People who cant be bothered to come up with a name for their child arent likely to be the best par- ents either.

So does the name you give your child affect his life? Or is it your life reflected in his name? In either case, what kind of signal does a childs name send to the world-and most important, does it really matter?

As it happens, Loser and Winner, Temptress and Amcher were all black. Is this fact merely a curiosity or does it have something larger to say about names and culture?

* See note p. 227.

Every generation seems to produce a few marquee academics who advance the thinking on black culture. Roland G. Fryer Jr., the young black economist who analyzed the "acting white" phenomenon and the black-white test score gap, may be among the next. His ascension has been unlikely. An indifferent high-school student from an unsta- ble family, he went to the University of Texas at Arlington on an athletic scholarship. Two things happened to him during college: he quickly realized he would never make the NFL or the NBA; and, tak- ing his studies seriously for the first time in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate work at Penn State and the University of Chicago, he was hired as a Harvard professor at age twenty-five. His reputation for candid thinking on race was already well established.

Fryers mission is the study of black underachievement. "One could rattle off all the statistics about blacks not doing so well," he says. "You can look at the black-white differential in out-of-wedlock births or infant mortality or life expectancy. Blacks are the worst- performing ethnic group on SATs. Blacks earn less than whites. They are still just not doing well, period. I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this." In addition to economic and social disparity between blacks and