One letter, two replies

[conuly]

I (16F) work as a counselor at a local after-school program. It pays really well, my boss is very nice, and I enjoy getting to try new activities with the kids. I recently had two little boys join my group of second and third graders. They are brothers (7 and 9) and are really sweet, goofy kids who have adapted well to our program. They are also pale, blond-haired, blue-eyed kids named “Rakhi” and “Bodhi,” and I am an Indian American who was raised speaking Hindi and English.

I don’t have an issue with their names, but their mom has an issue with me. She is white, is American, and does not speak Hindi but is very into spirituality, chakras, etc., and pronounces her sons’ names as “Rocky” and “Body” (like Cody). I instinctively have been pronouncing them like they would be said in Hindi (“Rah-khee” and “Bo-dhee”) because it’s my first language.

Their mom has now pulled me aside multiple times and basically told me off for mispronouncing her sons’ names, despite the fact that I have explained to her that it is literally the way their names are correctly pronounced in the language they come from, which I have spoken from birth. She keeps saying that I am “mocking” them and is now threatening to take this to my program manager, who I’m pretty positive would take my side, but I don’t want the boys to get kicked out—they haven’t done anything wrong. I can’t change my accent and they can’t change their names, but I don’t want to spend three more months dealing with this! What should I do?

—Pushed to the Limit in Portland

There’s a big difference between “I can’t change my accent and that’s the way their names sound when I say them” and “I am intentionally pronouncing their names the correct way instead of the way their mother has said they’re pronounced because I’m right and she’s wrong.” If it’s the former, explain the situation to your manager, who will hopefully tell the mom to go to hell. If it’s the latter, I absolutely get why you’re annoyed with the mom, who sounds like her headshot may be in the dictionary under “cultural appropriation.” But in life and especially at work, you simply have to call people what they want to be called (or in this case, what their parents want them to be called), not what you think they should be called. It may make you cringe, but it won’t be the last thing to make you cringe about having a job.

Pull up the Notes app on your phone and jot down some reflections on this experience. Sometimes the people and events that get under our skin the most can have an important message about what we care about and what we wish could be different about the world. “I was forced to watch people try on various elements of my culture as accessories and wasn’t allowed to complain about it and it felt awful” could be something that drives the books you read, what you study in college, or the kind of work you pursue in the future. Or maybe your notes will be the basis of your future memoir about the things you saw, heard, and tolerated growing up Indian-American in Portland. I’d read that.

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***

This mom’s cultural appropriation has got to be annoying to you as an actual Indian American person who speaks the language that she cribbed her kids’ names from. However, unless your accent prevents you from saying them the way she has asked you to, you should call these boys by the names that their mother gave them (however she spells them): “Rocky” and “Body.” Names travel the globe and are often subject to being remixed (or bastardized, depending on your interpretation), with many parents choosing pronunciation that doesn’t fit with how someone native to the culture they originate from would say them. Again, I get why this has got to be somewhat painful for you to deal with this white woman who has created an identity for herself that borrows from other cultures and who chose Hindi names for her kids without regard for how they are traditionally pronounced. But continuing to say them the “correct” way isn’t fair to the kids, who deserve to be addressed by the names that they have for themselves. Focus less on how irritating this woman’s actions are and more on making her kids feel welcome in your care.

You’ve already let this woman know that she’s not saying her kids’ names the way they were intended to be said, but there’s no moral victory to be had by continuing to do so. It may be offensive to you that she has chosen these alternate pronunciations, but you aren’t disrespecting your culture by saying the names in the way she has asked you to. If your accent makes it impossible for you to say these names as they were imagined by their mother, let her know that it is not your intent to be offensive or to mock her children but that you simply can’t pronounce “Rocky” and “Body” and that you would be happy to explain this to her sons.

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Comments

[conuly]

This woman is a pain, but LW is not going to win this. All she's really doing is making the kids pawns in an unwinnable power play with their mom. And yeah, I guess their mom started it - but LW can't win this. I don't care that LW thinks her manager has her back, they're not going to kick the kids out of the program over this or tell this woman that she's being ridiculous.

If LW is willing to lose her job over this then that does seem like the most probable outcome.

[melannen]

LW: You are mocking them. You're singling them out in class by mispronouncing their names because you don't respect their mother's culture. Regardless of whether their mother's culture deserves respect, she's not wrong that you shouldn't be using the kids' names as a tool to point this out to their classmates.

[minoanmiss]

Um, this is a little close to Reverse Racism You're The REAL Bigot.

[melannen]

Yeah, you're right; when I re-read the letter I realized I'd misread; I thought she'd said she was choosing to mispronounce them and I don't know why I thought that.

[laurajv]

tbh "rocky" and "rah-khee"/"body"-like-cody and "bo-dhee" are sufficiently similar in my own accent that I'm not sure I'd be able to tell someone was pronouncing them differently. Possibly I'd notice emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble or an extended "ee" at the end where I clip them, but I'm not even confident of that.

This is something that I agree with the LW the mom is being a pain about, but I also agree with the mom that LW is being a pain about it. Unless LW _cannot_ say Rocky and Body, she needs to call the kids Rocky and Body (spelled weird). It sucks that the mom is doing this weird-ass appropriative thing with the names, but as someone whose name is regularly mispronounced? Just fucking pronounce the kids' names how they, themselves, the children, who had no say in this, pronounce their own names.

[dissectionist]

The mom deserves no respect, but the kids are not the mom, and it’s not their fault that their mom is obnoxious. LW has been clear that she’s instinctively pronouncing it correctly, not doing it deliberately to be antagonistic. In situations like these I’ve found that it’s easiest if I rewrite the word in my head and think of it that way, rather than trying to get my brain to go along with a pronunciation that doesn’t seem right. So I’d advise LW to think of the kids as Rocky and Body in her head, because that’ll make it easier to say the pronunciation the kids are used to. If she keeps thinking of them as Rakhi and Bodhi she’ll likely keep defaulting to the native pronunciation. (This is most noticeable for me on the word “piranha” - if I don’t think of it as “peronna” instead, I’ll mispronounce it every dang time.)

[petrea_mitchell]

As someone who has a foreign-language name which is almost certainly not being pronounced precisely the way it would be in its home country (I was named after my Danish great-grandmother), I have to agree with the advice. Names travel, pronunciations change, you can't change the mom, all you can do is make the kids remember you as that awful person who refused to say their names right.

[cimorene]

Yeah, the kids shouldn't be the victims here, and they are the primary sufferers in the situation she's outlined here. I mean, unless they don't care, which is possible at their age - but then LW herself seems to be the main sufferer because she's getting in trouble. Either way, she should do her best to call them what they say their names are, which includes the way they want them pronounced. Everybody deserves that amount of respect. They might appreciate being taught an approximation of the real pronunciation and told about the names' origins, if they don't already know, but that should go along with pronouncing them the way they do.

[minoanmiss]

"That awful person" is definitely getting into "you're the Real racist" territory.

[redbird]

It sounds as though the LW is pronouncing at least one of those names in a way that their mother may not be able to pronounce--if LW is using "kh" to indicated a sound like a gutteral "ch," rather than either k as in "king" or "ch" as in "chin." Other than that, Rakhi is going to spend a lot of time telling people "no, it's spelled R-a-k-h-i," but that's not something the LW can solve for him.

[conuly]

I believe that kh and dh indicate aspiration. In which case it would be very difficult for a monolingual English speaker to correctly pronounce those consonants. We do have aspiration of voiceless stops, but it happens consistently at the start of words and nowhere else. This is worse, imo, than a sound we don’t have at all - since it’s just an allophone of the corresponding unaspirated voiceless stop we can’t easily hear or distinguish the difference.

It’s possible the stress is different as well and LW didn’t know how to indicate that. Or the vowels are different and ditto.

[lilysea]

Oh, man

I saw both of these, and my thoughts were

a) the mother is being cultural-appropriationey and probably also being racist

b) this almost certainly counts as a microaggression against LW

c) but this is not a battle LW can win. At best, LW will piss off their boss; at worst, they'll get fired

[minoanmiss]

I was about to spend about five times as many words saying what you've said here.

[starwatcher]

I've been there. Lots of Hispanic names in my area, and sometimes people -- on either side -- Anglicize the names. So I'd ask a new student, "Do you pronounce your name 'Hor-hay' or 'George'?" (Spelled Jorge.) If they said, "Either one," I'd ask which they preferred. If they requested 'George', I kept my internal cringing to myself. It doesn't matter if I consider it 'wrong'; a child's person's name should be pronounced as they and their family choose.

I once spent three sessions learning to pronounce a student's name. It was a real tongue-twister, 3 or 4 syllables, and very unusual even in the Hispanic community. (So unusual I no longer remember it, and it's possible it was actually from a different language; I didn't ask.) I struggled with it, but they were very patient in guiding me, and I finally mastered it. Words/names are simply an arrangement of (mostly) common sounds; it's rude to not even try to achieve a correct requested pronunciation.

[green_grrl]

If they requested 'George', I kept my internal cringing to myself.
Yup, this is exactly me with a colleague. He’s Hispanic, but he’s also umpteenth generation American and ‘George’ is his preference. The kids in this letter are growing up American in an American-English speaking family, so, this is their pronunciation.

[lunabee34]

I always write my students' names in the roll book phonetically if they are unusual or unexpected pronunciations so that I don't even see how their names are spelled and accidentally say them wrong again.

[jadelennox]

Everything the columnists and you all say is right, but I'd also like to throw a virtual punch in the direction of a mom who is consistently yelling at a 16 year old girl for her pronunciation of the kids' names.

1. This woman gave her kids names with non-anglo spellings and non-standard pronunciation of those names; the kids are going to go through life with a lot worse mispronunciation than "the standard pronunciation of those names."
2. Seven and nine is old enough to speak up for themselves, especially with someone who is also a kid, and if the two white boys (with whom LW appears to have a good relationship) don't feel comfortable doing so, it's a healthy lesson to learn.
3. Also, LW is sixteen. She's not microagressing against your two white sons, Chakra Mom. She's a teenager. If the boys are (a) bothered by it and (b) can't advocate for themselves, then tell LW that, because you haven't, and escalate to her manager if necessary. Otherwise get the hell over yourself and stop interacting with a teenaged counselor to your fourth grader like she's a 30 year old nanny to an infant.

[castiron]

Yeah, this. The mother is the kind of person who will chew out a teenager of color for pronouncing names the way teen would in the teen's native language. Not a good look, mother.

[minoanmiss]

I didn't let myself write this because I didn't think I could avoid melting my keyboard with rage.

[castiron]

The mother is an entitled jerk, but I will grudgingly agree that LW needs to suck it up and pronounce the names in the Anglicized way if she can (and maybe she can't, in which case the mother needs to STFU). Or better yet -- ask Rakhi and Bodhi which pronunciation they prefer! and do what they want!

[carbonel]

As far as I can tell, no one has asked the kids how they'd like their names to be pronounced. They're old enough to have preferences.

[qian]

lol lotta white people in these comments