Hey hey hey, Music Champ¹!
It’s time for Part 2 of my Story Data Story Black Onomastics trilogy. We’re still covering the collection, organization, and analysis of data regarding Black names.
This time, my distraction was Tableau. I decided to work with the names from The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases after all, and this meant adding another 60,000+ entries before I cleaned it (mostly by removing unnamed infants² and so on), resulting in 67,030 entries and 48296 unique names.
I’ve ended up with a Google spreadsheet that has 7 sheets with over 123,125 rows and a total of 66,565 unique names. Is there any wonder I want more power to shift through this?
In any case, I want to answer as many of my questions as I can with the spreadsheet as it is and then move the data into Tableau so I can compare it with US Census name data going back to 1880. The finale will hopefully have chord diagrams and other cool visualizations.
Let's get into it!
Ask:
To recap, our main questions were:
“What makes a Black name Black?”
Which user-submitted names are absent from Behind the Name but are represented in the top names on the US census?
What percentage of Black names are just African or Arabic?
What percentage of constructed Black names have African roots versus Arabic roots versus European roots?
What can we learn about Black naming trends as a whole by using NYC as a representative sample?
Our sources are:
Five sets of names scraped from my favorite character-naming resource Behind the Name:
Every name categorized as “African” (782 names),
Every name categorized as “Arabic” (1,068 names),
Every name categorized as “African-American” (177 names),
Every user-submitted name categorized as “African” (6,800 names),
Every user-submitted name categorized as “African-American” (3,274 names),
Every name from the website The Black Names Project (3,939 names),
The US Census’ top 1000 baby names by gender for 110 years, each a decade apart, (22,000 names),
NYC Open Data’s most Popular Baby Names by Sex and Ethnic Group (18,054 names), and
The African Names Database from the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases (67,459 entries—don’t know why the page says 91,491.).
I will not be scraping Proud Heritage: 11001 Names for Your African-American Baby after all—at least not now.
Prepare & Process:
This is the boring stuff, so I won’t be going too deep into it. I shared my data sources and then cleaned, linked it, manipulated it, etc etc. The database is pushing the limits of what Google Sheets can handle (“This document is too large to be edited offline. Go online to resume editing,” it says) so I won’t be too focused on making this pretty. It just needs to be pretty enough to hold my attention.
Here’s some of the self-populated overview data though:
A single sheet of the database looks like this:
I would say that’s processed and prepared enough, non?
The left hand is all information from the original csv files, while the colored righthand side is calculated fields that check whether a name appears in multiple databases.
Here we can see that the top name Aisha appears in 5 name databases: not only is it categorized as African-American, African, and Arabic in Behind the Name; it’s been one of the Top 1000 names given to children in America and has also been one of the top baby names given to children in New York City specifically. It’s likely also in the Black Name Project database as well, just under a different spelling.
My favorite sheet to scan is the one I added last minute, the logs of my enslaved ancestor’s names.
I didn’t know Black folks have been named Lamar as far back as 1821! That’s older than the name Wendy, given that Wendy was effectively invented in 1904 by J. M. Barrie for Peter Pan.
A lot of the names for enslaved people are common Anglo names like John, Sara, Adam, or Alice; but I can also find the Black Muslim names shared by six of my relatives—and my nickname, though not my full name. It makes sense, as a lot of enslaved Black folks were Muslim and brought their faith over with them. It’s just fascinating to see how many.
It’s also intriguing to see names like Kenya or Asia or Africa, which I thought were modern, or multiple entries of names I don’t recognize. Where are the names Inguammah, Luquibu, and Ochobah from? Have new names descended from them? From what names have they descended?
We can be here all day if we want to ask questions of the past, however. Let’s move onto analysis instead.
Analyze:
Q1: Which user-submitted names are absent from Behind the Name but are represented in the top names on the US census?
I could see this answer coming as soon as I scraped the data, but basically, mainstream baby name websites and services tend to see Black names as less legitimate. This leads to major resources like Behind the Name lacking in Black names that visitors to the website attempt to add. As noted above, there are 3,000+ user-submitted African-American names on the website, but only 177 African-American names are formally listed. This also leads to resources like the Black Name Project, which specializes in Black names regardless of perceived legitimacy.
We can see that of the names users submitted to the African-American section of Behind the Name, 27 are recorded in the African Names Database and therefore hundreds of years old! These names include Africa, Aja, Amare, Amaree, Andre, Darlo, Iquan, Juanda, Juba, Kamayah, Keah, Kenya, Kenyah, Lamar, Lawana, Maleka, Miyah, Muddy, Oshay, Quame, Saiah, Sire (wait, isn’t that—?), and Tamia. BtN does share 7 names with this resource, though.
50 of the user-submitted names are African names, but that category has a similar issue in that there are 6,800 names submitted and 782 names formally listed. The majority seem to be submissions that double-tagged “African-American” and “African.” Some people are just submitting their own names, after all.
17 of the most popular baby names in NYC are missing from the main database, including names like Ayanna, Emani, Jame, Khari, Kimora, Miya, Savion, Taraji, and Zaniyah. Moreover, 100+ of the most used names in the US are missing.
This is not to call out that one site in particular, though—I love Behind the Name! Thank you for the delicious data. Rather, I want to use it as a launchpad to think about descriptivism versus prescriptivism in terms of name. If a name is popular enough, doesn’t that make it real?
That said, that the category of “Black names” includes names popular with Black people and names associated with Black people as well as those originating in Africa or created in America. One figure demonstrating this compares the wealth of names in the Black Name Database with the top 1000 baby names as recorded by the US Census:
Q3: What percentage of constructed Black names have African roots versus Arabic roots versus European roots?
I won’t be tackling this one today; I haven’t eaten in six hours. (I’m not hyperfocusing, you’re hyperfocusing.
I have some of the data I need, but I suspect this is the kind of thing that Word2Vec would be good for.
Q2: What percentage of Black names are African or Arabic?
Q4: What can we learn about Black naming trends as a whole by using NYC as a representative sample?
I’ve decided to group these questions because the NYC data we need for Q4 has some interesting implications for Q2.
Let’s start with the chart:
For this chart, I filtered the NYC top baby names to only display names from the population tagged “BLACK NON HISPANIC” (yes, in that exact formatting). After grouping up the duplicates, that leaves us with about 600 names. We saw from the Sisense data in our last episode that only 11-17% of babies are given “Ethnically Specific Names” Black names, and 91% of the 600 names can indeed be found among the generally most popular names.
But if we compare the overlap between Black NYC babies and the data scraped from the Black Names Project, it turns out that 44% of Black babies have names with some kind of particular resonance to Black culture. (Even John can be a Black name.)
Arabic, African, and African-American names are only 7.8%, 8%, and 8.8% of the names given. I’m surprised that African-American names are the most common of those categories! I know Biblical names are especially common among Black Americans, but I assumed Arabic names would be popular.³
The constructive and unique nature of African-American names usually means there is a wider variety of less-common names. (Currently, the general trend is that there’s a wider variety of names being used. Even the white people are constructing names now! I kid, but the growth of Utahn naming practices and other tragedeighs⁴ is a topic of study all of its own.)
BONUS ROUND Q5: What names borne by 1800 enslaved Black people are still in use today?
Now that we’re winding down (yes, I wrote all this in one day), we’re moving into the bigger questions that arose once I added the massive African Names Database to the mix.
I want to see the rise and fall of Black names over decades, hopefully beginning with the 1800s when the census begins. I suspect that some names, like Quame, will fade in popularity as their more accurate spellings (ie Kwame) rise in popularity. I imagine most cultures the phenomenon where names lose popularity when/because they remind people of their grandparents, but I imagine that there are Black names that lost popularity once they became too associated with slavery, or stereotypes, or anything we’ve been taught to feel ashamed of.
Nobody’s naming their kids Amos anymore, Cuffey has long been ruined by connotation, and Sambo can never be redeemed. The name Buck was almost certainly not chosen by its bearer, and Adaycheney is almost certainly a misspelling. (Of Adecha…? Adeche…? Or Adechi…? Ade-something…)
This is a pretty simple graph result:
43 of the names carried by (or assigned to) enslaved people were Arabic,
165 names are some of the most popular in NYC (67 are especially popular with Black folks),
212 of the names were African (178 of those from the crowd-sourced user-submitted list),
229 are listed by the Black Names Project, and
286 names overlap with the general US Census. Keep in mind that a lot of these overlaps are names like Domingo, Dora, Joe, Landon, or Parker.
All of these still-in-use names name up only 2% of the names in the database, however. So what’s going on with the rest of them?
Some of them are clearly inconsistent romanizations. We have Aja and Ajah and Ahja, Urum and Uroom and Ooroom, Fahlalah and Fahllalla.
Some of these names may be misunderstandings, mistranslations, misspellings, mishearings, and misscribings by European captors who recorded these names. It should be possible to uncover what they are supposed to be then. Only some of the listed countries of origin are marked Unknown.
And even if they are mistakes, I don't think that makes them invalid. The name Mary is able to become Miriam, Moira, Maja, Mirka, or Manon because of all the cultural transformations that time and place and travel bring. There may be a few name shifts that, although not the intentional choice of the enslaved person bearing the name, are still it's still a valid change. Just ask Beyonce.
Violent Anglicization is a key element of the Middle Passage, after all.
It’s a little unnerving to think about the meaning of this dataset, all the violence that is lost when people become numbers, but the thing about names is that they hint at stories. The deeper I dig here, the more meaningful it feels. It feels like communing. It feels like memorializing. It reminds me of reading Zong!
I need to go eat and clean my bunny’s litter box so I’m calling it a day and scheduling this for the morning.
I now have a database with so many names that it’s a treasure trove for worldbuilding. I will research any name before I use it, of course. I stand by my method of Googling any name to see how the world is currently using it.
One of my goals is to see if I can bring back some forgotten Black names, restore respect to some of the underrated ones. I think Cuffey/Kofi/Coffey is a cool name, especially because a revolutionary maroon had it.