Asian American Vignette #4

A small private college offers courses in fashion design and textile arts.  It is the first day of a introductory design class.  About 35 percent of the students are Asian American and about 5 percent are students from Asia.  As the white teacher is struggling through some of the names of the students while calling roll, she sighs and says “Why can’t you have normal names which I could pronounce like Richard or Margaret?”

Commentary to Asian American Vignette #4

It may be easy to empathize with the teacher’s difficulty in pronouncing unfamiliar names. However her message seems to be: only Anglo names are normal; Asian names are not. This message is closely associated with the notion that white people are the norm; everyone else is some sort of deviation from this norm. Can you imagine a Chinese American teacher saying to students Michael, Hugh, Donald and Lorraine, “Why can’t you have normal names that I can pronounce?”

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