likely cause of the explosion in dis- tinctively black names was the Black Power movement, which sought to accentuate African culture and fight claims of black inferiority. If this naming revolution was indeed inspired by Black Power, it would be one of the movements most enduring remnants. Afros today are rare, dashikis even rarer; Black Panther founder Bobby Seale is best known today for peddling a line of barbecue products. A great many black names today are unique to blacks. More than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive   a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black, born that year in California. (There were also 228 babies named Unique during the 1990s alone, and 1 each of Uneek, Uneque, and Uneqqee.) Even among very popular black names, there is little over- lap with whites. Of the 626 baby girls named Deja in the 1990s, 591 were black. Of the 454 girls named Precious, 431 were black. Of the 318 Shanices, 310 were black. What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinc- tively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low- income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself. In Fryers view, giving a child a superblack name is a black parents signal of solidarity with the community. "If I start naming my kid Madison," he says, "you might think, Oh, you want to go live across the railroad tracks, dont you? " If black kids who study calculus and ballet are thought to be "acting white," Fryer says, then mothers who call their babies Shanice are simply "acting black." The California study shows that many white parents send as strong a signal in the opposite direction. More than 40 percent of the white babies are given names that are at least four times more com-