It’s one of those awkward moments; The teacher goes through attendance and makes a long pause as she squints her eyes and butchers your last name in front of the class. Eventually, after years of correcting, you give up and stop correcting your teachers and peers, settling for a name that strips you of your identity. On the surface, the mispronunciation of someone's name might seem like a minor incident to some. However, this is all about racism, xenophobia, and racial microaggressions in which pronouncing someone’s name correctly has the power to make the person feel valued, acknowledged, and comforted — while, mispronunciations negates one's individuality.
My name is relatively simple: Tiffany Nguyen. For those wondering, I pronounce my name as “New-win,” a watered down, American pronunciation that I’ve used for my entire life. The most common mispronunciation that I hear is “Nuh-guy-yen.” Yet throughout my childhood, I let it go. I thought that work at hand was more important than the hidden identity that I would hide by biting my tongue. My name was a way to push me aside, and most of the time, the people who were doing this didn’t realize the damage they did to my self-worth and sense of confidence. But now, as I enter college, a new chapter of my life, I feel more pride in the culture and experiences which are embedded in my name, and here’s why:
People’s names matter. Our names hold a big role in our identity, yet many still feel the pressure to dismiss that part of their individuality. People with “tricky” names often get landed with unwanted nicknames. The racist practice of mispronouncing names has evolved from a long history of changing people of color's names to strip them of their dignity and alienate them from their peers. I found myself, and a majority of my friends, wanting to withdraw from raising our hands in class, and sitting on the edge of our seats during roll call so we could intervene and say our names before they were butchered. To a degree, it is understandable for those who are not surrounded by flourishing and diverse communities to mispronounce the names associated with minority groups, since they’re encountered less often. However, it seems incredibly common for people to refuse to learn names outside of their ethnicity or to replace them with nicknames that are considered their own “normal.” These verbal acts of intolerance create anxiety amongst their victims and forms an environment of "othering"— that their cultures do not matter, and that they are not true Americans.
In a society where white people are the only accepted leaders, when leaders of color, such as Kamala Harris, are put on the platform, their given respect is over looked. The environment is disrespectful, and even today the mockery of foreign names are overlooked on a daily basis. As Gerardo Ochoa, a first-generation immigrant from Mexico, shares his grade school experiences, he reflects on the mockeries of his name: “… All of us, myself included, are going to stumble and fumble. But it’s not your mistake that matters most; it’s what you do after the mistake. That’s when you have the chance to make someone feel like they belong — or feel like they’re the other. What will you choose to do?”
What matters is not getting the name right the first time, but to make the effort to genuinely learn the pronunciation and to be open during the process. If you’re not sure, ask. Let them correct you, or look it up if you’re unsure! Now, when someone mispronounces your name, be sure to interrupt and correct them. It’s not annoying, but rather changing the environment in which owning your name is the norm, and no longer an exception. Take your name back, and pronounce it with pride.
Tiffany Nguyen
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