Empiricism @laqueersadilla - Tumblr Blog

okakimoti

bepeu-deactivated20171202

this is a mosquito hate blog

mosquitos are so stupid they dont fcking even have toes

botanyshitposts

the midwest is so beautiful this time of year…….reblog 2 support our farmers

andreii-tarkovsky

Fresh Off the Boat - “Hi, My Name Is…”

aj-elloo

YES

wumbawoman

Why Uzo Aduba wouldn’t change her name:

My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”

source

They can learn

whitmanifesto

I’ve worked with many exchange programs on campuses, and they still “encourage” Chinese students to choose English names for their stay in the US. I’ve adopted a rule for myself, I won’t address them with their English name until they’ve told me to stop trying their real name on at least three different occasions. My family is largely immigrant, and while we’ve never had this problem, I don’t think anyone should have to change who they are when them find a new home, even a temporary one. So far, only two exchange student actually wanted to keep their English name, and one of them, Alice, had had Alice for a nickname since she was little.

neenorroar-deactivated20181203

Don’t know if it’s okay to add this here, but I used to work with a Chinese woman who had changed her name to Angelina for the sake of ease. When she first told me that was what she’d had to do, I asked her for her real name and if she minded me calling her that. She looked so frikkin happy, and it only took about two minutes for me to say it right. It’s not that people can’t pronounce these names, it’s that they won’t. It’s lazy and it’s rude.

tashabilities

It’s also RACIST.

Say ‘racist’.

They pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger just fine.

sanerontheinside

They can’t, actually, pronounce Tchaikovsky, or Rachmaninov, or Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky, or Vesel’nitskaya just fine. Probably not even Schwarzenegger.

The hill to die on is the fact that it’s better to make a fucking effort, even if you butcher the name. At that point, it is up to the person you’re talking to decide if it’s something they want to hear.

It is racist, it is disrespectful. But not because they pronounce Russian, or Austrian, or any other European-origin names correctly—only because they do it with that bald-faced confidence, and a dash of that lovely certainty that they have to, anyway.

It’s really hard, sometimes, not to think that they just don’t care either way what it sounds like, but like I said, that part is already up to me to deal with.