I’m bad with names. I’m so bad with names that for a year in college, I only dated women named “Sue” so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I can remember faces, people, things we did and things that happened, but I just can’t pull a name out of the mush in my head when I need to. It can be very embarrassing when someone I know comes over and I need to introduce them, but can’t recall their name. My practice has become to just admit my failing and ask for help. Most people laugh at me for my inability to remember names and life goes on.
There seems to be a lot more people with unusual names these days. By unusual, I mean not the typical popular names that all the kids had when I was growing up. John and Mary are still around, of course, as are Jordan and Tiffany, but the other day I wrote about a woman with an apostrophe in the middle of her name. I have no idea what it was doing there, but there it was.*
I don’t know why there’s an apostrophe in the middle of a name, and I presume the name is otherwise pronounced the way it’s spelled. But I could be wrong. Perhaps the emphasis is on the first syllable. Maybe the third. Unless someone informs me otherwise, I’m left to my own devices, which wouldn’t be much since I suck at names.
Does that make me racist? NPR suggests that it does.
In this episode of RadioActive Youth Media, Keya Roy and Zuheera Ali talk with author Ijeoma Oluo and each other about living in the United States with uncommon names. They also talk to Rita Kohli, a professor at University of California, Riverside, who has researched the effects of mispronouncing names on students of color.
Producer Medha Kumar has her name butchered constantly. Every time a teacher reads the attendance list and gets to her name, she knows they’re looking at her name because they’re squinting. It’s one of those super awkward moments.
In the scheme of unusual names in America, these don’t seem particularly hard to pronounce, but then, I could be completely wrong and pronouncing them (in my mind) wrong. Why people would mispronounce the name more than once when reading from a list is a mystery. Either the teacher is a dolt or he’s intentionally mispronouncing the name. If the former, then he’s a union member. If the latter, then he’s an asshole. Are all teachers dolts or assholes?
Zuheera Ali says she was never one to let someone say her name wrong.
“My name is my identity, and allowing someone else to say it wrong is stripping me of that,” she says. “I feel like as a woman of color, I’m expected to make these changes, especially when I’m at school. But asking me to make my name easier to pronounce is a very unfair way that I have to change.”
A name is a name. If someone pronouncing it wrong strips you of your identity, then your psychological problems likely need tending, and perhaps psychotropic medication. But I suspect this isn’t true, but rather the attempt to turn a banal fact into a claim of victimhood over nothing. But these are students, kids, and they’re being reared in the culture of misery and victimhood. When they grow up, will they laugh at their infantile cries of faux offense or will they be bold, fierce warriors for a cause and miserable about the fact that so few people care about their traumatic world of mispronounced names?
Says co-host Keya Roy: “I always felt like by giving into that pressure to conform and allowing my name to be butchered, I was somehow making life easier for others…
“My name is a way to push me aside, and most of the time, the people who are doing this don’t realize the damage they could be doing to my self-worth and sense of confidence.”
The name “Keya Roy” doesn’t seem particularly hard to pronounce. You have the word “Key,” which is a common English word, with an “a” on the end. Unless this isn’t the pronunciation at all, in which case you would have to let people know that you prefer a pronunciation in defiance of common English pronunciation. And this damages you?
Ijeoma Oluo, author and leading voice on race in America, says her name is often used to discredit her.
“People will try to — as a blatant sign of disrespect — mispronounce my name or mock my name,” Oluo says. “I get that on social media all the time.”
Oluo says people on social media will “deliberately, wildly misspell my name to show to other people how serious must I be taken if I don’t even have what they would consider to be a serious name. It’s racist at its core to think that other cultures names are invalid. It’s othering and purposefully disrespectful, and it’s often used as a weapon against me.”
She continues: “It’s my name and I won’t let anyone take that from me.”
Fair enough. You can have it. But that doesn’t make other culture’s names “invalid,” just unusual, and without a ready comparison to a more typical American name. That you impute “disrespect” doesn’t make it so. It’s just an odd name. Americans can barely spell any word correctly; misspelling your unusual name seems almost a given.
When Black Lives Matter made its first pass through American culture, it faded without significant impact when the complaint shifted from the abhorrent police treatment of black people based on assumptions that blacks were more inclined to crime and violence. When the complaints slid down the slippery slope to matters like House Masters at Harvard having names that sounded the same as slave masters, it lost its punch. People were ready to go to the wall over other people’s lives, but not so much over their hearing words that they decided shouldn’t be uttered.
For all the damage and destruction, the violence and trauma following the killing of George Floyd, remarkably little of use or sustainability has been accomplished. I blame most of this on the well-intended ignorance of reformers, indulging their simplistic fixes when hard, real thought was needed. But at least there was recognition and movement.
When we reach the point where National Public Radio publishes the mispronunciation of names as racism, we reach the stage where seriousness is lost. Nobody is going to risk their life so Keya isn’t stripped of her identity because somebody said her name wrong. Adults should tell the children that they can’t steal a real problem for their own childish claims of victimhood.
*I once asked a black client who used odd punctuation and spelling for his child’s unusual name why. He told me that it made the name “fancy,” and it cost nothing. Whether this was only his rationale or is a more common reason, I can’t say.
His kid’s name sounded somewhat “African,” so I asked whether it was. “No,” he told me. He just made it up and liked it because it sounded as if it was African, but it wasn’t an actual word in any language or a ordinary name in any culture. “It’s fancy,” he reiterated, just in case I missed it the first time. I didn’t see any problem, as he could name his child any damn thing he wanted.
It never occurred to me that it might some day come back to haunt his kid if someone with no basis to know how this made-up name should be pronounced said it wrong.