{"id":70919,"date":"2019-03-26T11:00:54","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=70919"},"modified":"2019-03-26T11:43:08","modified_gmt":"2019-03-26T16:43:08","slug":"from-now-on-you-will-pronounce-my-name-in-my-ancestral-norwegian-to-my-satisfaction-or-be-called-a-bigot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=70919","title":{"rendered":"From Now On, You Will Pronounce My Name In My Ancestral Norwegian, To My Satisfaction, Or Be Called A Bigot"},"content":{"rendered":"

If I had a nickel for every stranger that’s pronounced my name “MIchelle” or “Michael”, I would have enough money to not need to interact with strangers at all anymore.<\/p>\n

It seems I’ve hit the intersectional lottery.<\/p>\n

Or maybe not.<\/p>\n

Because mispronouncing peoples’ names isn’t a matter of trying to wrap one’s tongue around a word from a completely different language, with all the inevitable pitfalls<\/p>\n

Oh, no.\u00a0 Like everything one does,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>everything one does not do,\u00a0 h it’s apparently racist.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Zuheera Ali and Keya Roy talk to author Ijeoma Oluo and each other about their experiences living in the United States with “difficult” names. They also talk to Rita Kohli, a professor at University of California, Riverside who has done research on the effects of mispronouncing names on students of color.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aaaaaaaand…:<\/p>\n

Spoiler: This practice of mispronouncing names isn’t just embarrassing. It has a long and racist history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, it’s not complete cultural sensitivity to Jerzy Szczepanski or Solveig Hjelle or even Euan Braithwaite’s names we’re talking about, here.<\/p>\n

And if you happen to listen to the podcast at the link – apparently from a program to train young public radio drones – you may reach the same observation I did; that millennials of a certain ideological persuasion collect grievances the same way the seem to love collecting psychological and medical diagnoses; the same way the used to collect Pokemon cards.\u00a0 The same way their grandparents collected fishing stories.<\/p>\n

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So anyone who doesn’t pronounce my name “BAIR-g” is a bigot.<\/p>\n

By the way, that’s the Norwegian “BAIR-g”, not the German\/Yiddish “BEHR-g”.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I had a nickel for every stranger that’s pronounced my name “MIchelle” or “Michael”, I would have enough money to not need to interact with strangers at all anymore. It seems I’ve hit the intersectional lottery. Or maybe not. Because mispronouncing peoples’ names isn’t a matter of trying to wrap one’s tongue around a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70919"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70923,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70919\/revisions\/70923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}