Week 4: Assignment B: “Honor Their Names” – Linda Christensen

Week 4: Assignment B: “Honor Their Names” – Linda Christensen

When browsing through articles, it literally took me about 45 minutes to choose one because several of them were so interesting. This particular one, however, was one that I kept thinking about and going back to. In the article “Honor Their Names” by Christensen (2019), she discusses the issues of not pronouncing children’s names correctly at all (or even changing it completely to make it easier for… let’s face it…white people to say. One quote that stood out to me was at the very beginning of the article when the author discusses her conversation with a Nigerian woman. Christensen had asked her waitress (the Nigerian woman) what her name was, and her response was as follows, “Oh, my real name is Chichima. Carol is my white name. My family is from Nigeria, so when we immigrated, I changed my name at school. It’s easier for the teachers. We all have white names.” To me, that is absolutely ridiculous. Why would any teacher want to take away part of a child’s identity in that way? I thought about it for a bit and still couldn’t think of a reason why except pure laziness. Anyways, this section of this article also made me think about the documentary we saw in class the other day, too. At the school, Groton, a girl named Jo, a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx, was interviewed and she discussed the ways in which she felt her identity was taken from her while she attended this school. At one point she is having a discussion with a white male at the school about her hardships and the hardships that many people of color experience in our society. He completely ignored her and trashed her ideas without giving it a second thought. This is the same situation that is happening with something as simple as calling a child by their real name (not one someone else thinks is better). The author also states, “To give students nicknames or to refuse to pronounce student names is to reject them from their families, languages, and cultures. To devalue something as intimate and personal as the names their parents bestowed at birth, to whitewash them, to rub out their faces, skins, and vocal cords is akin to saying, “You don’t belong” on the first day of school.” The solution to this: say their names. 

I came across this video as I was researching more about mispronouncing names in the classroom and how that affects student. It’s from the Washoe County School District, which is located in Reno, Nevada. The school district started a campaign called “My Name, My Identity” which is meant to show the importance of making sure we as educators are acknowledging the identity of our students. Many of the students in the video talk about how their names are misspelled or mispronounced and how that makes them feel. Why is it so hard for teachers to do this? Why is it not more of a priority for teachers to make sure that their students identity’s are being respected? Granted, it isn’t ALL educators, but enough that there needed to be a campaign for it.

Video: https://youtu.be/Dsnaytwk2ug