Perhaps now that Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, people will finally master the pronunciation of a name they’re going to be hearing often during the frantic months leading to Election Day. But don’t count on it.
When Harris ran for the Senate in 2016, she released a campaign video with a group of children eliminating all of the wrong ways to pronounce Kamala. “It’s not CAM el uh,” one girl says. A boy says, “It’s not Kuh MAHL uh.” Another boy shakes his finger and says, “It’s not ‘Kar MEL uh’.”
But eight years later, people keep getting it wrong. Some of this is probably unintentional, but that’s never the case with Republicans who get their cues from Donald Trump. For years, the former president has turned his exaggerated mispronunciations of Harris’s first name into a theater of mockery.
In his first rally since President Biden withdrew from the presidential race, Trump mangled Harris’s name multiple times, usually adding a cartoonish voice as if there’s something inherently funny about her name. Of course, the intention here, and on Fox News, is to otherize Harris and separate her from all those real Americans with real American names that are presumably easy to pronounce.
It’s an old bullying tactic typical of an old bully like Trump. He employed it against Pete Buttigieg when the future Biden administration’s transportation secretary was running for president in 2020. Trump branded the name of the then-mayor of South Bend, Ind., “unpronounceable.”
During this year’s Republican presidential primary season, Trump referred to Nikki Haley, his former UN ambassador, as “Nimrada,” a misspelling and mispronunciation of Nimarata, Haley’s first name. (Nikki is her middle name.) It’s a no less odious form of birtherism that tries to equate being American with whiteness, though Harris and Haley are both American-born daughters of immigrant parents.
Constantly having to correct your name’s pronunciation evokes what the incomparable Toni Morrison said about the “function” of racism as distraction: “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.
“Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do,” she said. “Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. . . . None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
Mangling Harris’s first name is a power play, a flex by those who want to project that someone isn’t worthy of the simple grace of having their name pronounced correctly.
Take note: Trump has no such problems when pronouncing the names of his authoritarian pals like Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister.
In an interview years ago, Uzo Aduba, best known for her Emmy Award-winning role on “Orange Is the New Black,” was asked if she ever considered changing her name when she became an actress. A native Bostonian of Nigerian descent, Aduba said no — but as a grade school student, she asked her mother if she could be called “Zoe.”
“I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Nobody can pronounce it,’” Aduba said. Her mother said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
They can also learn to say Kamala. But demeaning Harris’s Jamaican and South Asian heritage and her name is yet another sign of a Republican Party more adept at personal attacks than policies that will help move this nation forward.
So let them continue to butcher Harris’s name. The vice president and her campaign should block out the racist distractions and focus on earning the only name that matters — president-elect.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her @reneeygraham.
