{"id":265348,"date":"2020-08-15T05:43:31","date_gmt":"2020-08-15T09:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=265348"},"modified":"2020-08-15T05:43:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T09:43:31","slug":"its-comma-la-insisting-on-mispronouncing-kamala-harriss-name-is-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/08\/15\/its-comma-la-insisting-on-mispronouncing-kamala-harriss-name-is-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s \u2018comma-la\u2019: Insisting on mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name is racist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
When called out about this on his TV show, Carlson snubbed defensively: \u201cSo I\u2019m disrespecting her by mispronouncing her name unintentionally? \u2026 kuh-MAH-luh Harris or KAM-uh-luh Harris or whatever.\u201d (File photo<\/a>: Kamala Harris\/Facebook<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris pronounces her name \u201ccomma-la,\u201d but many of her fellow Americans \u2014 including Fox News host Tucker Carlson<\/a> \u2014 mispronounce it as \u201ckuh-MAH-luh\u201d or \u201ckuh-MALL-uh.\u201d<\/p>\n

When called out about this on his TV show, Carlson snubbed defensively: \u201cSo I\u2019m disrespecting her by mispronouncing her name unintentionally? \u2026 kuh-MAH-luh Harris or KAM-uh-luh Harris or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this instance, Carlson personifies \u201cWhatever People,\u201d one of several types of name bunglers that are called out in an MTV video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you do this, you are a bad person,\u201d says Maritza Monta\u00f1ez, who describes the daily distortions of her own name as \u201cjust exhausting.\u201d Mamoudou N’Diaye, another performer in the video, explains: \u201cPeople mispronounce my name seven days a week.\u2026 If you don\u2019t say my name correctly, it\u2019s basically like saying, I don\u2019t care about you as a person.\u201d<\/p>\n

How to pronounce Kamala.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mispronunciation as microaggression<\/h2>\n

In his 2010 book Microaggressions in Everyday Life<\/em><\/a>, psychologist Derald Wing Sue argues that superficially trivial incidents like \u201cthe boss forgetting or mispronouncing your name\u201d accumulate, and as such, they are \u201cequally disruptive and harmful\u201d as \u201clarge, overt racial or gender gaffes and overt obvious acts of discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such microaggressions are said to take a particular toll on members of minority groups. In Rita Kohli and Daniel Sol\u00f3rzano\u2019s study<\/a> of minority students across the United States, \u201cmany participants shared that the issues they experienced with their names in school caused them a great deal of anxiety, shame or feelings of \u2018othering\u2019.\u201d For example, they report an incident in which a vice-principal bungled a Chinese American\u2019s name before laughing at his own mistake.<\/p>\n

He butchered her name mercilessly, shaking his head and laughing as others laughed along\u2026 It is likely he did not intend malice.\u2026 But because this student had endured years of subtle racial slights, her cumulative experience with the fumbling of her name led her to feel humiliated by his action and see her culture as inferior.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The authors conclude that name blunders are \u201cinsults\/assaults,\u201d and that, \u201cto prevent internalized racism, teachers must own this issue regardless of the cause of a mispronunciation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Freudian slips?<\/h2>\n

Sigmund Freud infamously argued that mistakes are deliberate, in that each facilitates \u201can unconscious intention<\/a>.\u201d He and his colleagues attached special significance to proper names being misspoken, misremembered, misheard, misread or misspelled. All such mishaps were psychoanalyzed as performed below the level of awareness, as subtle slights \u2014 personal names being personal, after all.<\/p>\n

Neurologist and psychoanalyst Ernest Jones concluded<\/a> that:<\/p>\n

the general inability to bear other people\u2019s names in mind is an expression of an excessively high estimation of the importance of one\u2019s own name and of oneself in general, with a corresponding indifference to, or depreciation of, other people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cNo alteration is too slight to have a meaning,\u201d Jones insisted, citing the case of a foreign visitor who mistakenly referred to psychologist Edward Titchener as \u201cKitchener<\/a>.\u201d According to Jones, this slip originated in the visitor\u2019s contempt for Titchener and his expertise:<\/p>\n

A few minutes before, while talking about experimental psychologists in general, he had allowed himself to make the scurrilous remark that in his opinion they should be called the pantry-cooks of psychology, on account of their menial field of work; the passage from \u2018cook\u2019 to \u2018kitchen\u2019 is obvious.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Titchener, whom Freud considered a leading adversary<\/a>, advocated instead for a more scientific approach to introspection and mental processes, using experimental procedures, measurements, and observations in a controlled laboratory. Titchener also warned against the \u201cstimulus error<\/a>\u201d \u2014 failing to tease apart objective experiences from how we think, know or judge them to be.<\/p>\n

Titchener\u2019s century-old concerns are echoed in psychologist Scott Lilienfeld\u2019s arguments that microaggression research falls short of scientific rigor<\/a>. Racial microaggressions are subtle acts of racism and aggression, which certainly occur, but Lilienfeld shows that their valid application to individual situations is fraught.<\/p>\n

For example, Carlson\u2019s \u201cwhatever\u201d was decidedly dismissive and arguably aggressive (if defensive), but it was anything but subtle. Was it also racist? Critical race theorists like Sol\u00f3rzano et al. would probably say so. As Robin DiAngelo<\/a> puts it: \u201cThe question is not \u2018did racism take place?\u2019 but rather \u2018how did racism manifest in that situation?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Response to foreign words<\/h2>\n

As a clinical psychologist, Lilienfeld describes this way of thinking as dangerous<\/a>. He says that ill intent exists to be sure, but the mental health of a racialized person is not well served by assuming the worst from most if not all awkward statements or flubs they encounter in life. Lilienfeld also worries that a racialized person who feels depressed or oppressed, perhaps due to actual racial microaggressions, is likely to perceive more racial microaggressions and thereby get trapped in a vicious cycle of negative emotions.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that microaggressions only exist in perceivers\u2019 minds. For instance, Carlson\u2019s mispronunciation of Kamala is a textbook example of a linguistic process called \u201chyperforeignization<\/a>.\u201d Roughly, speakers go out of their way to refit foreign-looking words with pseudo-foreign speech sounds and sound patterns. This process is so strong that the Japanese had to rebrand Matsuda (\u201cMAT-soo-da\u201d) and Dattosun (\u201cDAT-toh-soon\u201d) as Mazda and Datsun, respectively, in order to avoid the American hyperforeignisms \u201cmaht-SOO-duh\u201d and \u201cdah-TOH-suhn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hyperforeignisms are literally \u201cothering,\u201d and yet, as unconscious phenomena, the intention behind them cannot be reliably established as aggressive or racist without considering independent observations and factors. For example, we also know that \u201cmale and female English names show systematic differences in sound pattern: female names are far more likely to have unstressed initial syllables<\/a>.\u201d So Carlson\u2019s \u201ckuh-MAH-luh\u201d could also be understood as \u201chyperfeminization.\u201d At any rate, his insistence on mispronouncing Kamala and his dismissive \u201cwhatever\u201d confirmed the disrespect he was accused of.<\/p>\n

This is precisely what makes racial microaggressions unsettling \u2014 they\u2019re indeterminate by definition. As social psychologist Dorraine Green describes it: \u201cThere\u2019s uncertainty about whether or not your experience was due to your race, for example, or due to something unrelated, such as the other person being in a bad mood or having a bad day.\u2026 That uncertainty is distressing<\/a>.\u201d\"The<\/p>\n

Darin Flynn<\/a>, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Calgary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris pronounces her name \u201ccomma-la,\u201d but many of her fellow Americans \u2014 including Fox News host Tucker …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":265349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54365,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-instagram","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-darin-flynn-university-of-calgary","mauthors-the-conversation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265350,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265348\/revisions\/265350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}