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It all started with such a simple question. \u201cWhat are the rules parents follow when they pick a name for their child,\u201d I asked a sea of students with my hands on my hips at the front of the movie theater I teach my Soc 101 class in. \u201cStart by writing down your thoughts and in a moment we\u2019ll share them with each other.\u201d When most of the class was pens down, I asked them to discuss in pairs the rules they\u2019d written down. <\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, so tell me what you think parents think about when naming their kiddos.\u201d Hands snapped into the air. I pointed at a young woman with curly brown hair and nodded to give her the floor. \u201cI think parents want names that sound employable.\u201d My eyebrows raised and my jaw dropped and in a I\u2019m-playing-dumb-voice I asked, \u201cwhat ever do you mean?\u201d Students laughed. Students writhed in their seats. \u201cSome names are more employable than others? If that\u2019s true, then give me some examples of \u2018employable sounding names\u2019,\u201d I said using air quotes. A choir of voices shot out answers rapid fire.<\/p>\n
\u201cMichael,
\nPeter,
\nChris,
\nBob,
\nJohn,
\nGary,
\nTony,
\nNathan,
\nTom,
\nAdam,
\nPaul,
\nSteve,
\nJason,
\nNick\u201d <\/p>\n
Hands in the air I cut them off, \u201cHold on a second. I\u2019m seeing a couple of trends in this list. First, not a darn one of them is a traditionally female name. You know women work too, right?\u201d They laugh seeing the smile on my face. \u201cBut what else do all of these names have in common?\u201d Before I could even finish the question, a young man near the front row shouted, \u201cThey\u2019re white people names!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if employable names all sound like \u2018white people names\u2019, then what does this tell us? Put another way, a conflict theorist would ask \u2018who benefits from this\u2019, so tell me who benefits from this?\u201d From here you can teach students just about any sociological concept you want: social privilege, internalized racism, the dominant culture, symbolic violence, non-material culture, patriarchy, the glass ceiling\/escalator, symbolic interaction, how personal decisions are affected by social forces, labeling theory, institutional discrimination, hegemony, and on and on. It\u2019s a swiss army knife of an activity.<\/p>\n
Instead of asking my students this simple question, I could have shown them the research on name discrimination in hiring by Bertrand and Mullainthan (2004)[1]<\/a>. I could have told them that this was a real issue, but instead they told me it was issue. The list of names they generated revealed to them something about themselves that they might have been unaware of. I could have told them that, as we all do, they personally struggled with racism and sexism, but instead their actions confessed this publicly. <\/p>\n In English 101 the saying is \u201cshow, don\u2019t tell,\u201d and in Pedagogy 101 the saying is, \u201cthe one doing the work is the one doing the learning.<\/a>\u201d This activity works on both levels.<\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainthan. 2004. \u201cAre Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination\u201d The American Economic Review<\/em> 94(4):991\u20131013.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong, it\u2019s vital that they do learn about the empirical research that\u2019s been done, but I don\u2019t think you want to lead with that. Make them want to know more about name discrimination, then show them the research. \u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It all started with such a simple question. \u201cWhat are the rules parents follow when they pick a name for their child,\u201d I asked a sea of students with my hands on my hips at the front of the movie theater I teach my Soc 101 class in. \u201cStart by writing down your thoughts and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1982,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30650],"tags":[15,30732,30728],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-for-teachers","tag-culture","tag-in-class-activities","tag-raceethnicity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1982"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":444,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions\/444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/sociologysource\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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