43 Flock Around and Find Out offer you a shortened version of their name, or an Anglicized version as part of code-switching, as way to make you comfortable (and lower the risk of negative consequences) at their own expense.” If someone truly prefers a shortened or different name, they will tell you so don’t ask. Defaulting to or requesting one strips away a piece of their identity. Imagine if someone insisted on calling you something else simply because your name was inconvenient for them. The Heavy History of “Whitewashing” Names When someone dismisses or mispronounces a non- European name, it may seem like a small slip, but it echoes the long history of forced assimilation and the devaluation of non-Western cultures. Understanding the gravity of respecting names requires recognizing the painful legacy of whitewashing names during colonization. Throughout history, European colonizers in the Americas—and in many other parts of the world—forced Indigenous and enslaved peoples to abandon their birth names in favor of European ones. This practice wasn’t about mere convenience; it was an intentional strategy to defile, subjugate, and oppress. Stripping someone of their name wasn’t just an erasure of a word—it was a violent attempt to erase cultural heritage, language, and identity itself. Traces of this legacy persists to this day. The Power of Micro-inclusions When someone makes the effort to learn, spell, and pronounce your name correctly, it opens the door to connection, trust, and belonging. It’s a small micro- inclusion that can have a big impact. Let me offer you a real-world example to put things in perspective. I know a manager who once struggled to pronounce the name of a new team member, Batsaikhan. Instead of glossing over it, the manager made it a point to ask Batsaikhan to teach her how to say their name properly, then spent a few minutes practicing. Pronounced as baat-sai-kha, she didn’t get it right the first time, If you’re struggling to learn new names, I promise you, you’re more capable than you think. Americans routinely use words in our everyday vocabulary without much difficulty that demonstrate an inherent skill for embracing linguistic diversity. Don’t take my word for it... Just ask yourself: Can you say most of these names and words with confidence? Björn Borg (Swedish) Karaoke (Japanese) Bruschetta (Italian) Daenerys Targaryen (Valyrian, fictional) Safari (Swahili, Arabic) Paprika (Hungarian) Mahatma Gandhi (Hindi, India) Kangaroo (Australia) Fajita (Spanish, Mexico) See? Most of us don’t struggle when it comes to learning difficult names or words if they’re ones we’re invested in, or that have been made familiar to us in pop culture. The same effort can (and should) be applied to the low frequency names of real people you encounter every day. Nigerian American actor Uzo Adubo shared a powerful message on names with Glamour, describing her childhood attempt to convince her mom to change her name to Zoe. Her mother’s response was pure perfection, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky, and Michelangelo, and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
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