This style of naming is Truth in Television, as a lot of Americans can attest — but it's not usually as exaggerated as seen in fiction. Different people have different standards — and to some people, a name may seem ridiculous when really, it's just unfamiliar. Names that are explicitly drawn from, say, Arabic (e.g. Jamal, Kareem, Ayesha) or an African tongue (e.g. Kwame, Kwesi) would not count, for instance. But if it's something the parents clearly made up or gave an "inventive" spelling, it would.
For the USA's black citizens, this trend has its origins in the civil rights movement of the '60s, which saw an attempt to 'reclaim' their African names and reject 'white' (European) names and surnames given to and adopted by their ancestors, since virtually all European names were from the (pre-civil rights) days when black citizens were second-class citizens compared to Anglo-Germanic and even Mediterranean-Slavic Europeans. Furthermore, many of those names came from the antebellum days, when the vast majority of the country's ethnic-African people were legally-sanctioned slaves. Though the result of many African-Americans consciously choosing non-European given names for their children is clear to see (as per this trope), the incidence of 'name reclamation' is harder to judge. It's worth noting two things: A sizable amount of the USA's African-Americans do not have "black" sounding names, and most of them did not assume new family names. This is due to them or their parents still seeing themselves as black Americans. Ultimately, the admixture of the country's African, European, and Latin-American people having the same "kinds" of names mean the country's (African-American) folk can be better seen by outsiders as US citizens.
Other Anglophone countries also have "ghetto names", particularly among Lower Class Louts like Britain's chavs and Australia's bogans. In non-Anglophone countries, meanwhile, it's ironically conventional English-language names that have this connotation, the idea being that lower-class parents give their kids "American" names, often taken from celebrities, in order to make them sound cooler or more posh. Inevitably, this backfires and turns these "American" names into ghetto names. In Germany, for instance, the names "Kevin" and "Chantal" are so associated with the children of ghetto parents that "Kevinismus"
is regarded as a genuine social prejudice.
