Dear Prudence: I Keep Calling My Black Coworkers by the Wrong Names.

[minoanmiss]

Today, I called a Black co-worker by the name of a different Black co-worker; I am white. I work in a large hospital, we have a lot of temporary workers, and I’d only met the one whose name I knew once. The scorn of the one I called the wrong name was evident and rightfully earned, though she was polite. I have a lot of excuses (the above, plus masks, plus the end of a tiring week) and justifications (I think I have just as much trouble matching the names and faces of the white temporary workers), but I know none of that matters. Embarrassingly, my husband and children are Black. I loathe myself for doing this, and not for the first time. My question is “how do I respond if I do this again?” and “how do I stop doing this?” (I don’t have any condition like face-blindness, by the way.)

I feel for you because I know it’s mortifying to be in your position. And I feel for your Black coworker even more. It’s really a downer to experience something like this because you can’t help but take it as a reminder that the person who’s called you by the wrong name is so fixated on your race that they can’t see you as an individual with your own unique qualities. And a big, awkward apology—especially one that makes you feel like it’s your job to smooth everything over—can only make you feel worse. I guarantee the last thing she wants is a “Just making sure we’re okay …” Slack message or email. So I think your “How do I respond if I do this again?” question is a good one. I would suggest a brief, clear “I am so sorry. That mistake was unacceptable and I’m going to do better,” rather than a longer explanation, excessive self-flagellation, or a mention of how you confuse white colleagues, too. And definitely don’t ask your colleague to reassure you that it’s okay.

But hopefully you won’t have to apologize if you don’t do it again. And I think that’s possible.

I actually answered a question similar to yours in a different advice column many years ago. That one came from a Black person who had greeted an Asian receptionist with the name of another Asian colleague. When I made some calls to help out that letter writer, I learned about the “cross race effect,” which is what is at work when you have a harder time recognizing or distinguishing between members of racial ethnic groups other than your own. I spoke to Kurt Hugenberg, a professor who had spent much of his career studying stereotyping, prejudice, and cross-race face identification. You can read the whole response here, but what it boils down to is that this is a normal thing that happens when you don’t see that many people of a certain race (even if you see three at home, that’s not a lot!), and to overcome it, you have to make a point of paying attention to what makes the people you do see unique, rather than getting stuck on what makes them similar. That’s something you can do even when people are wearing masks, because it’s not all about physical appearance. So maybe one Black temporary coworker wears fun earrings and the other is always seen with a big cup of coffee. Maybe you have a conversation and learn that one is from the Midwest and one is from California. And then you remind yourself to notice and remember these things rather than just their ethnicity. That takes a little more mental work, but maybe it can eventually become a habit. You’ll avoid future mortifying moments and your colleagues will start to believe—with good reason because it will actually be true—that you’re actually seeing them for who they are.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Jenae, I knew you had it in you! This is actually good advice! Keep it up!

I was just ranting about this subject the other day, ahahaha, as someone who has been on both sides of it (being a Black girl and a once and likely future receptionist). The key is to find each person's individuality. (and for workplaces to give out nametags with large clear printing, if necessary)

[gingicat]

Do you remember when I could not distinguish between the five blond teenaged boys at BUA?

[minoanmiss]

THEY WERE ALL BLOND with that particular wavyfluffy hair! It was UNFAIR! and they were similar shades of pink!

[xenacryst]

I like both the advice for its practicality and the question for not getting (too) bogged down in self flagellation and instead asking what to do next time and how to even avoid a next time.

[purlewe]

ooh this is good advice. I also recommend slowing down (which might be hard in a medical setting like above). I find that I often want to tell coworker A about something from coworker B and I call coworker A the name of coworker B when I am calling out to them. I find that my brain has already moved past the "Must talk to A about B" and goes straight to "B did you you know..." and every time the person corrects me for using the wrong name. I have done it ALL MY LIFE and I still can't slow my brain down enough to get it right.

[katiedid717]

Oh man, I feel for this letter writer. During the early days of covid, before we were used to seeing people with masks, I had three tenants (S, M, and J) who had the same height, same figure, similar sense of style. M usually wore her hair in a bob and J had box braids down to the bottom of her rib cage - S would switch between wigs for both styles. There were way too many times that I called one of the tenants the wrong name or didn't realize which tenant was in my office until she started to talk.

(Luckily M and J knew each other really well and had both had the same issue when they passed S in the hall, so I felt less alone once that happened!)

[azurelunatic]

If there is an employee directory with pictures, use it as a study guide. I'm faceblind enough that I once failed to recognize my sister on a flight to a family reunion, and at my receptionist job I studied the pictures of the people in my building, and made a cheatsheet for the three white men who I found hardest to tell apart (I had no trouble with #1 or #3, but #2 looked like both depending on his shirt and the phase of his beard).

Use cues like voice, stance, and walk as well as facial features. I was once also able to tell a blond ponytailed man friend of mine from another person wearing the same clothes in pictures of an event that I was not at where everyone wore paper bag masks over their heads (that was the point of the event), because my friend has a very particular way of holding his torso, and I was able to identify that in the pictures. His ponytail also has two sections that curl in opposite directions from each other.

[shanaqui]

I'm completely, totally aphantasic, so I don't have good facial recognition at all, and from that point of view I find it really galling when people clearly assume that I can't tell them apart for some reason that they find offensive. I understand why people make the assumption that I'm being racist or A Bad Friend/Careless Person, it's just upsetting that I get lumped in with that when I can't recognise anyone, for neurological reasons.

Still, I also know from intimate experience of how people make elaborate apologies about getting my pronouns wrong that I very much do not want to be the person stammering out a complicated-sounding explanation for why I can't do the thing, instead of just saying sorry! So I keep it under my hat.

Anyway, so my method of trying to get past this is to list the person's characteristics to myself and learn them that way. My dad is tall, has short salt-and-pepper hair, slightly hunches his shoulders, has a limp and a slightly wonky left knee, will always be wearing dark trousers and usually a white t-shirt. He smells like Sainsbury's fabric softener and/or motorbikes. The t-shirt will always be plain. He may or may not be wearing glasses. He does not have a beard or moustache. I can't remember a thing about the car he drives but I know the last three letters of the license plate, so I can recognise it when he's going to pick me up somewhere. If he's on the 'bike, I recognise him by the style of helmet he uses (open face, with goggles) and the green-and-tan backpack he wears. He's a baritone and often needs to clear his throat before he speaks. I'd recognise his sniff/noseblow routine anywhere (and he's one of the few people I know who always carries a hanky, not tissues, and always a huge white one).

From word-pictures like that, I build up a sort of mental checklist, adding to it for different situations, as above. It sounds cumbersome, but as you practice and as you see a person more often, it builds up and gets faster and faster. It's a skill that has to be practised, and the more non-visual senses you can engage, the better. I imagine this helps non-aphantasic people as well, to be honest.

With friends, family and coworkers, Facebook photos can be a good source of pictures to practice on.

[melannen]

As a person who is bad with names and faces, works a service job where there are literally hundreds of people I'm expected to be at least mildly acquainted with, and doesn't really have the extra mental energy most days to follow the very good advice in this letter for everyone who walks up to the desk, my advice is honestly to figure out ways to avoid calling people by name if you aren't sure, without being obvious or awkward about it.

Switching to 'hey you!' is obviously not good. And there will be situations where using a name or admitting you don't know it is unavoidable. But you can do a lot with waving and body language and actually approaching people and "How d'you do" and please and thank you. A compliment on someone's clothing when you approach them will absolutely distract them from the lack of specific address. You probably already do that a lot with people where you don't even have a guess as to the name. And being conscious about trying to politely not use names unless necessary is a lot less brain-resource-intensive than trying to come up with mnemonics for everybody.

(If you avoid names with only with Black co-workers and nobody else - don't do that, obviously. And switching to "Hey you!" is not good. But I found when I started trying to fix this for myself, years ago, that I was more likely to call Black people by the wrong name not because I was less likely to get it right, but because I was more likely to be falsely confident with people who seemed like they had distinctive features - if there are six midlife average-sized bottle-blonde women in the office, I will just never call any of them by name until I've been there at least six months, because that's just really bad odds. Meanwhile when I was involved in a heavily majority-Black organization, if there were only two other White women around total, I was much more likely to call them the wrong name because my brain went "oh it's the White woman! I know their name!")