More than 500 school districts around the country have taken a pledge to pronounce each and every student’s name correctly because a host of leftist education groups has decided that mispronouncing students’ names amounts to a “microaggression.”
The “microaggression” of failing to say a student’s name correctly adds to America’s lengthy and ever-growing list of “microaggressions” — everyday words and actions that radical leftists have decided to be angry or frustrated about.
The pledge to pronounce every kid’s name correctly 100 percent of the time appears to have originated with a national campaign launched last year by the National Association for Bilingual Education and the taxpayer-funded school district in Santa Clara, California, according to the Media Research Center.
The campaign, called “My Name, My Identity: A Declaration of Self,” suggests that teachers cause “anxiety and resentment” when they mispronounce students’ names.
A pledge offered by the campaign offers teachers the chance to state their names and then promise to “show respect to others’ names and identities in schools by pronouncing students’ names correctly” — and also to “share” name stories “on social media” and “be proud of who I am and celebrate our differences.”
Earlier this month, Rita Kohli, an education professor at the University of California, Riverside pontificated that the “microaggression” of mispronouncing a student’s name can actively thwart the learning process.
“Names have incredible significance to families, with so much thought, meaning and culture woven into them,” Kohli told NEA Today, the propaganda broadsheet of America’s largest teachers union. (RELATED: ‘ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS’ SIGN Shows Up At NEA-Funded Protest)
“When the child enter school and teachers — consciously or not — mispronounce, disregard or change the name, they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the students as well,” Kohli added.
On Kohli’s online résumé, the words “race,” racial,” “racially,” “multiracial,” “interracial” and “racialization” appear a combined 60 or so times.
A 2014 posting at a website called “Cult of Pedagogy” declares that mispronouncing names is actually “mutilating someone’s name” and “a tiny act of bigotry.”
“Although most of your students may not know the word microaggression, they’re probably familiar with that vague feeling of marginalization, the message that everyone else is ‘normal,’ and they are not,” the author of the screed, Jennifer Gonzalez, proclaims.
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