I have been a long critic of the erosion of free speech on college campuses and the use of the ill-defined concept of “micro aggressions” to sanction students and faculty alike. Now there is a national campaign by the National Association for Bilingual Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education that indicates that a teacher who mispronounces a student’s name is causing an offense to the student’s identity. negative emotional state that can lead to poor academic success.
The campaign, titled “My Name, My Identity” says on its website, “Did you know that mispronouncing a student’s name negates the identity of the student? This can lead to anxiety and resentment which, in turn, can hinder academic progress.” The author of an influential report on the issue, Rita Kohli, an assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, maintains that such mistakes can be deemed a “microaggression.” That is chilling for some of us who are notoriously bad at pronouncing names.
Kohli coauthored a report with Daniel Solorzano entitled “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classrooms. The report stressed “[w]hen the child enters school and teachers – consciously or not – mispronounce, disregard or change the name, they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the students as well.”
I can see how mispronouncing names can be stressful but it is part of life for many people. One has to have some understanding that most people do not mean anything hostile or intentional in such mistakes. Yet, Kohli insists that teachers who mispronounce a student’s name because they are incapable “to center cultures outside of their own.”
This point was driven home by education blogger Jennifer Gonzalez:
Name mispronunciation – especially the kind committed by the arrogant manglers—actually falls into a larger category of behaviors called microaggressions, defined by researchers at Columbia University’s Teachers College as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (Sue et al., 2007).
In other words, mutilating someone’s name is a tiny act of bigotry. Whether you intend to or not, what you’re communicating is this: Your name is different. Foreign. Weird. It’s not worth my time to get it right. Although most of your students may not know the word microaggression, they’re probably familiar with that vague feeling of marginalization, the message that everyone else is “normal,” and they are not.
She stresses that you should not take it personally to be called a microaggressor or bigot:
“And before you get all defensive about the bigotry thing, let’s be clear: Discovering that something you do might be construed as bigotry doesn’t mean anyone is calling you a bigot. It’s just an opportunity to grow.”
The campaign seeks to have teachers sign a pledge to “show respect to others’ names and identities in schools by pronouncing students’ names correctly” and “share my name story on social media” as well as other pledges. I have never met an educator who did not want to pronounce the names of students correctly, so I hardly think that the pledge to do so is problematic . . . or necessary. What concerns me is the ongoing effort to create a new basis for sanctions or compelled “cultural appreciation” or “cultural sensitivity courses” for “microaggressions.”
A category for ““brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” is chilling. An unintentional “negative” comment is a standard conveys that it turns on how it is received rather than intended. We have seen where an ever-widening range of speech on campuses — particularly conservative speech — is deemed as offensive or harmful to some listeners. Recently we saw professors and students actually support a professor who criminally assaulted pro-life advocates with some calling such advocates “terrorists” for their views.
We have seen students rise in protest over what they believe is “cultural appropriation” in schools offering yoga or students wearing dreadlocks or serving Mexican food. Recently students at Oberlin even fought to stop the school from offering students sushi as “cultural appropriation.” We are losing the important lesson that in a pluralistic society you need to be prepared to hear opposing views and overcome slights that come your way. Ideally you develop an appreciation that some insults are not intended and to develop a thicker skin in dealing with people from different cultures or perspectives. Instead, we seem to be plunging our educational institutions into the dangerous waters of speech regulation and sanctions.
Putting aside the immediate debate over mispronounced names, we have never had a real debate over the meaning or necessity of microaggression codes in this country. However, advocates of the expanding range of speech regulation are succeeding in establishing these ambiguous standards on our campuses despite the threat to free speech and academic freedom.
Vanessa, the French voice fromWaze will be in trouble often….
Mispronouncing a Name a “Micro aggression”?
I’ve been studying an isolated Indian Tribe in Peru. The Mashco-Piro is a mock name given by the rubber barrens, meaning “wild savages”.
In this video at the 4:00 mark, a teenager walks over to an older Mashco & asks a question. Then older Mashco points finger & says “Wanton-tanton” in Piro language, then the teenager gasps…What does it mean & is it PC?
Could you imagine some of these students who are bothered with micro aggressions and safe places are probably going to law school and some day they will be in a court room arguing a case against another lawyer. What’s this person going to do when the opposing lawyer starts to make him look stupid? Look at the judge and ask for a time out.
Maybe all these college students should just take all of their courses on line so they don’t have to interact with other people on a face to face basis. That should be a safe place.
“Discovering that something you do might be construed as bigotry doesn’t mean anyone is calling you a bigot.”
What world does this princess live in?
Everyone need to ax demself if deys uffended wif dis stuff.
For your pleasure:
Roscoe, Great and perfect clip. I just saw a pretty good flick, Don’t Think Twice, and this hilarious substitute teacher was in it. Screw PC! This is where comedy is both funny and edifying.
He suffered no micro-aggressions.
LOL!
Well, according to this guy,
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Let’s just give them numbers and avoid the name thing all together!
The trend of seeking to find new ways for people to be offended and psychologically harmed is beyond belief. I’m offended by it!
@JT
“Putting aside the immediate debate over mispronounced names, we have never had a real debate over the meaning or necessity of microaggression codes in this country. However, advocates of the expanding range of speech regulation are succeeding in establishing these ambiguous standards on our campuses despite the threat to free speech and academic freedom.”
I challenge anyone to identify a more passionate and inclusive defender of free speech than I, but it’s clear to me that mispronouncing a child’s name, intentionally or not, is potentially confusing if not psychologically hurtful to him or her, both in terms of the child’s efforts to establish an individual identity and in terms of its disrespecting the child’s parents who gave the child his or her name. Imagine how a child must feel to be called one loving name by his/her parents, and another, foreign-sounding, name by an authority figure like a teacher.
Older children may more easily dismiss it and attribute to laziness or ineptitude having their names mispronounced, but I daresay even adults who are firmly self-identified are much more kindly disposed to those who make the effort to pronounce their names the way they pronounce them, themselves.
Am I wrong, Purfesser Tourly?
OT – Wells Fargo Fraud. If you ever wanted to see a classic case of how the corporate-political corruption operates, see the media coverage of the Wells Fargo Fraud. First, the media does NOT interview nor even question the mastermind behind the fraud: Warren Buffett. Yeah, I know, the media loves Warren Buffett and they work hard — like the presstitutes they are — to present him as a lovable, friendly, and charitable multi-billionaire, none of which is true (except the multi-billionaire part). But the reality is that he is a vicious, greedy, corrupt weasel, mega-billion dollar tax deadbeat, and promoter of the Clinton (who, of course, is in the pockets of the bankster-scum, as well as other assorted scum, like the Saudi-scum).
Let’s just say, when you’re dealing with the corporate-political corruption, you’re dealing with a lot of scum. So, naturally, the prestitutes give Buffett a free pass, as they do for Wells Fargo’s CEO John Stumpf, another bankster-scum weasel.
Meanwhile, the top-level bankster scum FIRE the small time Wells Fargo employees that carried out the fraud ordered by Buffett-Stumpf. Well, somebody’s got to play the patsies in the game of corporate-political corruption.
And, finally, there’s the proverbial slap on the wrist by the political whores in the US Government, who serve the interests of the MIC and their bankster-scum subsidiaries. As usual, the big fish get away.
The fact is that there are very many sounds that can be made by the human vocal tract but any particular language uses only a small subset of them and a speaker of that language develops a neural net to sort out those sounds and only those sounds.. The neural net for one language sometimes cannot decipher some sounds from another. For example Chinese and Japanese speakers cannot handle the English sound represented by the letter “R”, instead they pronounce a sound closer to that of the English “L” and so say flied lice instead of fried rice..
Irish Gaelic is spelled using the Roman alphabet but if you try to pronounce the words as if they are English you will get it wrong.The name spelled “Sean” is pronounced like the English word “shorn” as in “the sheep have been shorn” and the famous singer whose birth certificate says”Eithne Ní Bhraonáin” has changed her name to “ENYA” which if pronounced with English sounds to the letters is the same sound as the correct Gaelic pronunciation of “Eithne”. There ia a police procedural TV drama featuring a detective whose name is Scottish and spelled “Dalziel” but it is pronounced like the name of the letter “D” followed by the letter “L”.
Chinese Mandarin is spelled with Roman letters according the pinyin system but the sounds of some the letters .are not the same as those letters have in English. The Chinese name of my late wife is spelled “Yuan Xu”. If you use English pronunciation for “Yuan” it is close enough but “Xu” is not pronounced “Zoo” as an English speaker would assume. The sound of “X” is a hissing sound, the previous romanization of Mandarin called Yale tried to approximate the Chinese sound now spelled “XU” with letters using English pronunciation as “SYU” which is much closer. When I went to visit my future life at the share flat where she lived her flat mates did knot know for whom I was asking when I asked for Yuan Zoo.
The fact is a speaker of one language may never be able to pronounce some words in another because his/her neural net for processing language has already been set and cannot be modified.and then of course there are those with speech impediments.
Steve Fleischer, Paul Schulte and you have covered it; impossible, impractical and unreal.
Needed: more and better word police and pathetically shallow pedants (the kind who take issue with well established contractions)!
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Microaggression.
What’s a Microaggression? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name?
Well, sometime just homophonically mis-spelling somebody’s name can be a MACRO-aggression, like happens to me when somebody spells my first name, “Squeaky” and my last name, “Fromme”, and then asks me how Charlie is doing!
But just mispronouncing a name is no big ting. Ting??? Oh!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1c2OfAzDTI
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
It seems to me that Ms. Kolitis and Mr. Solarpane are inflating the significance of a non-problem, or a minor problem.
If you mispronounce my name you are committing a microagression against me but if I accuse you, fairly or unfairly, of being a bigot I am merely offering you an opportunity to grow.By this standard I think the Chargers are now leading the AFC West.
First name is common in Spain, last is of Welsh origin. Neither one pronounced correctly by teachers, employers, friends, etc. You politely correct, then move on.
Exactly, In all of my 54 years, the number of people who have pronounced my last name correctly the first time, is easily less than ten. In fact whenever someone has gotten it right without me needing to correct them I actually thank them for it.
My name was constantly mispronounced in school. I just got to the point where I answered “Here” to anything close to correct. As I teacher I tried my best to pronounce my students’ names correctly, however there was always one whose name I could not get my tongue around. Now, I was born with a twisted tongue and took speech lessons to help clear up my speech. Am I still a micro-aggressor if I cannot pronounce the name because of a physical defect?
You can’t make this stuff up.