Black Names

The case manager from my insurance company had come to meet with me. His name is Katario. We talked about my health care and just kind of hammed it up, just talking as two guys.

He said, “You’re 32? I have a daughter about your age.”

I asked in jest, “Oh yeah? Is she single?”

He laughed and said, “No, she’s married with kids, but she did marry a white guy, so you’re not too far off the mark.” I’m so not racist that I wasn’t even thinking about him being black and me white.

Then as he was leaving, I temporarily forgot his name and then quickly remembered, saying, “Nice meeting with you. . . Katario, right? Sorry, I just don’t encounter that name very often.”

Katario explained that he was named after an uncle or somebody who’d died in Vietnam. “But you know us black people,” he went on, “we just make up names.”

He has a point, and I thought of the social science research on job applications with black names versus white names. Studies have shown that applicants with “white” names are more likely to get interviews than those with “black” names, the sort of names that became popular in the black community around the time of the black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. According to the research, the white-name applicants who indicated that they had been convicted of felonies still had better job prospects than those of black-name applicants with no criminal backgrounds! Racism in employment opportunities, then, seems to be very real.

Katario, I should say, however, seems to be doing well for himself.