Michael Eric Dyson and I had to correct Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at least 10 times last night for purposely mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name. “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to,” Mace said.
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 16, 2024
This is what the Republican Party has become. 🤦🏾♂️ pic.twitter.com/RVmS8cbBFe
I can pronounce the Lowcountry US Representative's name any way I want to, but the question is, will I? "Nancy Mace" rolls off an English-speaking tongue beautifully. If I chose to mispronounce it--how would I without it seeming deliberate? What if I called her "Antsy Face" because her motor mouth has outrun her wind-up toy brain?
See, that is deliberate. Just as calling Donald "Dump" is deliberate--as an English-speaker, there is no doubt what is intended. He is being personally derided as being either a trash pile or a piece of excrement--it is honest, and everyone knows what is intended. It is by no means racialized.
Mispronouncing a three-syllable name that has been in the news a lot lately is not clever, but it says something about the person doing it.
The game Mace is playing here with her Mayflower mouth depends on everyone else being too big and generous to call her out on it. We should ignore her. She's ignorant. She's petty. She might be trying. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt. She wins if she gets to pretend this name is too "other" for her lily-white face to possibly enunciate. And whatever else about this interloper might be too "other" for us to accept?
The part that was broken is she did get called on it. And she lost the game. She admitted her mispronunciation was purposeful.
Trump does the same thing less subtly--asking if her last name is really "Harris". Far too many Republicans did the same thing digging up Barack HUSSEIN Obama's middle name and then emphasizing it for all it was worth. Nancy RUTH Mace or Donald JOHN Trump just don't seem so threatening, right?
I don't know. My birth name is pretty goddamn English, but when JD Vance invokes my Irish and German forebears who came to the US in the 1800's, I guess I feel some kind of way about that. And I know people mispronounce the last name I took from my first-generation Italian American husband at first quite legitimately. It's a lot of letters. I am hard to "other"--racially.
I only know I would be ashamed to intentionally fix my mouth to show my ignorance the way she did there, and moreover, pretend there was something sexist about men correcting me on that, or citing my personal accomplishments to pretend I was exempt from being called out.
She's a weaselly little piece of business, and deserved getting called out, and if her response is to call the Black men on that panel "boys" whoa!
There were Black men Defending a Black woman. The only child in that room was petty-ass Antsy face. This female child is not fit to serve in Congress. I would really like her district to understand that about her. She is an attention-driven ghoul. She feeds on drama and I highly doubt she is looking out for anyone but herself.
3 comments:
Even without the racism (which it is,) she was initially called out on disrespecting another human, which is precisely what she did. If she had simply apologized and gone on pronouncing correctly, it would have been fine. But she brought in the racism by denying it. (I may have missed a little bit?) but her deny,deny..., well, just any Republican not being able to apologize and make it look like a slipup, but instead escalating the othering, is who they are. They are awful, othering, bigoted people.
I recommend everyone start pronouncing her name "Throatwobbler Mangrove." I'm sure she wouldn't mind.
Is it so hard to say? What is the problem? Most people say kamala, we don't say Kamabla. Because what the fukk? We already know how difficult it is for these magats to let go of that bad time they did. For a few times, I was really scared. I thought we were just going to survive another 4 years of MAGA. We can do that. We have done it before.
Post a Comment