Parents Of Color Speak Out After Sen. Kamala Harris’ Name Is Mocked
After Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia butchered and mocked Sen. Kamala Harris’ name at one of President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies last week, people of color recoiled in unpleasant familiarity.
“Ka-MA-la, KA-ma-la, Kamala-mala-mala. I don’t know, whatever,” Perdue said of the Democratic vice presidential nominee at Friday evening’s rally in Macon, Georgia, drawing laughs from the crowd.
Democrats, including Harris’ spokesperson, responded to Perdue’s remarks as “incredibly racist,” noting that Perdue had worked with Harris for more than three years in the Senate. Perdue’s spokesperson John Burke tweeted that the senator “simply mispronounced” Harris’ name and “didn’t mean anything by it.”
The incident sparked an online movement, which included Democratic lawmakers and celebrities, sharing the origins and meaning behind their names with the #MyNameIs hashtag.
For parents, in particular, many shared the tug of war they experienced when it came to naming their children ― on the one hand, wanting to honor their racial and ethnic background and, on the other, facing the worry that their children would be mocked like Harris if their names were deemed difficult to pronounce, even in the slightest way.
“Monolingualism, in general in the United States, is taken as a given, and anything that’s outside of that is deemed ‘ethnic.’ This really shows how myopic this awareness is in the U.S.,” said Mariam Durrani, an assistant professor of anthropology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
Durrani, who gave birth to her daughter in 2009, said she was aware of how her Muslim daughter with Pakistani roots would be perceived in the U.S., so it was important for her to find a name that was both meaningful and easy to pronounce. She settled on Nadine Noor, a harmonious alliteration that translates to hope and light, respectively.
HuffPost spoke to several Americans about their journeys with their own...
