Re-read pages 6–7 and identify the central idea of these paragraphs. Explain what you learned about Wes and Nikki’s names.

In the Spiegel & Gray paperback edition of The Other Wes Moore, pages 6–7 detail the history behind Wes and Nikki's names, which the other posted response to this question explains, and also establish the motif of duality, which gains importance when the narrator tells us about the "other" Wes Moore.
Moore writes,

Our home was on a busy street that sat right on the border of Maryland and Washington, D.C., stuck confusingly between two different municipal jurisdictions . . . My friend Ayana . . . was half Iranian and half Italian.

In just a few sentences, Moore places us at intersections: of Maryland and D.C., of cultures, of identities. His language here foreshadows the fate of the man who shares his name, and how that fate could very much have been his own. Moore also takes care to explain the cultural blending of his friend Ayana. The attention here suggests that Moore sees an increasingly diverse population in 1980s America. Moore's focus on inclusion and exclusion—where to find belonging, and where to feel left out—also brings in the issue of identity, and how our communities influence our sense of selfhood. Because the trajectories of the men in this book rely so heavily on the "crucial inflection points" of their lives (as Moore says in his introduction), Moore wants us to understand the forces that act upon those inflection points, and how those forces become even more complex when they oppose one another.

In these pages, Wes Moore discusses the origins of his names and that of his sister. The central idea is that his names convey the legacies that his parents hoped to bestow on him. His first name, Westley, is the same as that of his father. He has two middle names, as his parents could not agree on which middle name to give him. One of his middle names, "Watende," is a Shona name; its meaning is "revenge will not be sought." This name is in accordance with the soft, nurturing nature of Wes's father and was his father's choice. The other middle name, "Omari," means "the highest" and was his mother's choice. His sister was named Joy but called "Nikki," as Wes's mother admired the poet Nikki Giovanni, who wrote about women's empowerment.