>> Except that as I wrote this I suddenly wondered what not-Sara thinks of her own name. (For the record, I love mine.)
Yeah, my first reaction to this letter was: I was brought up to believe that making an effort to pronounce someone's proper name correctly is just basic respect. Especially if you're as close as an SO!
Except... I have now known several people (and read pieces by several more online) who point out that some people don't *want* you trying to do that, they would rather have the choice to just use a name that blends in, and save their hard-to-pronounce name for people who share the culture it's from. Especially in late teens/early twenties when people tend to experiment like that, it's possible that "Sara" *likes* him using a different name, or likes the idea of code-switching between two racial/cultural/national identities by choosing which name to use.
(There's all sorts of complicated stuff about *why* she might want that and so on, but it's not necessarily just about the boyfriend being lazy/entitled/racist. And Mom may not ever get the whole story. Also, I say all this as a person with the most whitebread, Anglo names imaginable, and literally nobody who is not related to me has ever pronounced my full name right on the first try. There are people I have known, and never felt deliberately disrespected by, for ten years, who still don't. I make the choice about who to correct and in what contexts on an ongoing daily basis. Americans being shitty at names isn't purely a racial thing, they're shitty at names in general.
...mind you, the only people who ever seem to feel bad about getting it wrong are bipoc. It's not *not* racialized. But in this case I suspect Boyfriend would be fucking up her name just as bad if she was white.)
Re: Remember how I mentioned that our identities affect our lives?
Yeah, my first reaction to this letter was: I was brought up to believe that making an effort to pronounce someone's proper name correctly is just basic respect. Especially if you're as close as an SO!
Except... I have now known several people (and read pieces by several more online) who point out that some people don't *want* you trying to do that, they would rather have the choice to just use a name that blends in, and save their hard-to-pronounce name for people who share the culture it's from. Especially in late teens/early twenties when people tend to experiment like that, it's possible that "Sara" *likes* him using a different name, or likes the idea of code-switching between two racial/cultural/national identities by choosing which name to use.
(There's all sorts of complicated stuff about *why* she might want that and so on, but it's not necessarily just about the boyfriend being lazy/entitled/racist. And Mom may not ever get the whole story. Also, I say all this as a person with the most whitebread, Anglo names imaginable, and literally nobody who is not related to me has ever pronounced my full name right on the first try. There are people I have known, and never felt deliberately disrespected by, for ten years, who still don't. I make the choice about who to correct and in what contexts on an ongoing daily basis. Americans being shitty at names isn't purely a racial thing, they're shitty at names in general.
...mind you, the only people who ever seem to feel bad about getting it wrong are bipoc. It's not *not* racialized. But in this case I suspect Boyfriend would be fucking up her name just as bad if she was white.)