Thanks for the links. Unfortunately the Daily Beast article is behind a pay wall. The other articles don't talk about the different experiences of white and non-white immigrants, but I still appreciated reading them. Key & Peele are hilarious. I have never in my life had a substitute teacher pronounce my name correctly. Actually I've never had one try. They would just get to it and pause: that was my cue to speak up.
A couple things jumped out at me. First, for all the talk about Kamala Harris' name, it actually is not at all difficult to pronounce. It's unfamiliar to a lot of people, so they'd have to hear it a couple times to get it right, but that's it. At least as I've heard it, the sounds are all part of normal English speech. (The people making a big deal out of it were just being racist dipshits, no question.) But not all names can learned so easily. Some can be genuinely difficult for English speakers to hear/say correctly. Even simple Dutch words contain diphthongs and other sounds my American friends cannot reproduce.
Second, these articles still use "Anglicize" and "whiten" as synonyms, and as a non-Anglican white person, that strikes me as awfully US/UK-centric. That's the core of my argument. I agree that name mispronunciation can feel minimizing—I have felt it myself—and I readily accept that this minimization intersects with other forms of racial and cultural minimization POCs experience. But I don't think name mispronunciation is inherently racial because non-Anglican white immigrants experience it too. (I will add the columnist didn't say this, exactly, but the jump to racial fetishism surprised me and made me recall seeing this discussion elsewhere.)
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A couple things jumped out at me. First, for all the talk about Kamala Harris' name, it actually is not at all difficult to pronounce. It's unfamiliar to a lot of people, so they'd have to hear it a couple times to get it right, but that's it. At least as I've heard it, the sounds are all part of normal English speech. (The people making a big deal out of it were just being racist dipshits, no question.) But not all names can learned so easily. Some can be genuinely difficult for English speakers to hear/say correctly. Even simple Dutch words contain diphthongs and other sounds my American friends cannot reproduce.
Second, these articles still use "Anglicize" and "whiten" as synonyms, and as a non-Anglican white person, that strikes me as awfully US/UK-centric. That's the core of my argument. I agree that name mispronunciation can feel minimizing—I have felt it myself—and I readily accept that this minimization intersects with other forms of racial and cultural minimization POCs experience. But I don't think name mispronunciation is inherently racial because non-Anglican white immigrants experience it too. (I will add the columnist didn't say this, exactly, but the jump to racial fetishism surprised me and made me recall seeing this discussion elsewhere.)