Say My Name — Why Mispronouncing And Joking About POC Names Is Racial Microaggression
Growing up in Sydney with a foreign-sounding name, I’m no stranger to hearing POC names as the punchline of tired, Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars-worthy jokes.
But when it starts happening at work, it feels somewhere in between a personal slight and a million steps backward. I received an email from a colleague this morning, addressed to:
“Dear Farina”
I’ve worked closely with the author of this email for the past twelve months. We have met in person and spoken over the phone on several occasions, and yet they have provided numerous interpretations of my name in emails alongside accurate ones reserved for my Anglo-Saxon colleagues.
This is just the most recent in a string of name-related incidents that seem to come with the territory of having a migrant background, and living in Australia.
I was born in India, and migrated with my family when I was six months old. In 1991, my father was advised by an Australian immigration lawyer to consider changing my name to something “less ethnic”, you know, to make things easier on me (he declined) I can barely communicate in any Indian language, and have been mercilessly mocked by my extended family as a firang (translation: foreigner) for my broad Australian accent, but from my first day in the Australian primary education system, I noticed my contemporaries fell into two main camps — roasting the ethnic kid (fun fact: Farhana rhymes with banana), or desperate for something easier to pronounce.
This isn’t something that vanished after childhood. Thanks to other people’s’ discomfort with uncommon names, I found myself submitting to a rather unfortunate childhood nickname that followed me well into high school, university and full-time employment. For the better part of two decades, friends, teachers and colleagues called me ‘Fuzzy’ out of ease, and I didn’t have the strength nor the inclination to correct them.
Fortunately, I’ve never felt the need to change my name for employment, but there are many Australians from migrant backgrounds who have. In acknowledgement of this phenomenon, Canadian parliament recently debated a “name blindness policy” for the public service, following a study that showed employment candidates “with English-sounding names are 35 percent more likely to receive callbacks than resumes with Indian or Chinese names”.
Now, this isn’t some crushing indictment on every person who has ever made a typo in an email. In most cases, it’s a simple and honest mistake. Some might even call my stance an overreaction. But when it happens over and over again, in professional environments where people of colour already experience the kind of discrimination that limits us getting a foot in the door, it’s not okay, because you’re not a kid in your primary school playground anymore.
Names are personal, and for some of us they represent one of the few connections we still hold to the heritage we left behind when we chose to embrace Australian culture and identity as our own. It hurts that someone I know couldn’t take the time to glance at the correct spelling, or literally copy and paste it from my email signature. Misspelling and abbreviating our names reminds us of our difference.
Multiculturalism should mean more than simply coexisting. And yet, at its most literal definition, multiculturalism simply means that multiple cultural traditions exist within a single country. It should be about what you do with those cultures and the people who bring those cultures to that country. It’s more than just eating our food and appreciating other cultures and traditions. It’s more than occasionally paying lip service with buzzwords like diversity or virtue signalling. It starts and ends with the small, seemingly insignificant things and the ways we’re forced to live in white, western, colonised worlds, constantly on the outside, never quite fitting in.
It’s not feeling othered in the only place you’ve ever called home.
This article by Farhana Laffernis was originally published at The Vocal.
