Stupid not to ace the name game

Well hello there, Kamala Harris.

Whip-smart, experienced, impressive credentials, female, mixed race – not only is she the second African-American woman to serve in the US Senate, she’s also the first Asian-American woman, which is a nifty feat – and, if God is still listening to the protracted scream that is 2020, she’ll be the next vice-president of the USA.

However, first she has a problem: her name. Or rather we have a problem: her name – because she’s just fine with it.

How do we say it? Is it Ca-milla/Ka-MAR-la/Kamma-lah or, according to Wikipedia, kml/KAH-mə-lə (no, I don’t know either).

None of those is correct. We should say it like she says it: Comma-la. That’s “comma”, as in the punctuation mark, and then “la” or “luh”: Comma-luh.

I keep repeating it to myself, trying to set it in my brain.

No, it doesn’t sound like it looks, it doesn’t role easily off the tongue, not yet anyway, but we must keep trying because mispronouncing someone’s name is disrespectful – especially when you have been told how to say it, but choose not to learn.

It’s also an elitist bully-boy tactic, displaying massive entitlement – it says, “you’re nobody; even your name doesn’t matter”.

While purposefully mispronouncing someone’s name is boorish – witness Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson get it wrong then say, “whatever”, when he’s corrected – it also makes you look stupid.

Let’s flip it: mispronounce some white English names.

Dad was Geoffrey – you’d have been wrong to call him Goff-free, even though that’s how it looks.

I live on Grosvenor Street – except you don’t pronounce the letter S. It’s Grove-nah. A favourite class-distinguisher of posh people in the UK is the name St John, which is bafflingly pronounced Sin-jin.

There’s a certain smugness in knowing how to say these things correctly and ridicule for the sorry person who gets it wrong.

So why, then, is the mocking mispronunciation of an African-Asian-American woman’s name used as a weapon, and worn like a badge of ethnic superiority?

The mere fact it can be shows just how deep the bigotry still runs; the fact that it is used thus is pure racism.

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