researchers ran a trilogy of hypothetical transportation accidents: trolley, plane dilemma, and lifeboat. In each variation of these moral dilemmas, participants were asked to imagine that men’s lives were at risk. The men that could be saved or sacrificed might be white with a name like “Dan” or “Alex,” an immigrant with the name “Mark” or “Adam,” or an immigrant with a name associated with China or the Middle East, such as “Qiu,” “Jiang,” or “Ahmed.”

The researchers focused most of their effort on using white participants, to more clearly delineate ingroups and outgroups in their research

In the trolley scenario, people tended to sacrifice the one to save the many, which is a common finding. However, white participants were more likely to sacrifice an immigrant with their original name than someone white or an immigrant with an anglicized name.

Their second study involved a plane crash scenario and possibly leaving someone behind with a broken leg. The white men continued to show similar bias patterns, but the women did not.

In the final scenario, throwing a life preserver to a man named Muhammad and risking the lives of everyone on board a lifeboat, brought similar results. However, for participants who scored as favorable towards multicultural groups, being an named “John” actually improved ones’ chances for survival. But for participants who scored as favorable towards assimilating minority groups, only being white increased the chance to be saved. Zhao says they’ve seen this bias before in some of their other research.

The authors stress that encouraging people to change their name is not the desired outcome of this research. What’s needed, says Zhao, is “the whole society should work together to improve the system to promote diversity and inclusion.”

To that end, Zhao and colleagues are working on intervention studies in which to train people to recognize and pronounce common ethnic names and phonemes, hopefully improving intergroup communication and reducing the need for Anglicizing ethnic names.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-biases-immigrants-non-anglicized.html#jCp

Source: Research shows biases against US immigrants with non-anglicized names

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ICYMI: We’re giving our babies distinctly Canadian names and impact of diversity

2017/03/10 Leave a comment

Another measure of increased diversity is the presence of ethnic names (end of excerpt):

Every year, another snooze-worthy report is published of the country’s most popular baby names—for the past decade, a sea of Emmas, Bens, Liams and Sophias. But this year, to further distinguish ourselves from our American neighbours perhaps, the creative brains at Canadian data journalism site the 10 and 3 (their mission: “to tell compelling and unusual stories about Canada through maps, interactive charts and other interesting visualizations”) decided to look past the Ethans and Isabellas and crunch some distinctly Canadian numbers.

What exactly makes a name more Canadian? “Firstly, it has to be relatively popular in Canada,” explains Arik Motskin, data scientist and founder of the10and3.com, “but more importantly, it has to be much more popular than however popular it was in the United States.” Take the name “Brody:” in 1990, 0.1% of Canadian baby boys were given it, compared to 0.01% of American babies, giving Brody a “Canadian Factor”—as the site calls it—of 10. “That means you’re ten times as likely to meet a Brody in Calgary than you are in Kansas City,” says Motskin. And now with a handy new mode of measurement, plus a century’s worth of data to explore, here are a few things the Canadian Factor has taught us.

Surprise! We love hockey players

A modern-day name with a top Canadian Factor is Linden, who scored a 20 and currently sits atop the scale, for former Vancouver Canucks hockey star (and current exec) Trevor Linden. “There are other hockey names, like Duncan and Darcy, but the Linden thing came out of nowhere for us,” says Motskin. Fittingly, it’s not only Trevor’s Linden’s prodigious sports skills that made his name, but also that he’s so well loved in Vancouver for being a nice guy (how Canadian is that?).

Sorry Pierre and Jean-Paul, name stats are an imperfect science

Name data, though it might seem straightforward enough, is actually notoriously difficult to find. “In Canada, name statistics are [kept] at the provincial level, but beyond the top 10, most provinces don’t provide more details—both for privacy reasons and because they just don’t have the manpower.” The 10 and 3 mostly lucked out across the country, but no dice in Quebec, which presented two problems: “We weren’t able to get data from Quebec, but even if we did, we’d have to crunch the numbers differently,” says Motskin. When French Canadian names showed nation-wide popularity, their Canadian Factor automatically spiked off the scale—like Josée in 1970s with a massive top score of 634. “Maybe French names should be compared to France,” says Motskin.

So long, stereotypes

Co-authored by Zack Gallinger and Neil Oman, Motskin’s piece is titled “Gord, Sheila, Graham and Beverley? The Most Distinctively Canadian Names Are Not What You’d Expect.” While Gordon makes a lot of sense—Downie, Howe, Lightfoot come right to mind—the others are, admittedly, inventions of the authors to make a point. “Everyone has their stereotypes, and these were just ours,” says Motskin. While some stereotypically Canadian-sounding names (looking at you, Nate and Duncan) definitely appear on each decade’s Top 10 list, names like Mohammad and Syed, with a Canadian Factor of 8.7 and 10.3 respectively, measure up equally Canadian.

…Of all Motskin’s number- and name-crunching, the most fascinating was abrupt cultural changes that arrived in distinct waves. The 1930s and 40s saw distinctly Anglo-Saxon monikers like Archibald and Angus for men, Catherine and Doreen for women, he notes, but “by the mid 20th century, suddenly there were a lot of Italian names like Giuseppe and Antonietta.” Immigrants often name their children traditional names, who in turn grow up more assimilated in Canada and look right back to the top 10. “I suspect in 20 years, those kids will have a lot of Emmas and Liams—or whatever’s popular then.”

Source: We’re giving our babies distinctly Canadian names – Macleans.ca

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Appreciate the History of Names to Root out Stigma – NYTimes.com

2015/10/20 Leave a comment

More on implicit bias and names, this time with respect to African-American names:

Besides the barrier to entry to employment that comes with a “black name,” employers also tend to hire “racially palatable” blacks or other minority individuals. If a person is unstereotypically non white — which is to say, for example, that he or she acts white — that person is more likely to be considered for the job.

Nontraditional names are testaments to nonconformity, but they do not signal combativeness or unacceptable personality fits.

The insidious bias against people with black-sounding names pops up long before they hit the job market. And usually, the more unusual the name, the more susceptible to bias. A study published in 2005 found that teachers had lower expectations for children with unusually spelled names like Da’Quan, even when compared to their siblings with “less black-sounding” names like Damarcus.

That’s because preconceived notions about black-sounding names are not only racist but an indication of class bias. Unusually spelled names that have punctuation are associated with low socio-economic status — a factor that consciously or unconsciously biases teachers, employers and everyone in between. The assumption of low socio-economic status is specific to African-American names (or so-called ghetto black names), as opposed to names of African origin like Nia or Jelani.

But the nuance of individualized, African-American names goes deeper. The diversification of baby names in America started in the late 1960s during a larger sociocultural shift that emphasized individuality, and that’s where names for black and white Americans began to diverge. As black Americans began to give unique names to their children (much more so than white Americans), there was a sharp rise in the prevalence of distinctively black-sounding names — influenced at least in part by the championing of black culture by the Black Power movement.

African-American names became symbols of resistance. They resist uniformity and West European influence, and therefore the limiting cultural framework of how one should present his or herself. When minority individuals are prejudged on the basis of their names, it is because those names do not conform. And in order for diverse identities to be reclaimed as such, we must appreciate the ideology behind unique names and root out the stigmas about them.

And while nontraditional names are testaments to nonconformity, they do not signal combativeness or unacceptable personality fits. They signal the multitudes of different experiences that shape people of color, and increased knowledge of these experiences can be wielded to combat bias.

Source: Appreciate the History of Names to Root out Stigma – NYTimes.com

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