Name, identity, and profiling

Via the New York Times, there is the following interesting bit on what a name means in France:

IN France, a person’s name can signify as little as a measure of what’s big on TV at any given time, or as much as an entire country’s nature.

The recent publication there of two annual guides charting the popularity of first names could only prompt more soul-searching in a nation already painfully struggling with how to define its character. The issue appears so urgent that President Nicolas Sarkozy felt the need to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, and the government has passed a law authorizing DNA testing to establish family links among would-be immigrants.

[…] In a recent article pegged to the publication of one of the guides, Joséphine Besnard’s “Index of First Names in 2008,” the newspaper Libération asked 15 people to talk about their own names, prompting a lively debate on its Web site. A few readers commented on some French assumptions. “What of the new first names — Binta, Jamila, Lin, Ahmed, etc. — of an increasing number of French people?” wrote one commentator at the Web site. “It would have been interesting to look into that issue and how society perceives people with those names, people who may be born here but whose parents almost certainly weren’t.”

But Guy Desplanques, a demographer, pointed out in 2002 that names like Ahmed and Jamila actually were on the wane, and that second-generation French men and women work toward integration by coming up with variations like Yanis or Rayan; the latter has become popular in some banlieues, evoking both the Maghreb and the relatively widespread Ryan.

[…] Sociologists like Mr. Besnard observed that first names were often quick markers of social and educational status. […] Indeed, bourgeois French parents are unlikely to give their children “Anglo-Saxon” names; Jennifer was the most popular name for girls from 1984 to 1986, but it’s a safe bet few Jennifers came from well-educated families. (The craze is commonly explained by the success of the TV series “Hart to Hart” in France at that time — Jennifer Hart was one of the title characters — while “Beverly Hills, 90210,” featuring a popular character named Dylan McKay, is sometimes blamed for the explosion of Dylans a few years later.)

This quick profiling can hamper those looking for a job: Several studies have shown that all things being equal, applicants with “foreign”-sounding names are less likely to be hired.

It is possible to expand the discussion to America with the case of Barack Obama for example. The fact that it is possible to un-Americanize him by using his middle name by purposely confusing his last name with Osama without paying any political prize speaks volume about the importance of a name and of race in America. It shows that in the US, to the contrary to France, the main problem with having a different name and looking foreign isn’t so much the difficulty of finding a job, but rather the difficulty of becoming the representative for all Americans and of acceding to the highest class status through other means than entertainment and sports. Sarkozy loves to tell the story that his father told him that he wouldn’t succeed in politics with his name. However, Sarkozy had the advantage that he looked French and that he could take off the “de Nagy Bócsa” of his name to make it sound less foreign. All he had to do was to wrap himself in the French flag and to use extreme language against immigrants to look more patriotic than the French of pure blood to get to the Elysée palace. The recent polemic about Obama and his supposed lack of patriotism shows that the perception of one’s foreignness is reinforced by one’s name and one’s physical appearance. To come back to France, a large part of the French elite and politicians knows that the French integration model doesn’t work. However, because they are conservative, they are still clinging on to the idea that it doesn’t work because France got the wrong immigrants who don’t want to become French or rather cannot become French because of their cultures and religions.