Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:That's a subset of white people that are a minority in their own right, so what is the experience that POCs have of those particular people's lives? Is it hard to imagine that, through racial generalizations, some POCs may have overlooked that subgroup of white people, attributing to them a general exemption from cultural prejudice that they assume those people enjoy on account of their whiteness that isn't actually based on a particularly large amount of experience of it?
So if there's particular issue you have to deal with, doesn't it make you more sensitive to the experiences of other people who have to deal with that issues, even if their experience isn't like yours in other respects? Like does being an Irishman living abroad only sensitise you to the issues faced by other Irishmen living abroad or does it cause you to take more notice of how
all foreign nationals are treated where you are? And do you not notice at least some of the differences in the kind of treatment afforded to some of those foreign nationals based upon characteristics like country of origin?
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:It's not so much a conclusion as a possibility, but to break it down point by point:
group of mostly black people who, unfamiliar with what it's like to be a white person with an exotic name
I think white people with unusual names are rare enough in the US that the average POC probably doesn't have much experience of how they're treated.
I think you don't know much about the USA if you think that. There's an incredible diversity of given names here[*]--as you would expect in a mass immigration nation. More than half of all European Americans identify their ethnic ancestry as something other than "American" or "English" and heritage names are common. The use of surnames as given names--for girls as well as boys--is a frequent practice, especially among those of British or "American" origin. Moreover--in stark contrast to most European countries--there are essentially no legal limits to what name somebody can adopt or give to a child. Coining new names is common. Despite the fact that we come from an extremely conservative naming tradition generally (being mostly Irish and German Catholics), my cousins coined a complete novel name for their child by combining elements of their respective given names.
The diversity of surnames is even greater. My surname is shared with only ten other living people in the entire USA. (And, in fact, I use a unique form of it, so not only am I the only person alive with this surname, I may be the only person with this surname
who has ever lived.) And that's hardly unusual: 14% of the population has a surname which occurs fewer than 100 times in a population of 330 million people. (The top ten surnames cover less than 5% of the population; for Ireland, by comparison, the figure is 7.4%.) I live in an HOA with 12 households. Only three of the owners have a surname in the top 1000 most common surnames in the USA according to the 2010 census. The most common of these (Marquez) ranks 287 on the list.
So there are a lot of unusual names among white people here. People of all races have a lot of experience dealing with them.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:From what I've seen, racism is pretty common in the US, and I'm not restricting my definition of racism to white people who hate black people, as the other way around is not only possible but seems quite common as well.
What you're calling "racism" here I would call "racial animus". These do not describe the same phenomena.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:It seems likely in this case as I found the comment "you don't double down like most white men" pretty racist
He's absolutely right though. That
is what white men tend to do in these sorts of situations. It's what you're doing right now. You are right now telling a USAmerican you know better than he does how racism operates in the USA and you're indirectly telling Black folks you're better at recognising racist behaviour than they are.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:So in response to an example you gave of cultural intolerance involving white people whereby a white American refused to say a French name, your acquaintance said that while that's bad, if it were a POC on the receiving end it would be worse? But what's their basis for that?
I know you'll say experience, but I feel like prejudice is a pretty good contender here too. How do you know whether your acquaintance believes it would be worse for a POC because they've collected enough data to make a fair judgement or whether it's that they've been prejudiced against white people either through negative personal experience or cultural indoctrination (i.e. they are "woke")? I don't expect I'll be able to change your mind of your estimation of this person, but knowing you to the extent that I do, I wouldn't trust you to spot a devotee to wokeness, given I feel you are fairly close to being one (if not in fact one) yourself. Objectively, we can't know how this person drew their conclusion. You and I are likely to differ in our default assumption on this, and I'm not sure there's a way we can argue past that, but given that either of us could be right, it's at least something you should entertain as a possibility. I also accept the possibility that they haven't a racist bone in their body (though its hard to explain the "white men" comment in that case) and that they could be telling an objective truth.
"Wokeness" is not a cult, let alone some magical reality-distortion field. It's not even a coherent ideology. It's just a slang term for a loosely associated constellation of attitudes and ideas--so loose, indeed, that I have really no way of knowing what all you're grouping under this umbrella.
Your argument at this point is pure
Bulverism. You hold the belief that "wokeness" is wrongheaded. Based on a few key phrases, you diagnose both me and the person I'm quoting as suffering from it. Then you use that as the basis on which to discount our testimony and our judgment. It's a circular argument.
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:I've never been to the US
...but you're not about to let that stop you from making sweeping generalisations about it!
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:from what I see online, Irish names are generally trotted out as a bizarre curiosity and hopeless mispronunciations of the names by Americans are used as a kind of joke at our expense. This is usually the worst of it, there's rarely open hostility. It is also true that a decent amount of the Americans I come across (though there's a filter effect at work here, as I come across the ones who bother coming to Ireland) are actively interested in Irish names, culture and language, usually on account of their having ancestry from here. I can easily imagine this ratio dropping severely in relation to African languages and cultures on account of a lack of ancestry. I can imagine, therefore, some degree of discrepancy in interest from white Americans in mastering Irish names vs African ones (or African American ones for that matter), but I can't say how significant it is. At the end of the day, is the difference significant enough to warrant POCs ire at the different treatment in this case? What if we were to examine the difference between the average white American's attitude to mastering the pronunciation of an Irish name vs the average American POCs attitude to the same? Do you expect it would be the same? What direction would you intuit any discrepancy to be in, if there were one?
A name shouldn't have to be from your own culture for you to care about not mangling it. I think even starting from different definitions, we can both agree that holding that view would be properly called "racist", right?
It's hard to overstate how important names are to the people who bear them. Getting them right is pretty much the basement when it comes to showing respect for another person. POC are not exempted from the expectation that they will pronounce other people's names correctly, even if they originate in a different culture. (YMMV, but, if anything, I generally find POC
better at dealing with unusual names because they have more experience with this, often because they come from a culture where diversity and creative in given names is expected and because they're used to navigating a culture which is different from their own.)
Rí.na.dTeangacha wrote:That seems like a pretty clear case of prejudice alright, but is it racial prejudice or classism? Because making this about white people vs black people puts an awful lot of people who are neither posh nor English on the wrong side of that.
You can't easily separate the two in the USA. That's a pretty basic fact you need to understand if you're going to try to perform any kind of analysis our society. Social mobility in the USA has always been closely linked to being accepted as "white". It's why my ancestors moved easily into the middle class without even having to lose their accents.
I'm not "making this about white people vs black people"; white people, through our behaviour, are doing that. Black people are pointing it out. And white people who don't like having this pointed out are doing what they always do and blaming the Black people for noticing what they didn't notice and/or don't want to have to acknowledge.
[*] It's always hard to know what someone else will consider "exotic", but I'll point out that Nevaeh, Rylee, Gianna, Aaliyah, Skylar, Nova, and Kinsley were all among the top 100
most popular given names for girls in the USA in 2019. I've never met someone with any of those names; have you?
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons