One woman with a Latin American name has called out people unwilling to learn the pronunciation.
And she has used Game of Thrones as an example.
In an article written for Huffington Post, Aizita Magaña highlighted the argument being shared on social media about the hypocrisy of being able to pronounce fictional characters’ names and not the names of real people of color.
In particular, in her opinion, if you can learn to pronounce Daenerys Targaryen…
Then you can learn to correctly say Latin American names.
Many tweets discussing the topic have been shared online over the years.
One Twitter user wrote: “I don’t understand how white people can pronounce ‘Daenerys Targaryen’ and ‘Petyr Baelish’ perfectly but still struggle to say ethnic names correctly even after they’ve been corrected 5 times.”
Aizita shared her story of growing up with a name that set her apart from her classmates.
She goes on to say that her name was shortened by her friends to ‘Zita’ and even that was an anomaly in her school at the time.
According to Aizita, this was something she had to deal with throughout her school years, and even her teachers struggled to learn her name.
She said this caused her to be “embarrassed by the negative attention and ashamed to have a name that was so singular and difficult to pronounce.”
She went on to write: “I was Latina, brown-skinned, with long, dark braids, in a practically all-white elementary school in a nearly all-white town.”
Adding: “My name combined with my ethnicity and appearance made me anxious about fitting in or being accepted.”
But it wasn’t just the pronunciation of her name that people had trouble with…
It was also the spelling, with Aizita explaining that “sometimes the first ‘i’ would be left out, or an ‘e’ would be added.”
But over the years, and after learning to accept her unique name, Aizita shared that she began to “ask to be called by my whole given name.”
She revealed that she became “less concerned about belonging or acceptance, I appreciated how unique it was.”
She continued: “It gave me a sense of individuality and complimented my then-recent embrace of my Latino ethnicity.”
It was only in her forties that Aizita began exploring the meaning behind her name, and discovered she was named after the model Aizita Nascimiento who was born in 1939, in Rio.
Aizita explained that the model “became the very first Black woman to compete in a beauty contest in Brazil.
“Aizita won the Miss Renascença contest of 1963 and went on that same year to participate in a much larger pageant in the northern part of Rio.”
She shared that this influential woman, who shared the same name as her and achieved so much, gave her a sense of pride.
And now she often thinks of her when people struggle to get her name right.
Aizita concluded her article: “Learning to say my name is respect, affirmation, and acknowledgment of me and my identity.
“It makes space for me, but also the possibility of connection. If you want people of color to be included, and believe they deserve to be seen, then you can say so by correctly pronouncing their name.”
What do you think?