I am an 18 year old college freshman, and I have actually had an experience completely opposite of the one described here. I grew up in a town which was extraordinarily racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse (I believe we were one of the first school districts to willingly integrate). When I came to college, I experienced the culture shock of being in a much more homogeneous environment than I had ever seen. I was shocked when I was told that my college is actually considered diverse. Coming from what I suppose is a rather uncommon perspective, I would argue that the "diversity" people of my age supposedly experience on college campuses is largely illusory, and that the fact that even this small amount of exposure causes so much contention is cause for concern.

I'd hardly call butchering student names a microaggression, or even "racially charged."

My Italian last name gets pronounced incorrectly all the time. Do I rage? No, I accepted around the age of 8 that culturally, I'm in an area where Spanish speaking ethnicities outnumber Italians quite a bit.

Does that mean that professors butchering names are racist? No, they go for the most common answer, and if they are just lost, that means their just ignorant of a certain race's language.

Does the professor mispronouncing the name for "most of the term" mean their doing it out of spite? No, it just means the professor has a shit ton of students.

"Professors butcher their names and ignore them during most of the term (excluding the few days when the discussion shifts to hip-hop or colonization)."
Is this how the author (a teacher himself) treats his students? Is this how the author believes other teachers (but not him) at his college behave towards students? Is this supposed to be true about other universities in the US? If so, where are the data? (The same applies to all the other unsubstantiated claims in this post.)

In 36 years of teaching I always made the effort to pronounce names correctly. The only time I had a real problem was in 1975 when I mistakenly used President L. B. Johnson's pronunciation of Nguyen. After that I felt I had discovered one of the reasons we lost that war. The young lady in question gracefully corrected me and I never made that particular mistake again.

Interesting. From what I've seen many colleges make it completely possible to continue with the homogeneous groups that the students are used to - there is a lot of self segregating. (And I've noticed it's inevitably blamed on the minority groups - "Asians don't help anyone but other Asians in classwork" or "why do Black people always sit all alone in the cafeteria?"... With complete disregard to the fact that the speaker of that question is sitting at a table filled almost entirely with white people.)

Even when students are not self segregated it can be easy to ignore or miss the problems experienced by other groups. My school had a mini scandal that brought to light how minority students are often treated by campus security, and a white girl I know was amazed when many of her close friends stepped up with their own stories - it hadn't occurred to her that this was a problem. It is hard for people with privilege to see it, and perhaps feelings expressed in that post secret offer one reason why college students of color might not want to bring up the issues when they see them.

Obviously Sweden is different form the US, but I still find the connection between class and race striking when it comes to the education, and maybe the same thing applies across the pond too? For me there was quite a clear pattern:

I've lived in or close to an economically depreseed and ethnically diverse area all my life, so in elementary school ther was quite a lot of diverity in both ethnicity and economical means.

switching over to a private school however, the student body became almost all white and with educated parents who could afford the time and money needed as an investment in the school.

I turned to a communal school for high school, and became one of the few kids in my class without first, second or third generation ties to another country, though that might be because of the focus on language. A lot of them were also born to families without higher education.

Now I'm at the university and have changed class every term for the past two years. I'm still in my home town, which has the oldest uni in the country, so it's really big. Thing is, the little diversity that we have comes from exchange students. There are immigrants too, but most can be seen as squarely middle class. The troubled "working class" and immigrant kids that I grew up with are nowhere to be found.

For univeristy towns to have that sort of selection in whom of its inhabitants attends the actutal university is really rather unnerving.

For the first time in my life, I am in the minority. All through high school my school was 90% white, and then bam, I get to college and no single race has a majority. It has been a really eye opening experience. I have become much more aware of my race, and I've been able to deal with a lot of my own racism issues that have surfaced for the first time. It has definitely been a positive experience for me.

One thing that should also be added is that Universities themselves sort students pretty dramatically along economic lines. The economic diversity at the private university I teach at ranges from the upper middle class to the supper rich with a spattering of working class students as exceptions to the rule.

The structural racism and classism of our educational system admits and excludes along these lines while masking it's decisions as 'merit.'

This is a rather thing funny I encountered. I am grader for a class at a large Mid-Western university. One of the questions asked to describe the TV characters' age, gender and ethnic/race background. Sounds easy enough to answer, yet I found a surprising number who omitted to answer the characters' race as if it did not matter to them. Points were lost because of this minor omission.

Weird, my university is ranked one of the most ethnically diverse universities in Australia. Depending on what you're studying, the majority of students come from an ethnic background which is not Anglo-Saxon, but from Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and other ethnicities. People are aware of race, for sure, but I think everyone, including white students, are aware because we're not the majority but one of many races.That said, some races are more represented than others. I imagine it would be easier to be white or Asian, than say, African. There are just less African students to form a collective with.

I had a similar but slightly different experience in college. I grew up on the West Coast around a lot of white and Asian people, but very few black people, and then when I went to college on the East Coast there were still a lot of white people but the Asian population seemed to have been switched out for a black population. There was about the same amount of "total racial diversity" but it was still an adjustment because the racial breakdown had changed a fair amount.

It was sexism more than racism at my school. I think it was something like 93% male when I entered (as a girl, before figuring out I was trans...) and the sudden IMPORTANCE of gender was kind of horrifying to me.

Being queer in a situation like that was similar.

I also once had the excellent experience of hearing a (presumably straight and cis) white boy say in our psychology class that he thought minorities were over-reacting because HE'D never been offended and wished he was offended more often.

I'm not sure exactly what college is like when you don't go to a specialty school... but it was definitely an interesting experience that made me take apart what privileges I DO have and understand it all a bit better.

Sometimes self-segregation occurs because people like to spend time with people with similar backgrounds. I spent time at a technically "diverse" [i.e. percentage wise] prestigious school in the South, and though there were a lot of black kids and a lot of white kids, they didn't tend to interact. Part of this was because the black kids were often pulled from the inner city and the white kids were prep-school Northeasterners or Old Money Southerners. (Similarly, the prep-school Northeasterners and the Old Money Southerners each often stuck with their own group because they had similar backgrounds.) There was not a lot of common ground between the two groups [black and white] to begin with. The issue wasn't race, it was the dichotomization of student "types" (i.e. rich, poor, public school, private, urban, suburban) along racial lines. Which, don't get me wrong, is a problem.

That being said, sometimes this segregation occurs in the NAME of diversity. I had a friend who got invited to a "Diversity Weekend" at a famous state school in California, and the first thing they did when they got there was divide everyone up by ethnicity. Ironic, sort of. I think there were good intentions, but trying desperately to promote cultural diversity (with student groups for each ethnicity, etc) can potentially backfire.

On the other hand, my college has a single "International student house," and it means that international students interact with international students from all different countries, not just their own. And since they're non-exclusive, domestic kids get to spend time at those events, so everyone interacts. It might not be picture perfect, but it might be...

Lastly, does religion have anything to do with some types of segregation? Different ethnicities/nationalities tend to have different religions or different forms of worship, so the especially religious (or especially non-religious) might end up self-segregating for that reason.

Of course, there are comments full of white people moaning that since it doesn't personally affect them, it doesn't exist, and we uppity coloreds should shut up. @@

I don't have anything lengthy to add, but that PostSecret really resonates with me.

I experienced anti-French microaggressions following the post-9/11 fallout between the US and France because of my Québécois heritage in a predominantly German heritage town, along with some ethnic slurs. However, in environments where people didn't know about it, I was relatively safe.

The one time any professor got my last name right (and even offered me a choice between the French and American English pronunciations), I was speechless. The DIFFERENCE between the Anglo-Saxon privileging I struggle against as a person of white Continental ancestry and what the non-white international students in my graduate studies program face is this:

A professor said that she had trouble with "all those foreign names" and couldn't be counted on to remember them (first or last). It is now two months into the semester and she is still calling a guy from China "Shoe" (like a shoe) instead of "Xue" (pron. approx. Shu-way) and can't tell the difference between male and female Indian names. When confronted with my French surname, she didn't make excuses for not pronouncing it properly the first day. She also seemed completely fine with the European international's name.

She has made slightly more troubling remarks, but I feel a bit uncomfortable airing all of the problems I have had with her when no one else seems upset (or embarrassed) by the behavior, and I'm still in a class with her.

This is funny. I am currently dealing with this, this semester. My school isn't very diverse and one of my classes has 2 exchange students from China, 4 Black people, 1 person of Middle Eastern descent, and the rest are White out of around 50 or so people. When my teacher hands out papers, she butchers the names of the minority students but the rest of the White students (except maybe 1 or 2 with non-Anglo Saxon last names) have their names pronounced correctly. What gets me is that every time she asks the guy who is Middle Eastern his name, he tells her, but she ALWAYS calls him the wrong name. Instead of Khaled, she calls him Kalil. It never fails. I am Black and when she saw my name she told me she wanted to call me something stereotypical for my race because they were so similar. (she didn't say THAT, but she told me she wanted to call me _____ because she didn't know my name). I think she has stopped attempting the names of the exchange students and gets them wrong every time. It's kind of frustrating but you get used to it after a while....and I am speaking from life experience.

I'm biracial, I went to a SUPER diverse high school, and am finishing my 5th year at the University of Texas. All of the above are also true of my wife. And as far as we can tell, UT is a wonderful place of very diverse racial mixing, without professors ever mistaking students for criminals, etc. Sure, there are a few stray racially-insensitive rural whites that are looked down upon by everyone else, and yes, there are ethnic organizations that provide communities specifically for people of various groups (not limited to racial groups, of course), but in my experience, UT is a tremendously and happily diverse place to be.

White people on here going on and on about the one time their name was mispronounced are proving the OP's point.

I'm a black Acting major and I'm one of a handful of black students in our 70 student theatre program. I knew this would be the case coming into the program. Every quarter we have to audition for shows and its always amazing how my program says they are promoting color-blind casting, yet they continue to pick shows that feature families, and old-timey shows and musicals like "Picnic" and "Our Town" (where a black person as the lead would be a risk). I've been on stage once, in the basement theatre as bit-part black child with a few lines. Recently, "Little Women the Musical" was produced in the basement and featured an Asian girl as one of the sisters. Other students treated it like a joke when the casting was first announced.

However, next fall, we're doing "Hairspray," and all of the sudden my being black is needed and valued. There's three black supporting roles, and the chorus. Being short and cute, I'm going to go for Little Inez who (surprise) has a short featured spot, or I'll be in the chorus. There is no chance for me to have a leading role here. Yet, I have to listen to my white classmates smack their teeth and say, "Why are you complaining? You're going to get cast." (Meanwhile, the leads are the white characters.)

I've also had classmates who've approached me and said I have to many monologues that mention the fact that I'm black or talk about racism, and I'm bringing too much attention to the fact that I'm black. Really? Because even if I do a monologue where race isn't mentioned, I'm still black.

Little things like that, hearing them over and over, can really wear someone of a racial minority down over time.

For all the white people on here claiming that there is no racism in how names are "butchered" I would venture to say that while your name may be mispronounced, I doubt there are entire videos on youtube devoted to mocking and degrading your name like "60 Ghetto Names" which Black women are constantly subjected to. In fact, if you type "Why do black women" into google, one of the top options to fill it in is "have such ghetto names." Your name, while perhaps seen as difficult, is likely not seen as ridiculous. Being German probably does not subject you to urban myths like "there's a child in my class called L-a pronounced Ledasha because the dash be silent" or "A mother in my class named her child Chlamydia because she thought it was pretty" or any of the other ways Black naming practices are distorted and mocked in order to paint Black women as ignorant. That it is often teachers sharing these alleged stories shows the disrespect inherent to their students - you are likely not in a situation where your name leads your teachers to see you as second class before you even have a chance to prove yourself in the classroom. There are probably not regular threads on message boards about the funniest German names or how "ghetto" you are as a result.

I doubt your resume with your Eastern European name is likely to be rejected (as studies actually proved) or that anyone will send an email around the workplace mocking the "ghetto guy" with the nerve to be applying for a job. Your name is likely not considered in itself to be evidence of your lack of humanity and to make you deserving of discrimination ("why name your kid that if you want them to get a job?")

Nor are there are unlikely entire websites devoted to mocking the name "Laurentia" like there are for Asian names that mean something unfortunate in English (i.e. Chew Shit Fun.)

While your name may not be said correctly, it is unlikely accompanied by commentary like "and what's your last name, KUKUMONGOWONGOBONGO" (as happened to me in one class.) There is a difference between a professor saying something like "I hope I don't get this wrong, but let me try" and then making a mistake - as white people are far more likely to experience - than having your name mocked in front of the whole class, having the syllables drawn out unnecessarily, and having comments made like "Wow, what were your parents thinking there? HAHAHA." Please also consider that the Black names being butchered, such as Kenjus, are often not at all difficult to pronounce, and yet Black students will experience professors pretending like their perfectly phonetic names are somehow completely impossible to understand or speak correctly. This is what people mean when they say their names are "butchered" - not that understandable mistakes are politely made - but that our names are not seen simply as names in themselves that are difficult, but are treated as evidence of us being lesser, stupider, and undeserving, and that our names will be used to let us know as such.

Finally, I would also venture to say that I worked in an extremely homogenous white college where I experienced much racism, and the one Eastern European professor did in fact also experience much discrimination based on her accent, so I'm not sure why people here are unwilling to see that rather than invalidating the experiences of racism due to their own Eastern European or German etc. names being mispronounced, what they are actually experiencing is in fact related to the temporary loss of the camouflage of their white privilege. Because Eastern Europeans, etc. are "white," you experience life in a white privileged society until your name is encountered, at which point you become "foreign." I actually don't doubt that you will experience deliberate mispronunciation, exaggerated inability to "deal" with your name, the pretence of fairly simple names being completely alien and impossible, etc. - all of which are in fact likely manifestations of you being reminded that though white you are not totally acceptably English. Rather than denying racism, these experiences should teach you how white privilege works, and how whiteness is enforced and policed. This actually should further your understanding of racism rather than denying it.

Because you see yourself as white, however, you do not see how you are in fact being "othered" (and in fact much of the idea of whiteness depends upon a belief in the homogeneity of whiteness, and that white itself is any kind of valid marker) and that your name may well be aggressively mispronounced much like Black/Asian etc. names are, because you are unfamiliar otherwise with experiencing how discrimination and dehumanization works and you believe in the myth that whiteness is a monolithic and unconstructed identity. Eastern Europeans are to a certain extent only tenuously (and recently) white, and so deliberate mispronunciation and drawing attention to your unfamiliarity is one way in which you can continue to be othered.