Impactful Inclusion Toolkit

ACTIVITY 43Say Their Name

“A person's name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

—Dale Carnegie

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What's in a name? For many, our name is representative of our heritage, culture, or something of significance to our parents. I once worked with a man named Paris and believed his name was more feminine than masculine. I was surprised when he agreed with me. He beamed when he told me that that's where he was conceived while his parents vacationed there. In his mind, that vacation was more special than any other they would take. Feminine or not, he was proud of his name and why he had it. Paris was lucky. He had a name that is easily pronounced. My first name is unusual and is often mispronounced. I have met only a handful of individuals who share my name. The phonetic enunciation is “ee-VET,” and it is of French origin. I grew to like my name over the years because it was different, and I got a kick out of informing people that it was French. I used to marvel at being Black and having a French name. As a kid, somehow that made me feel cool. People who get it right on the first attempt tend to pose it as a question, “Yvette?” rather than saying it with confidence. For some reason, people find it necessary to sound out the letter Y. Classmates struggled far less saying my name than faculty and required correcting only a few times before nailing it every time. My high school history teacher butchered my name as “Ya-Vetter” every single day no ...