"Kevin ist kein Name, sondern eine Diagnose"

In English: "Kevin isn't a name, it's a diagnosis."

This article caught my eye when my homepage, SpiegelOnline, came up this morning. At first I giggled (I've known a few Kevins, and was inclined to agree), but reading the article was a little worrying and more than a little sad. For those who can't read German, or don't feel like reading the entire article, it describes a study that found teachers in Germany have pretty clear and unabashed prejudices about both the abilities and trustworthiness of students with particular names. In short, students with more "traditional" or "older" German names (the article gives as examples Maximillian, Alexander, Charlotte, Sophie, among others) are viewed by their teachers to be more intelligent and trustworthy than their peers with names like Kevin, Brandy, Angelina, Justin or Marvin (Marvin? That one came outta left field...). With the exception of Marvin, there's a common thread between these names that should be pretty apparent to anyone living in the US who's had the misfortune to glance at a People magazine in the last five years. When I was in Germany, I'd hear frequent jokes about people considered part of Germany's underclass and at least half of them involved a child of "trashy" (read: lower class) parents who was named Kevin (Beyonce was another popular one), which immediately reminded me of jokes I'd heard in Ireland involving baby chavs named Shakira or Justin.

On the one hand, there's an interesting discussion here on the influence of American culture on the European "underclasses", but it caused me to think about how a similar phenomenon exists with teachers in the US. Naming a child "Paris" or some variation of a "traditional" name which substitutes many of the familiar letters causes many people (yes, myself included) to react with a certain amount of disdain. How long would it take before we started to associate that disdain with the children themselves (and their parents), and not just their names? In that sense, it's very similar to a lot of other prejudices, and potentially just as harmful.