They botch our names because of who we are

Writer Atiya (pronounced Ah-Tie-Yah) Irvin-Mitchell stands for a portrait in her neighborhood of Squirrel Hill on Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)

Americans have little trouble pronouncing “Targaryen” but too many balk at something as simple as “Kamala” or “Atiya.” Is there something lurking behind the verbal misfires?

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First-person essay by Atiya Irvin-Mitchell, PublicSource

On one of many sleepless nights this past July, I found myself scrolling, and in a sea of memes I noticed that a family friend had shared a clip from CNN. Pundits arguing during an election year is hardly an unusual sight, but this clip in particular got my attention. 

While discussing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record, CNN Political Commentator Bakari Sellers corrected one of his colleagues on his pronunciation of Harris’ first name. Instead of apologizing when his error was pointed out, David Urban didn’t seem to see the issue with his mispronunciation and appeared eager to brush it off. Not even when Sellers noted that there were many women in the U.S. with different names, and like the vice president they were owed a certain level of respect, did Urban seem to understand.

I’d just started high school the first time Barack Obama was elected president and I can still remember classmates and the occasional adult making a mockery of the former president’s name. Seeing that people aren’t behaving much better 16 years later leaves me wondering: If you can be elected to the highest offices in the land and still not have your name respected, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Should I have called her ‘Ren’?

Atiya is an Arabic name that means gift or present. My father was a Muslim. My mother was a Baptist who wanted to choose a meaningful name for me. While working at a convent, she became close to a convert who suggested the name. 

My mother taught me to explain my name’s meaning by the time I was four, and the gist of the responses I’d get from family friends and her coworkers was that Atiya was a beautiful name. Perhaps that’s why, when I started school and my world got larger, it was so confusing for me that so many adults seemed to think my name was just too hard. 

When I was 12 I went to summer camp. Upon meeting my camp counselor Lauren, I introduced myself. She looked at me and said she’d never be able to learn to say my name (it’s said Ah-Tie-Yah) and asked if she could use a nickname. I was shy, my mother had already hugged me goodbye and started driving back to Pittsburgh, and I wanted her to like me. So going against the discomfort I felt, I gave a small, “okay,” and for the next week, I was Ty, not Atiya. It’s not lost on me that all these years later I can recall Lauren’s name so easily, but she decided in under 60 seconds that she couldn’t be bothered with mine. 

It should be said that I do have a few nicknames, however, those who use them are also able to say and spell my full name accurately. The point is that nicknames should come from a place of affection and not laziness. My 12-year-old self was too nonconfrontational to call Lauren on it, but now I think she should’ve given me the same courtesy she gave Maria, Andrea and Courtney. Initial mistakes can be forgiven, but the disregard and refusal to learn that some people have shown when I tried to correct them feels far more egregious.

Talking the liberty of adding an ‘L’

As the years went by, this problem remained a constant in my life. 

Several states away from Camp Kon-o-Kwee Spencer, my 7th grade English teacher didn’t try to shorten my name, she just said it with an “L” that doesn’t belong there for the entire school year. Being publicly chastised is never a fun experience. Still, it felt like adding insult to injury that during one particularly unpleasant encounter when she called me out of another class to scold me about my folder being disorganized, she was still saying my name wrong. As had become a trend, my correction only seemed to annoy her more, and she suggested that I should apply that corrective spirit to my organizational skills. 

But it’s my name! It’s one of the first things I ever learned about myself — how could I not feel strongly about it being said the right way? In the end, by May of that school year, she was still saying my name with that out-of-place L, so feeling exhausted I figured she wouldn’t be my teacher much longer and stopped correcting her.

As a teenager, I was tired, and I’d resolved that if I ever had children of my own I’d choose names that were easy, pronounceable and would never be considered a typo by Microsoft Word. But in a world of Fyodor Dostoevskys and Anton Chekhovs, why are those of us with names and lineage that hail from Africa or the Middle East obligated to be “easy”? Why do tortured Russian authors get to keep their names with every consonant while the rest of us have to fight not to be condensed? 

If I was blonde and rode dragons?

By the time I was in college, my reticence was receding, leading to the slow death of the idea that my life would be less complicated if my name were “easy.” Oddly enough, Game of Thrones finally killed the notion that my name was just too complicated to learn. When I looked around and saw many a YouTube essayist and interviewer easily wrap their minds and tongues around names like Daenerys Targaryen, Rhaegar Targaryen and even Viserion, it occurred to me that the issue wasn’t the difficulty of my name but its perceived validity. 

There was a mix of validation and sadness when I came across an article in 2021 describing a study in which applicants with “distinctively Black names” experienced discrimination. I’d suspected it for a few years by then, but the studies confirmed that the repeated butchering of ethnic-sounding names comes in part from a belief that names like Kamala, Jabari, Amira — and yes Atiya — are less real than names like Sarah and John, because the people most likely to have them aren’t blonde-haired and blue-eyed. 

Almost anything’s pronounceable if you think it’s important enough, and with all due respect to George R.R. Martin, I believe I and others from the classroom to the White House deserve as much if not more respect than dragon-riding fictional characters. Every letter of my name is there for a reason and says something about me, my family, and my history. Now that I’m an adult, I correct people every time they get my name wrong without hesitation. But even in a time when it’s hard to hope, I still hope that more people will show more respect for non-Anglo Saxon names so that other kids in the spaces I once occupied don’t grow up feeling like they’re just not worth the effort.

 Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer and can be reached at airvinmitchell@gmail.com and you can follow her on Twitter/X  @atiyawrites.

This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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