No, not African American or speaking on behalf of anyone African American. But I have conversed with many African American friends and one friend who has native American heritage and what I have posted here is what I have learned from those conversations. My friends tend to be MC and all had given a good deal of thought to the names they chose for their children.
I see it as respectful, not discriminatory, to steer clear of some names. To me it's a question of balance of power.
www.babynamewizard.com/forum/cultural-appropriation-of-names
A discussion here^^.
This post in many ways sums up my point:
When an individual or culture is oppressed, one of the most basic ways of resisting oppression is through naming. There might be "secret" personal names that aren't used in front of oppressors or that don't make sense to the more powerful culture... on the flip-side, children might be given names from the oppressing culture, to help that child blend in better and to take some of the power for that child.
When individuals from the more powerful group "borrow" names from the less powerful group, therefore, it can be felt as yet another example of the more powerful blithely stepping on the culture and autonomy of the less powerful. The greater and more long-standing the power imbalance, and the more important to or representative of the culture the particular name is, the stronger the negative feelings about this practice are likely to be.
In the other direction, parents from the more marginalized group "borrowing" names from the dominant group might be seen by members of the dominant group to be (rightly) trying to assimilate or to be (unjustifiably) "aping their betters", according to the particulars of the group dynamics and the dominant individual in question. It might also pass entirely unnoticed, since the dominant names are normalized where traditional names of the oppressed group would be seen as deviant...