It's a lot about class and perceived class. Working class white people often go with 'unique' names too and get a lot of the same judgement from teachers and employers (my mother was an elementary school teacher to mostly urban, white, working class kids; she hated to admit it, but she could tell looking down the list of names which kids were likely to be difficult each year and it was depressingly accurate - not all of them, but at least one every year would fulfill the prejudice)... it's not fair on the good kids in the slightest, but this definitely happens at all stages of life... it starts in the playground, continues through the classroom and all the way into adult life.

People see non-standard names and infer, however falsely and unreliably, something about how a child was likely to have been brought up - if the parents named the child for "fashion" rather than for "success", did they also pay more attention to the sneakers he was wearing than the books he was reading? Was he getting his ears pierced whilst James was getting his eyes tested? Was it cartoons or stories before bed?

It's ALLLLL in the perception - none of this has anything to do with actual parenting and is unfair on the majority of parents who use interesting names and raise great children, but we live amongst a species to whom perception is vitally important and I think it's unfair to thrust an unborn child into a life of having to prove people's misconceptions wrong when it's not really that big a deal to be called Nicholas or something else relatively unimaginative. If the child hates their boring name by the time they're a teenager, they can assume a nickname or get it changed anyway.