What’s in a Name?
In America, a quintessential person-of-color moment is to have your name mispronounced. It caused my mom to change her first name when she immigrated here. No one pronounced it correctly, so she switched to “Lisa”.
My first name doesn’t get mispronounced, but my last name does sometimes.
I want to talk about a couple other name flubs (and flub is putting it lightly) that I have encountered recently.
1. When a co-worker calls you by the name of another co-worker of the same or similar race.
I’m always thrown for a little bit of a loop whenever this happens.
And it’s not even an issue with how some minority first names are hard to pronounce or remember (this is subject to opinion and upbringing). The person remembered your co-worker’s name but simply swapped your face and his because… they didn’t care to distinguish your faces?
Now, I won’t pretend that I remember everyone’s names all of the time. But in those situations when I forget, I go with a simple “hey” or “hi, how are you doing?”… instead of throwing out a name I’m not sure about.
2. When someone addresses you by your last name in an email reply.
Another situation that has happened more than a few times is I get addressed as “Quan” in an email. The crazy thing is this happens AFTER I already sent the original email to the person and signed it as “Stanley”.
This mix-up is quite annoying and is also something I never do myself. I always just reply based on how the person signed off their initial email. It’s pretty simple professional etiquette.
These two scenarios are mind-boggling to me and as I mentioned earlier, throw me for a loop. Whenever I feel like an assimilated part of normal society, these shock me right out of it.
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