Is anyone else not too fond of those african-american sounding names?

Question

The ones like, Shakita, Takaya, Shaneyney, Shanequa. It doesn't have anything to do with their african culture though because real africans have more traditional sounding names...

every decade, the roll call for teachers seems to be getting harder and harder with names like these.

Answer 1

its not just those names it seems parents are just stupid giving their poor babys such fake made up names cause they think they are cute or unique! please they cant be said the way you intended and the spelling is so ignorant! i see it everywhere no wonder our children cant read or write ! it is pathetic save the dumb names for your pets not your babys! please!

Answer 2

In the seventies, ROOTS premiered and black americans saw how the african slaves names were changed to white peoples names. this caused us to take back our heritage and no longer be ashamed of our heritage. When we saw the truth about how our ancestors were forced into slavery we regained our pride. our names now reflect our heritage. if you notice most of these names started with parents that were teenagers at the time ROOTS premiered. You must like shenika, you can call her nika for short. Another thing why do japense and chinese have names you can't spell or pronounce? same reasoning. get it. so stop hating and being racist.

Answer 3

now Takaya may be a good African name, but it's not african american. i'm african american myself and my name is "Josephus" from the old hebrew name "Josepos". I don't know what it means though. I seriously don't like or recommend naming your baby any of these stupid made-up names. children will be ridiculed and won't get jobs because of this.

Answer 4

I don't think they are necessarily african-american. I'd consider it ethnic. AND the names are not that complicated if you can sound them out. The spelling of the names above I think are a little confusing though.

You can name your child whatever you like (i.e. Fennis, Apple, Kal-el, Coco, Cannon, Jagger - all caucasian celebrity baby names).

Times are changing, and the population is increasing. There can only be so many Mary's, Jane's, Mark's, Peter's, Dan's, and Susan's. Parent's want their child to be different from others. Some people choose to pave the way by name choice. It doesn't bother me at all.

Answer 5

I am half african american and I can say with all honesty that if my mother (who is white) had named me Shaquita I would have changed it at age 3...
I think it is for lack of imagination that those poor children have names that are one to hard to spell, to hard to pronounce and what do they mean. I want to be able to look my name up and know it doesn't mean "turd of dog" or something....by the way my (real) name means "small and wise"

Answer 6

I love the name Takaya..There are many Beautiful names of the African American orgin...and every culture has their names that sound odd to one person or another.Everyone has different taste.

Answer 7

And what about Caucasian names, aren't you tired of those too?! Becky- sounds like someone in a trailer park, OMG Caleb, Chase, Jacob, Brent, Trent, Susie, OMG, give me a break. And for your information not just black people(because I know thats who you are referring too) name their children with ghetto sounding names like those. There are whites, indians, hispanic, etc who name their children Shakita, Takaya, Shaneyney, Shanequa whatever. You need to research the facts first before you make stupid comments.

Answer 8

Yes! It drives me nuts that a grouping of certain names -- stereotypically made up jumbles of letters and sounds with little rhyme or reason -- are inherently considered "African American." To me, that's as bad as any other sort of racial profiling/generalizing.

After all, why on earth would you want the names typically associated with an entire race to be so stereotypically ignorant? Especially if you are African American?! There are plenty of beautiful African names out there. If you want to embrace your culture or ethnicity, that would seem a more positive way to go.

Simply stringing sounds together or adding random prefixes, suffixes or punctuation to already-existing -- though often misspelled names -- does not an African American name make! The alternative doesn't have to an uber-traditional name like Michael or Emily, but there are so many unusual, but still actual, names out there. No need to make one up and call it "African American."

Little Shaqueefa, DuhShawnn and K'rell would thank you. LOL

Answer 9

I absolutely can't stand ghetto, made-up names that have no meaning whatsoever, regardless of who uses them. They are uneducated and it seems like the parents threw a bunch of slips of paper with random syllables and letters on them into a hat and then strung together the first five they chose to make their child's name. These poor kids will be branded for life by these ridiculous names.

Answer 10

"real Africans" don't have traditional ENGLISH sounding names..because real Africans' native language is NOT English...

get over it.

Answer 11

I AGREE WITH VIRGO. This question sounds kinda racist. I generally don't like made up names period. African American or plain old white trash, haha!