How White People Subtly Reinforce White Supremacy When They Laugh at Black Names

[Igel]

105. What's "common"?

My kid finds eating chicken feet to be weird and unusual. So do his friends.

Many hundreds of millions of people don't find it weird or unusual.

Thing is, the two groups of people don't interact.

"Skyler" is more common and DeShaun rare among the group of people that makes fun of "DeShaun" (although that one I haven't heard mocked, AFAIK). People can't be expected to know what's common among other communities, just what's uncommon among their own.

Names that are mocked among the Skyler-common/DeShaun-uncommon crowd include, usually, things like Moon Child, Ima Hogg, Aeh'nne, Joe-Pete, but also "white trash" names that aren't "Joe-Pete" like but much more AA-sounding. (The AA tradition isn't AA; it's rural Southern, and the tradition is alive and well among poor whites. In stressing the "otherness" of AA customs, traditions, and speech, one usually misses the commonalities it had with the whites that were similar in SES and geography with post-Civil-War free blacks.)