While the racist undertones of mispronouncing of names are usually understated, when it is analyzed within the context of historical and present-day racism, African students, like myself,  find that they are actually subtle daily insults that support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority., Enduring these subtle experiences with racism can have a lasting impact on the self-perceptions and worldviews of students. One of these students is Chinenye Nwume, a Nigerian student at the University of Illinois Chicago.

 “I never thought of my name as anything special, but coming here my name became an indicator and reminder of the fact that I’m different,” Nwume said. “I found myself wishing that I had an easy name to pronounce or at least one that would easily have a nickname coined out of it.”

Nwume and several other Africans who migrate to the U.S. are often forced to coin “Americanized” nicknames or change their names entirely. Eventually, a month after she started at college in 2018, Nwume coined a nickname because of the pressure placed by others who couldn’t pronounce her name.

 “I had people call me Chichi and I really hated that name. But the crazy thing is that I told people to call me that because I felt it would help me fit in better but it just made me feel even more out of place,” she said.

 Nwume said that this contributed to her loneliness since she was not able to make friends for several months in college.

 “I ordinarily have a hard time connecting with people, and sometimes I feel my name makes it worse because I have literally felt invisible when people begin to ignore me in a social circle after I introduce myself,” she said. “This isn’t the only effect, but it’s the one that affects me most. I honestly don’t know if this will follow me for the rest of my life, but has followed me long enough for me to believe it will.”

 Fegor Imieye, 21, a Nigerian student, changed her name to something she hated because several people kept discriminating against her because of her name.

 “I feel very irritated because my name is two syllables and very easy to pronounce but at this point, I am used to it,” Imieye said. “I just started introducing myself as ‘Faye’ instead.”

 Ebubechukwu Nwafor, a Nigerian native, shortened her name to “Bubae” which is easier for Americans to pronounce. She too claims that after so many people kept mispronouncing her name for so many years, now she is mostly immune to it. However, her name is still so important to her.

 “My name means ‘miracle of God’ and although it’s a common name in Nigeria, it makes me feel special,” she said.

 Nwume believes that the way people in America make her and other Africans feel about their names is yet another form of racist micro-aggressions.

 “While I feel there are harsher ways of discriminating, this is one of those harmful things that just eat you up slowly and make guys like yourself into believing it’s not a big deal, even though it is,” she said. “This experience is not common to a lot of Americans so a lot of them can’t empathize with us because it is such a specific experience to us.

 Nwafor too has experienced microaggressions from several people especially in Georgia Tech where she attends college.

 “Professors would save my name for last on roll call, or sometimes not even say it at all, even when it was obvious they skipped me,” she said. “Same goes for asking or answering questions. I would get ignored sometimes.”

 Imieye said because her name is African she has experienced blatantly racist assumptions.

“My school sent an email to African international students during winter saying that we should get clothes and coats from a shelter because they think we are all poor,” she said.

 Then there are people like Oluwademilade Ayeye who don’t give anyone the chance to mispronounce their names.

 “When people mispronounce my name it irritates the living daylight out of me, so I don’t even give anyone that opportunity and I just go by ‘Demi’,” she said.

 Before Ayeye came to the U.S. in 2018 to attend NYU, she came prepared to introduce herself to people with her shortened name so that people would not butcher it since her first name—which means “God has crowned me”—is extremely important to her.

 “My name is a signifier of all that I am, all that I want to be, and all that I am expected to be. It holds the hopes that my parents held for who I will become but in growing up, it now holds the hope of who I wish to become,” Ayeye said.

 When people don’t make an attempt to pronounce her name properly, oftentimes, Ayeye does not educate them because she doesn’t believe it’s her job to open the minds of small-minded people.

 “I think it has something to do with how they subconsciously see me as ‘the other’ and more often than not, the other is met with much less empathy,” she said.

 Imieye believes that because Americans view Africa and Africans as exotic and far away, they already have a mindset that African names are complicated.

 “I feel it is damaging because our names are a huge part of our identity and when the pronunciations are trivialized, it leads to a loss of representation and feelings of isolation,” she said. “Also having to even use short nicknames results in Africans feeling like they have to Westernize themselves to fit in or be more palatable.”

 Ayeye believes this is not just harmful but intentionally racist.

 “It’s not a harmless mistake to mispronounce African names. It’s ignorant behavior,” she said. “They’ve managed to pronounce Tchaikovsky and other complicated non-African names so why can’t they pronounce ours?” 

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Black bookstore owners like Yvonne Blake, owner of Hakim’s Bookstore in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania experienced the boom.

 “When the pandemic hit, we were closed for a little over three months, but after George Floyd got murdered, people were so alarmed and horrified that they decided to start reading,” Blake said. “Therefore, we noticed that uptick in our online sales, especially race-conscious books.”

 On the day George Floyd was murdered—May 25, 2020—there weren’t any books exclusively tackling white privilege or anti-Blackness on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list. “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo was the only book to break through the week of May 31, but by June 21, almost 70% of the Times’ Best Seller list confronted race.

Blake admits that this surge in sales came as a saving grace for the bookstore since they had been struggling even before the pandemic. Once the pandemic hit, they had to close and Blake moved the bookstore into her house.

“I had the books shipped to my home then I was shipping books out of my dining room and going to the post office and standing in a very, very long line,” she said. “Because we were hit all of a sudden, initially, we didn’t even have a website until we got one developed. The volume increased so much: almost like day one after he was murdered, that we had to put some operations in place.”

When sales became overwhelming, Blake had her family members help out including her daughter, granddaughter, and sister. Family collaboration is nothing new for the bookstore, which has been family-owned and operated since Blake’s father founded it in 1969 making it the first and oldest African American bookstore in Philadelphia. This historical significance played a significant role in increasing the bookstore’s exposure.

 “We started making friends and acquaintances around the United States and I was even shipping books over to Europe,” Blake said.

 La’Nae Robinson, owner of Bliss Books and Wine in Kansas City,  Missouri, experienced this wide exposure as well.

 “We saw that initially, the surge was for antiracist literature and specific titles and authors. However, customers were also attending online events and signing up for our newsletters,” Robinson said. “The exposure even landed us a feature in an article about Black-owned bookstores across the United States in The Oprah Magazine.” 

 Since then, a lot of things have changed.

“As things stand now, the surge of orders has drastically died down,” Robinson said. “We still have a steady stream of orders, but they are not nearly as overwhelming as they were during the summer of 2020 so they have plateaued to what is probably the normal rate for an independent bookstore.”

 Blake also said that online sales of Hakim’s Bookstore have gone back to what they were before 2020. However, as a result of the exposure, the foot traffic has increased as well as their relationships with educational institutions.

 “It was just kind of amazing to me that, you know, we’ve been trying to teach this history. And now there’s more of a push to get all children educated in critical race theory,” she said.

 VaLinda Miller, the owner of Turning Pages, a Black-owned bookstore in Goose Creek, South Carolina,  said many customers were trying to educate themselves.

 “These books opened many people’s eyes on the history and it helped to bring back Black authors from the 1940s to now,” she said.

 Robinson said she is not surprised at the drastic decrease in orders after the protests died down.

 “I did think the excitement over Black-owned establishments and antiracist literature would be short-lived,” she said. “In fact, I am honestly surprised when I see those popular titles from that time still show up in orders.”

Seeing this, Robinson encourages people who have stopped buying from Black-owned bookstores and reading antiracist literature to continue.

 “This is a movement, not a moment,” said Robinson. “Continue the dialogue and continue the journey. We have not solved the issues addressed in those readings and there is still work to be done.”

When asked if this short-lived surge made her consider the possibility that people were just being performative in their purchases, Blake said she can tell who is being performative and those who truly want to be educated by the types of books they want to read.

 “They might want to read a ton of Ta-Nehisi Coates books but if I try to introduce them to a book that actually deals with true African American history, like a John Henrik Clark book, they’re not so much interested in that,” she said.

 Many who got caught up in the Black Lives Movement during summer 2020, bought one or two books from Black-owned bookstores, and then never went back.

To these people, Blake wants them to ask themselves some tough questions.

 “Do some soul searching and ask yourselves, ‘did I just do this because it was the thing to do at the moment to make myself feel better and to feel that I was part of the movement?’ or ‘do I really have an honest interest in trying to establish racial equality and respect among the races,’”  she said.

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Like many other African women, the advanced feminist landscape in the U.S.—compared to Nigeria—played a significant role in Yongo-Okochi’s choice to migrate and remain in America.

Sughnen Yongo-Okochi

“America meant empowerment to me. It meant liberation. It meant the ability to truly be who I am at the core,” Yongo-Okochi said. “I am free-spirited and artistic and it shows in my appearance with my short blonde hair and piercings. My mum would always say if you have all these things, you will look like a ‘loose girl.’”

Yongo-Okochi never thought or behaved according to the predominant cultural and religious elements in Nigeria. This made her an outlier among her family members and it was exacerbated when she had her child.

“I got pregnant before I got married and this was a big deal back home. It was like, ‘you’re loose and you’re a whore and you’re a disgrace to the family,’” she said. “It was just very stressful for me emotionally and mentally because I knew that if my male cousin did the same thing, he wouldn’t go through that.”

These cultural and religious elements are not unique to Nigeria. Sharon Nyakundi, 29, a Kenyan immigrant, believes that in her home country, the patriarchy is rooted in traditional culture and religion which was the foundation of her home.

“Here the feminist fight is in some ways more political unlike at home where it is a battle against culture and religion that is the very historical foundation and core of many African families,” Nyakundi said.

Abosede George, a professor of History and Africana Studies at Barnard College and Columbia University with an academic focus on African women and African migration, disagrees with this argument believing that patriarchal norms are not an inherent part of African cultures because there is so much more. However, she does believe that the difference between feminist landscapes in Africa and the U.S. is the strength of institutions that are in place to support them.

“There are institutions that are in place to guarantee individual rights and equality of opportunity,” she said. “A lot of African countries including Nigeria have pretty egalitarian laws, on paper, that should promote some uniformity of experience and protect women from random discrimination but when those laws get violated, which they do routinely, there is just a really stark difference in what people have recourse to.”

As an accomplished Wall Street lawyer, Nyakundi also admits that she has remained in the U.S. for the past 11 years—since coming here for college—because the work environment here is more conducive for women than in her home country.

“At home, some friends have to trade favors with men to get jobs or have to fight off men in the office to be taken seriously as professional women and being told to focus more on family rather than their jobs,” she said. “Here, I have more agency over my career, my body, and my interests than at home where these are sometimes subject to the needs of the culture and the family.”

Anima Addo, 24,  an African immigrant from Ghana also believes that America is better for a career woman than her home country.

“Subconsciously, I knew I had a better chance of succeeding as a woman in a male-dominated field/industry migrating to the US,” said Addo, an IT Applications Analyst in Illinois. “Finding a job might be difficult, despite my qualifications I might need an introduction/reference (most likely from a man) to get the job.”

George also mentioned that these experiences often lead to women in Africa being unable to gain financial independence, 

“For African women, financial dependence is built into the structure: differential salaries based on age and gender play a role in keeping African women in a junior status,” she said. “The opportunities that women get to have to gain financial independence are radically different here because there’s the expectation that you should be able to just work and live without being harassed because of your gender or sex.”

Despite the fact that female African immigrants’ income growth rate has outpaced that of U.S.-born men and women and they are the highest-paid group of immigrants, George believes that the quest for financial independence is a much more powerful push for African women to migrate to the U.S. than the pull of higher earnings.

“Women are leaving primarily because of the suffering that they do know, rather than what they expect to find,” she said. 

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