The incident sparked an online movement, which included Democratic lawmakers and celebrities, sharing the origins and meaning behind their names with the #MyNameIs hashtag.
HuffPost spoke to several Americans about their journeys with their own names and how it influenced how they named their children. Some spoke about the importance of upholding traditions. Others talked about the weight of their names and its ties to slavery or how likely someone was to be profiled at an airport or overlooked for a job. Nearly everyone recalled a moment when they faced their own Perdue, when they were dismissed or taunted because of their names.
Zakir was named after Hussain’s father, a tradition common in Latino culture. Hussain’s husband has such a name himself. Emiliano was named after the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. Jafri wanted to make sure her children had meaningful names that stemmed from the Islamic faith, even if it meant working with letters that didn’t exist in the English language.
“I always loved my name, but I just always felt like people used it to devalue me because some people wouldn’t even attempt it or if they said it wrong and I would correct them they wouldn’t even respond or try to make a correction,” she said.As a young Black woman in engineering surrounded by older white men, she was constantly asked if she had a nickname or an abbreviation they could use instead.
“It’s that colonial mindset or that imperialist mindset that says, ’You will adapt to my superior culture, my superior name, my superior language. You will be the one to adapt, rather than a mutual honor and respect,” she added.Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow remembers when she was a grade-school teacher and some students mocked other students’ names or teachers forced nicknames onto students whose names they couldn’t pronounce.
“When we diminish aspects of people’s culture or people’s identity, then we’re diminishing them,” said Thompkins-Bigelow. “We think those kinds of things are small, but they end up adding up and becoming huge things.A few things stuck out during Yasmine Badaoui’s pregnancy. Like when she was pregnant with her first child and realized that her baby moved the most when they listened to Mozart.
It's not laziness, it's racism.
MyNameIs Samira. MyNameIs Anandita. They are beautiful and traditional names that don't require a doctorate to pronounce. I've you've never heard these names before, something is wrong with the way you've been living your life.
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