The Intersectionality of Hate: Name-Magic in the 21st Century

[bellatrys]

The one who tells the stories rules the world.
--Hopi proverb"Intersectionality" is one of those words that, like "dynamic", can seem to be (and is sometimes used as) a meaningless buzzword, but which really does have meaning and is a useful descriptor for discussion purposes, namely of the fact that the world is not a bunch of separate unrelated

Comments

[morgan_dhu]

Excellent post.

Oddly enough, one of the first things I thought of was how Stephen Colbert draws attention to this tactic in his performance of a conservative media personality - he will deliberately and absurdly mis-pronounce names (the most common target being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad).

I began noticing this in the American news media in particular some years ago now. As a Canadian, I'm naturally most familiar with the standards of news coverage in my own country, and for all of their faults, news announcers here tend to make sincere attempts to give the proper pronunciation to names of people and places that are not of English origin. When the explosion of cable brought so many US news stations to Canada, I was struck by how many news announcers did not seem to be making such attempts.

It makes me wonder a little to see how this tactic of demeaning and marginalising people and places whose names are "not American" is legitimatised by the media, and especially the conservative media, in the US.

[morgan_dhu]

And along the same lines, Stephen also makes a big deal out of people "mispronouncing" his name as as coal + bert, which is how it was pronounced before he himself changed it. (Ditto the Report, which also now has a silent T to match.)

Except when he was on the O'Reilly Factor (which is not the O RLY Factor, thank you fingers), and O'Reilly was going on about how Stephen was pronouncing it in a French way, and shouldn't he just pronounce it Col-bert? And after explaining that he changed it so it would appeal to the public, you know the sacrifices we have to make in this industry what with the media's liberal bias, &c., and O'Reilly still pressing him on is it "coal bear" or "coal bert", Stephen Colbert (who made a big production of worshiping the ground O'Reilly walks on) told him "for you, Bill, it's whatever you want it to be." Which, of course, is partly a what-I'm-not-saying-the-kind-of-thing-you'd-say-to-a-crush joke, but also fits in with this whole model; you can call me by anything you like because you've got the power here

[ksej]

My parents have no problems calling me Nick, except when they lose their tempers with me, when I suddenly become [birthname] again. If I was being generous, I'd say it takes an intellectual effort to remember what to call me, and they can't sustain it when they're angry, but I can't help wondering how much it's actually about wanting to put me in my place. And coming from my parents, I think there's an extra dimension of "I gave you this name and by god that's the name you will be called."

[fledgist]

It may be more than a conservative white American refusal to accept the 'foreign' or the non-Anglo. My students, who are African American, have real trouble with African names like Obasanjo (not to mention the imaginary Middle Eastern countries of Eye-ran and Eye-raq, but that's another story), and tell me I'm being unfair when I say that if they were white I'd call their refusal to make an effort to get the pronunciation right racist.

Well, Adam Yoshida is living proof

[bellatrys]

that you don't need to be white to be an Anglophone Imperialist. I've personally run across a few jingoistic African Americans, even if somewhat-conflicted ones, much the same as with jingoistic American women - the combination of "yes being treated as second-class citizens sucks, but we are STILL WAY BETTER THAN THE REST OF YOU #@%^$ OUT THERE, NYAH!!!" which I can't really comment except by analogy, as my family's jingoism was reserved for the Catholic Church (and a little bit for the USAF, with much more conflictedness) which in both cases was a lot different sort of cultural unity, on the one hand much larger and on the other hand much smaller than national/racial borders

Re: Well, Adam Yoshida is living proof

[fledgist]

Some of it is the assumption that the pronunciation rules of American English are universal ('But it's written that way!'). Some of it is a mindless American jingoism that assumes that if it isn't American there's something wrong with it.

Adam Yoshida? Well there's also Michelle Malkin.

Re: Well, Adam Yoshida is living proof

[jenny_islander]

I think some USians just plain never thought about it. It simply never entered their minds that other languages could use the alphabet in different ways because they spent their entire lives in a place where only one language was needed and did not know a single person who spoke any other. When you grow up in an environment like that, some things just aren't in your headmeats. You have to learn them, like calculus.

I had a classmate, a middle-aged commercial fisherman who was trying to establish ties with Japanese buyers, who could not hear the difference between what Barnes-sensei was saying and what was coming out of his own mouth. She would patiently repeat "Otoosan" and he would parrot "Oh-2-sayyun." She would correct his pronunciation. He would take a deep breath, knit his brows in bafflement, and carefully say, "Oh-2-sayyun." I thought he was about to cry when Barnes-sensei put Romanized words with a double I on the chalkboard; they might as well have been imaginary numbers. He dropped the class shortly after that.

[rikibeth]

And then there's the Obvious Jokes about one's name, too. Your identity is Comical, your existence is a subject of ridicule.

I'd never thought of the name-manglings that way. THANK YOU.

[randwolf]

A fine example of this is the Republican use of the phrase Democrat Party. (Hendrik Hertzberg, on one of his better days.) I am always astonished by the amount of petty nastiness and dishonesty in the world, and every time I find more of it I am astonished all over again. It would just be so much easier if we threw it all over, but I suppose it is not quickly possible, and even objecting too much risks making the problem worse.