Micro aggression and African American names

[Fragile Bird]

Please tell me about this.

A Facebook friend posted someone's tweet, calling for 2016 to be the year black people act like they don't know how to pronounce white people's names.  We got into a somewhat heated discussion where I said stupid people were stupid and I get my name misspelled all the time (misspelling was also a common event) and that deliberately mispronouncing someone's name was ignorant and it happens to all kinds of people.  I was assured this is a thing that black people in the US face regularly, and what was wrong with me that I couldn't understand this is a real thing even after it was explained to me and the tweet was a joke and not a call for a mini race war.  This is a form of micro aggression (a new term to me) against black people.

So, please, tell me about this.  If your name is Robert Jones, do white people pretend they can't pronounce Robert, or is it when you have an African or Arabic name, like Mohammed or Shaquille or Rashida?

Excuse me, but I'm still trying to get my head around this.  50 years ago when Canada was basically 95% white Christian Anglo-Saxon or French, people sneered at Eastern European or Italian names, or Pakistani names (Pakistan was a Commonwealth country and there was an influx of immigration during turbulent times), but these days I think most people try their sincere best to correctly pronounce and spell names, since the population is so diverse.  I'm certain stupid people still mock others for their names, but I think there are bullies everywhere who search for something to bully a person with, and mocking a name is an easy and sensitive target.  It sounds like grade school schoolyard bullying.  This whole concept of micro aggression through deliberate mispronunciation sounds like a scene out of In The Heat of the Night (wasn't there a scene in that movie where Rod Steiger deliberately mispronounces Sidney Poitier's name?).

Do you see this happening all the time?  If you live elsewhere, like Europe, do you see this as well?  I've had my name misspelled and mispronounced my entire life, and it's been annoying and sometimes it felt like it was done deliberately, but I can't say it was commonly done or that there was regularly a nasty undertone to it, which this sounds like.

[maarsen]

Call me old fashioned but pronouncing some one's name properly is the smallest and simplest of courtesies that can be bestowed on a person. I have mispronounced names on occasion but only because I was unable to ask how to pronounce the name from the person directly. If you want to deliberately mispronounce a name, just skip a step and say, 'hey, asshole'. That way everyone knows who the deliberate asshole is.  

[sologdin]

frags--

i've got a slavic surname and expect it to be unpronounceable to basically everyone, not because of intentional attempts to denigrate me as a greasy eastern european, but rather because the mispronouncers are worthless wastes of space who can't figure out something relatively elementary.  the mispronounciation inures accordingly to my benefit rather than theirs.

that said, i get it that this is a racialized question, presented in the context of parallel acts of micro- and macro-aggression on the basis of race.  easy to ignore or reverse, i.e., in isolation; not so much when every other communication carries some deviation or denigration.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I make sincere efforts to pronoun names, not just correctly, but as the person I'm addressing prefers them to be pronounced.  It is common curtesy.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Life's too short to figure out how to pronounce every possible name.

Eta: as an Asian American, I've discovered a corollary: life is too short to teach other people to pronounce your name correctly.

[zelticgar]

I pride myself on name pronunciation. I work with a lot of folks from India and have made it a point to understand and get used to pronunciations. Indian names are tricky because there can be upwards of 4,5 or 6 syllables in one name. Its kind of common sense to make sure you can pronounce someones name but if you have a unique name you need to be realistic and not get pissy because someone is struggling to pronounce a name. 

 

 

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Indian names are tricky, but doable for Germanic and Romance language speakers. It's a lot of syllables, but not too many unfamiliar sounds.

Chinese names, in my experience, are easy for English speakers to get close enough, but unless they've studied the language for years or decades, impossible to get perfectly correct.

[zelticgar]

I work with some Chinese folks and I can never get their names correct. I never know how to pronounce Q's and Ng's.

Never had any trouble pronouncing any American names, even some of the newer African American names. I've seen a few names with apostrophe placement that is a little tricky but anyone with a high school education should be able to figure them out. If you cant figure it out just ask.

 

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

There are people I've known my entire life and they still can't pronounce my last name. I don't think people do it intentionally, they just can't do it.  

[Inigima]

Guys, it's great that you, personally, don't do this, but that's not really relevant. FB, this may be instructive:

http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-woman-ridicules-racist-white-coworker/

It's not something I see, but I'm not in a position to. There's not really a reason to lie about it, and I don't think it's hard to believe that similar stories don't happen plenty. People can be dicks and racism is far from dead.

[JonSnow4President]

Guys, it's great that you, personally, don't do this, but that's not really relevant. FB, this may be instructive:

http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-woman-ridicules-racist-white-coworker/

It's not something I see, but I'm not in a position to. There's not really a reason to lie about it, and I don't think it's hard to believe that similar stories don't happen plenty. People can be dicks and racism is far from dead.

Reading that, I would like to think that's exaggerated or fake as shit. Assuming it is true, I would say that transcends the concept of microagression to full on deliberate racism. 

I don't think there's anything remotely aggressive or discriminatory about saying "Meng zoo" for a week, uncorrected by anyone, before finally learning it was really "Mon zhu." It's something that I've never grown up seeing, and I make a legitimate effort to learn and say it correctly when it's pointed out I'm wrong.

My name's Joe.  My brothers and cousins are Justin, Jacob, Amy, Will, Morgan, Kaleigh, Kelsey, Bradford, and Cassy.  My aunts/uncles/grandparents/parents were two Barbaras, Vernon, Joe, Richard, Kevin, Dawn, Gina, Brad, and Bobby. My friends in the first town I can remember growing up in were Charlie, Will, and Jordan.  Courtney and Brady in the second town.  Tyler, Jeremy, Jonathan, Joshua, Will, and Jared in the third.  Jake and Travis in the fourth.  By the time I reached middle school, the most exotic name I can remember seeing was Dominic, and that's including every black person I knew in small towns in Arkansas and Texas.  

In the same way I don't expect someone to move here and immediately speak English perfectly, I don't think it's fair to expect someone not to initially butcher a name from a culture foreign to their own.  If there's a continued intentional or blatantly apathetic mispronunciation, that's another thing, but I can say I've never encountered a situation (outside of childhood) where someone was deliberate trying to make fun of someone's name, and only one situation where someone was so self absorbed not to care after they were corrected (ironically, it was a Pakistani immigrant doing it, not an American) (Michelle into Mitch and Mitchell)

 

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

The guy in the article Inigima shared was a racist prick for the sake of being a racist prick.  

[Fragile Bird]

Guys, it's great that you, personally, don't do this, but that's not really relevant. FB, this may be instructive:

http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/black-woman-ridicules-racist-white-coworker/

It's not something I see, but I'm not in a position to. There's not really a reason to lie about it, and I don't think it's hard to believe that similar stories don't happen plenty. People can be dicks and racism is far from dead.

Ok, I see.  I was accused, btw, of supporting this idiot in the link because I said all kinds of people get their names misspelled and mispronounced.  But that article was not linked in the thread I was responding to, what was linked was some woman's tweet, as I said above, suggesting all black people pretend they don't know how to pronounce the names of white people.  When I said that mispronouncing peoples' names was ignorant, I was told here goes white privilege gettin' all defensive.

And I agree with you, JonSnow, about the story being untrue.  I spent more than 15 years working as a lawyer in a couple of large US companies (in Canada) and if at a meeting of managers with their supervisor someone said the things 'Evan' was supposed to have said his ass would have  been in front of HR so fast it would make your head spin.  And for her to spend 6 months deliberately calling him by wrong names with the full support of everyone in the office sounds extremely unlikely as well.  After the first couple of times her supervisor would have (or should have) had her in the office to ask what the hell was going on.  The story sounds like someone's revenge fantasy.

However, I don't doubt that asshats do in fact deliberately mispronounce the name of people or say that they can't be bothered because the name is too hard.  It's practically an urban myth, one that I think is absolutely true, that many a foreigner with a strange name has been given a nickname because their real name was too hard to say.

 But I started this thread because I wondered if boarders with Arabic or African names are finding this kind of stuff happens to them.  Like solo and Arch-MaesterPhilip I have a last name that has always been mangled, even with me anglicising it to make it easier for folks.  But rarely do people do it on purpose, they usually try hard to get it correct. 

[baxus]

I have a Slavic name and a rather short one at that and it's still funny to see foreigners mispronounce it on a regular basis. If someone would deliberately mispronounce it or if I'd get the feeling they are deliberately mispronouncing it, I'd correct them every single time until they'd get it right. Usually it's rather difficult for people with no Slavic languages background to pronounce it 100% correctly, so I'm not a dick about it and I usually go with "close enough" when I see someone trying.

 

[Magnar of Skagos]

My name is Aidan. It's a pretty straight-forward, English/Anglicized name, for an English person. I have been called Alden, Arden, Aidien, Hayden, more times than I can count, by people from every race under the sun. It's not your race or culture that determines that your name will be mispronounced or misspelt. No matter what you're called, somebody will butcher your name to shit.

[Bonesy]

My secret for pronouncing names correctly:

Grow up in the SF Bay Area.

Live in East Asia for four years.

Be a hockey and futbol fan.

Don't even try with Gaelic names, just memorize that shit.

[Tears of Lys]

My husband's last name is fairly unusual.  It's supposed to be old Prussian.  Anyway, it's very unfamiliar to most people, so when they see it printed out and have to say it, it's pretty funny.  When he first introduced himself to me, I had him say it twice and then spell it!  My ignorance obviously didn't turn him off, though.  Thank the tiny gods! 

OT, I think people mispronouncing other folks' names is very rarely done on purpose.  When it does happen, mostly it's because everyone's in such a damn hurry that few people stop and study the various syllables and figure the pronunciation out.  When someone mispronounces **my** name, I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that they're doing it to insult me.  However, my experience is, of course, solely mine.  You can tell, **I** think, when someone's doing it on purpose.  Their demeanor screams "ASSHAT."   I think that may have happened to me maybe once or twice since I've taken my husband's last name, and when it has happened, it's been very clear that it's not done out of ignorance but out of malice - for which there's no excuse and it deserves whatever response it gets.

[Datepalm]

I can see it. Not familiar with the American context personally, but yes, I have encountered the mispronounciation of names as an act of denigration, snobism and general know-your-placeness here, usually towards Arabs, also towards immigrants (Slavs, Ethiopians,) and occassionally even the Ultra-Orthodox, who have a lot of traditional Yiddish names that are a bit exotic sounding by now to secular Hebrew-speakers. Either it's an overt unwillingness to put in the - incredibly minimal - effort of getting the pronounciation right, highlighting that, hey, i'm in the non-oppressed-majority here and I don't have to give a fuck, or just flat out deliberate mispronounciation in, yes, something extremely akin to schoolyard bullying.

(And sure, my name gets ocassionally mispronounced, (and the last name is hopeless in Hebrew) and the English and American standard pronounciations are a little different from the way I say it, which I occassionally correct and never sticks, and sometimes it's automatically assumed to be a more common version. None of those are usually indicators or racism, but that doesn't mean that names can't be used that way just because my name doesn't happen to be.)

[Fragile Bird]

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing I meant.  People are really sensitive about their name, and can usually hear an insult when it's intended.  But the story Ini posted was way way beyond that, it suggested very overt racism.  It's the more subtle stuff that seems extremely demeaning and insidious, because it's the stuff that I think can fly just under the radar of, say, a discrimination complaint.

[Datepalm]

Ini's link is just someone verbalizing very bluntly the logic behind the act, I think. That guy just took the further step of actually adding, "I'm so disdainful of you and your culture that I can not bother to pronounce your name and expect to get away with it," but thats the subtext of the thing. There are plenty of non-innocent mispronouncings where people don't actually say the followup, or maybe aren't as consciously aware of the process that's driving them to continue to mispronounce a name. (Though personally I think bullies usually know exactly how they're causing someone to feel and why,)They just know they're enjoying themselves or it feels right, and they don't expect consequences, because they can feel the social power imbalance between a guy named Evan and a woman named LaToya, even if it's only on the level of recognizing one name as being mockable and a 'reasonable' target for (continued) mispronounciation, and the other not. IE, if I mispronounce Michael (Mee-cha-ell? My-chell?) i'm the one who should be embarassed - I must be stupid, or foreign, or not a native speaker, or mocking. If I mispronounce Laquisha, she's the one who should be embarassed for having such a ridiculous name, and I'm free to keep doing it.