Shakespeare（莎士比亚(1564-1616） famously penned the quote, "What's in a name?" He was talking through his character Juliet as she pleaded（辩护） with her lover Romeo. That what we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. In her mind, names and labels made no difference because it was the content of one's character that was weighted the most heavily. And I've learned, through both personal and professional research, that nothing is farther from the truth. My obsession（迷住） with names first stemmed（起源） from my eldest daughter's birth. I wanted to give her the best chance at navigating an at times bias society, and I knew that a name could be consequential for a child's trajectory in life because of common research methodology（方法学） used in my field.

  In audit（审计） studies, researchers create fictitious resumes that are identical, except for they affix（[语] 词缀） different names to the tops of each one. After which, they send these resumes out to real jobs and companies, and they assess the percentage of callbacks received, depending on which name applied for the position. So when it came time to name my eldest daughter, my quirky professor brain kicked in and I decided I needed a research study to find her the best name that would offer her the most success in life. Seriously, I had a thousand survey takers from across the nation assess each of my name choices on just how competent（有能力的）, likeable, and hireable they perceived a person with that name to be. With little sentimentality, the scientists in me chose the name that rated highest across all measures of my study. True story.

  Now, if you're a parent of more than one kid, you may understand why by the time it got to the second kid, he didn't receive the same rigorous（严格的） investigation. There was no research sample or empirical（完全根据经验的） investigation for my son. And instead, we named him Kingston, which was reminiscent（怀旧的） of his ancestral（ 祖先的） past. So instead of thinking with the logical, analytical（分析的） left side of my brain, we wanted something more meaningful（ 意味深长的） and symbolic（ 符号的）. Both my husband and I have Caribbean（加勒比海） roots, so naming him Kingston tied down to a history that we never wanted him to forget. My obsession with names and labels progressed even further when we started to understand the power and complexity（复杂） of racial labels.

  So in one-on-one conversations with white counterparts（副本） at networking events, I would refer to myself as black, and in response, they would refer to me as African-American. It was as if they were placing black for African-Americans, so not to offend me. Now, there are technical differences between the two labels, where black is more of a global term, and African-American refers solely（单独地） to residents of the United States, but colloquially, within this country, we treat the two interchangeably. And I certainly wasn't offended by the use of either one, but I did find my counterparts' behavior to be strange. After multiple interactions like this, I started to wonder whether there was a stigma inherent（固有的） in the black label that I was missing. So the researcher in me set out to test whether white people perceived black people differently than African-Americans.

  In a series of studies that I collected with Sarah Townsend, Catherine Phillips, and James Carter, we created fictitious application forms that were identical, except for in one, we identified the candidate as black, and in the other, we identified the candidate as African-American. The results shocked me. The white participants who evaluated the African-American candidate were twice as likely to believe that that candidate belonged in a managerial position rather than the same exact candidate, but who was described as black. The African-American label led participants to believe there was a completely new candidate, one who was more competent, educated, and worthy（有价值的） of a higher salary. This is like $8,000 that we're talking about for this label. It made me think back to my cocktail（鸡尾酒） party participants and wonder whether the black label conjured（ 召唤） up all these negative stereotypes（ 固定形式） and they were reticent to apply those stereotypes（ 固定形式） to me.

  I decided to dig even deeper to investigate how racial labels even become imbued with stereotypical（老一套的） content. And to do so, I had to go back in time. Let's take the racial label Negro. Most Americans will consider it negative or at least old-fashioned. In fact, it was removed from the census（人口普查） after 2010 because of complaints that it was negative, outdated（ 过时的）, and reminiscent（怀旧的） of the Jim Crow era. I realized that this racial label evoked（唤起） the historical period it gained prominence within.

  Negro was frequently used during a time that further Jim Crow ideology（意识形态）. Therefore, it's not terribly surprising that it soaked（浸） up some of this ideology（意识形态） and those undertones continue on with the word even today. Now, the process of a word absorbing the tone of the words that frequently surround it is called semantic prosody.