I have enough trouble with the face in the mirror in the morning; remembering someone else’s face is a whole new level.
Just about everyone with whom I’ve talked about microaggressions points out that part of what that means is that in many situations, each individual time, it could easily be a simple mistake and that there was no aggression or rudeness intended, but rather that it’s the repeat nature of the thing – in the example in the OP, it’s not just one professor in one class, but a lot of professors in a lot of classes over the course of a person’s academic career. The disheartening part is that it’s cumulative. Death by a thousand paper cuts. And to add to that, the frustration with trying to describe the ongoing effect, but one’s listeners want to address each incident in isolation.
My boss is terrible with names, TERRIBLE. He tends to mix up names of colleagues if the names have similar or related sounds – like Christine and Kirstin, or Judy and Julie. Or with surnames, Robertson and Robinson, or McCarthy and McCartney. It will be completely random, if you are one of these people, which name you will get at any given time, and these people joke that at this point, they’re ready to answer to either. Yet, the other pair of coworkers whose names he switches are two black woman, Phyllis and Imani. I’m not a linguist, but I’m pretty sure Phyllis and Imani is not a sound differentiation issue.
To reiterate, in my experience the opposite is true – a professor of a large class is MORE likely to know the names of the few students of color than of anyone else. Which is still mildly “racist” as the word is being used in this thread.
I get called by my mother’s name, and she by mine.
People have confused me with any other brown haired, brown-eyed white woman I worked or went to class with, so long as we were within 15 years, 15 cm and 15 kg of each other. I almost got fired once because The Other Lab Girl who’d been hired as the same time as me had a bad case of the Don Wannas; thankfully the factory manager had a moment of inspiration and started asking people who were they complaining about, the tall one or the short one?
I’m always correcting my complicated, unusual lastname - no, it’s not the more usual, simpler, similar one. But other women with the similar one who happen to be in my neighborhood have found themselves correcting in the opposite direction.
That boss I had who refused to learn the name of any woman he worked with? That was an asshole. People who get confused? That’s confusion happens. I’ve learned to point out the differences between me and whomever I’m being confused with.
I think maybe we should consider dropping official names and try what deaf people do. Using “name signs”.
If your not familiar with name signs well lots of things in sign language are done with shortcuts and they do the same with names. So they dont spell out say “Elizabeth”, “Micheal”, or Phillip" each time they refer to each other. They use is a “name sign”. A name sign is a sign they use to identify people. It is usually the first letter of the name combined with some personality trait or characteristic. However other times they give just a sign for say “Nose” or “Jump”. A person with a certain scar might be associated with that. Often, especially when they become close it can be quite funny. One woman said in high school hers was “Big boobs”. When Wayne Gretsky played for Edmonton his sign was “99” but on the arm.
Thing is as a non-deaf person you cannot pick your name. They give it to you and if you’ve been working around them for a while, trust me you have one. You know you’ve gained their trust when they give you theirs and you find out what yours is. Yes, it could be the sign for “bald” or “angry”.
Yes, they are often racial which can cause problems but they usually try and be sensitive to that.
They take these name signs quite seriously and often for life and dont like changing them. I read how one kids name sign looked like pointing a gun and his hearing school demanded they change it which upset the parents.
Which brings me back to my original point. Once you learn peoples name signs, its interesting because often that name sign is a better indicator of them because say someones name sign is “Giggles”, that is often a better way of remembering them by their name say “Diane”. Especially when you work with 3 other Dianes but only one Diane makes people laugh.
So maybe we should just assign nicknames to people? They could be like say Diane in management could be a D with the sign for boss. A guy who wears suspenders alot could be just the sign for suspenders. Jill with big hair could be J pointing to the head.
This, When I was married my ex had five children, I’ve sat there one more than one occasion and watched her do exactly this. One time I watched her go through all five names before she eventually got the right name for the kid she was trying to address. It was quite comical!
Also, I do this with my pets.
This appears to be the crux of the matter. Right now, acknowledgement of this phenomenon as a Thing, and also the causes behind it, is what is going through change. Disenfranchised groups are at a point where they have a greater level of traction establishing the existence of this more-then-mistake microaggression (ugh - the word is charged).
What is interesting is how the change itself drives tension. If "White Males"™ dominated the Main Media Gaze™ - representing say (TOTALLY MADE UP AND HYPOTHETICAL), 90% of the views shared and framed. If this (illustrative) % has decreased to say 70% given all of the new channels available on the internet for groups to find their voices and assert them - well then the Dominant voice is going to see a HUGE decrease and feel that loss, even if they support the balancing out; a disenfranchised voice will acknowledge progress, but see a long way to go. And each of us, if we stop and consider it, is a lumpy collection of POVs that reside on both sides.
So this issue of mistaking names is very subtle and charged. From the Main groups, there is a huge feeling of “what…THIS too?!”, while the disenfranchised groups are more like “you mean…this everyday bullshit may actually be acknowledged?”
Complex. Humans don’t always do complex so well.
I know one mother of 4 who sometimes goes “Umm…you, stop that”.
I was thinking about this today as I walked on the workroom floor. Much of our staff is black and in their culture they always acknowledge each other whereas when I walk thru I tend to avoid eye contact (unless I know someone) and just walk straight ahead.
I was thinking as I did this, they might just take this as an arrogant or even racist attitude.
This could be one of those “microagressions”.
It would be one if they only see you doing this with black people.
But otherwise, probably not. They may think you’re stand-offish and aloof, but they have probably already figured out that that’s just how you are.
Yeah, that could happen because most of the workers I know by name are white.
I’ve decided to try and be more friendly.
I don’t know whether to proclaim “progress!” or ask the Mods to shut down the thread before this goes South 
I wonder, sometimes, how people can tell if they are being confused for another person rather than it being simply the names that are confused. I say this because there is one specific person at my job who I am often “confused” with ( and have been for 20 years by multiple people) But in this case , it’s very obvious that we are not being confused as people and it’s also very obvious that it’s not due to race.We have very different jobs and no one looks at her and asks her to do things that are part of my job, nor do they look at me and ask me to do things that are part of her job. However, although I am Caucasian and she is black, I am a bit overweight and she is thin, and she is 20 years younger than me, we get called by each other’s name all the time. In person and in email. By people of every ethnicity. Her name is “Dorian”, so it’s easy to see why it happens in this particular instance, but that doesn’t mean the same “confusion of names but not people” can’t happen without that similarity - although my mother often calls me by one of my sister’s names, she doesn’t ask me about their husbands or kids.
But that’s still the same issue. It reveals that you’re lumping those names together for some reason. “My kids”; “Dor__n names”; “Black people”. The problem is not getting the name wrong, or that you can’t tell the people apart. It’s that it reveals a person’s mental cataloging system, and there’s something unsettling about constantly being reminded that when people think about you, your race is really high on their list of things that define you.
It’s like revealing that you use the search term “black people” when your brain goes looking for that name. Why do we even have that as a search term? I do it to, and I hate it.
If there’s other reasons to get the two confused–two people genuinely look a lot alike, the names are similar, the role is similar, there’s some plausible deniability that the search term assigned to those names is not “black people”. But sometimes it seems pretty undeniable.
Right.
When my sister and I were still attached at the hip, people used to get our names confused all the time. It was annoying sometimes, but still understandable. Not only do we physically resemble each other, but our names are very similar.
But when someone confuses me for the black chick that looks nothing like me, whose name is nothing like mine, who doesn’t hang out around me that often, then of course it’s logical to conclude we’ve being lumped together by race. If people confused me for a white or Asian chick with the same frequency, then maybe it wouldn’t be such a clear-cut example. But this never happens.
I have two white male coworkers who can trip me up with their names. But it has nothing to do with their race. One’s first name is Stewart and the other’s last name is Stewart. And they are best friends, practically attached at the hip. If someone tried to use my occasional misnaming of the two as an example of me lumping white guys together, I think I’d have a pretty good defense.
The problem from my point of view is that “plausible” is not the same as “obvious” and I’m not so sure most people would accept a plausible but not obvious defense.
As far as I can tell, it’s not an issue when all three people are the same race and it’s not an issue when the two people being confused are different races. What about when it doesn’t appear to be two people being confused for each other ? Let’s say I have a coworker named Alan who is a different race than me. And sometimes I mistakenly call him “Mark” because he looks a lot like my cousin’s husband or has a similar personality to guy in my bowling league.But we don’t work with anyone named Mark. I assume that’s not going to be seen as based on race. And if we do work with someone named Mark who is a different race than Alan , that’s not going to be seen as racial.
But I get the impression that just as soon as there’s an Alan and a Mark who are the same race, it’s going to be seen as racial - even if it’s only one direction and I never, ever mistakenly call Mark “Alan”. Most people are not going to confront me and use this as an example of my “lumping X people together”. They will just think whatever they think and never mention it to me. But of those who do confront me, how many are going to believe and accept that the reason is that Alan resembles a Mark I know outside of the workplace? Even if I proactively say, " I’m sorry, you look a lot like my cousin’s husband" , I’m not so sure it will be believed or accepted.
It’s annoying as hell and frequently confusing to regularly be called by someone else’s name. But that’s true whether race is involved or not.
I’m sure no one would have a problem remembering a 10 foot pole, regardless of how many Slavic people you worked with 
I’m really trying to understand the point you’re making, but I’m failing.
Of course when someone confuses me for my coworker, the cause could be any number of reasons besides race.
But when multiple people make the same mistake, then it’s likely not because of all the hypothetical reasons we can possibly conceive of. What is the likelihood that multiple people know another person by my coworkers’ name, a person who I just happen to physically resemble? Not very high. It is much more likely that they are lumping us together because of race.
When you’re a racial minority, you quickly realize that the dominant group (whites) really do tend to think we all look the same at first blush. I learned this right away in college. White classmates would get me confused with black classmates who didn’t look anything like me (not even in skin tone), but when I’d clear up the confusion, it was always, “OMG! You guys look just alike!!!” So I suspect my coworkers think I look like Black Chick Coworker, or at least a whole lot more than I think we do. And I’m also pretty sure that they would use this as an explanation for why they get our names confused rather than racial classification. But that wouldn’t mean they still aren’t being "racial. The only reason they think we look alike is because we’re wearing the same political label.
It’s a different kind of annoyance. If someone confuses me for someone with a similar name, that’s understandable–a mistake anyone could make. But if someone repeatedly confuses me for a person who doesn’t look anything like me, and yet the excuse that’s given is “YOU GUYS LOOK JUST ALIKE!”, well, that’s kind of eye-rolly. Maybe that person is being sincere when they say that, but it’s still a reminder that your “youness” isn’t being seen.
The issue is not whether or not you, personally, can immunize yourself from ever coming across as racial/racist in your thinking. You probably can’t. I can’t. Probably I’ve given any number of people the impression that I might be terribly racist any number of ways. I think most people reserve judgment about people they know well, and build a more complete picture based on overarching patterns of behavior.
I think the more important issue is recognizing that when a minority has a negative emotional reaction for being confused with another member of the same race yet again, that’s a pretty normal reaction, and there’s good reason to believe that such behavior might be rooted in some racial thinking. We get defensive and have, I think, unrealistic expectations about the degree to which minorities should grant individuals in the majority the benefit of the doubt, and to dismiss their frustration and feelings of being labeled as other as “whining”, being “butthurt”, “reverse racism”. Basically, we think they should go far, far out of their way to control their emotional reaction so that we don’t ever have to feel bad that someone might have thought the worst of us.
I’m not saying you are doing this, but I know I do if I don’t watch my own defensiveness, and this thread has been full of clear examples of what I am talking about.
The most memorable time I remember someone calling me my coworker’s name happened about a year ago.
One of the regional directors came to the office (I work in headquarters). Her name is Amy. Regional directors are usually treated with much deference and respect, so when they speak to you in a friendly way, it’s kind of a big deal. And Amy is the kind of person you want to like you. Well, on the day she stopped by, I just happened to be chit-chatting with the secretary and someone else. Amy said hello to everyone and then turned to me and gave me a personal hello, except addressing me by my coworker’s name.
I was so pleased that she extended a friendly hello to me that I didn’t want to ruin the moment by correcting her. So the secretary did it for me. And the look on Amy’s face said it all. She was so embarrassed! And I felt embarrassed that I was involved in her embarrassment, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.
So I assured her that I was used to people calling me by the wrong name, and that it doesn’t bother me none. But she kept apologizing, which just made it more awkward. Poor Amy. I hope she’s not reluctant to say hi the next time she sees me.