Say My Name: Black Names, Workplace Bias, and the Cost of Being Misnamed

A name is one of the first pieces of information a workplace receives about you.

Before the interview. Before the handshake. Before anybody knows how you work, how you think, what you have built, or what you can contribute.

For Black Americans, names have never existed outside of history.

They can carry family, geography, memory, adaptation, resistance, and sometimes survival.

That history matters when we talk about what happens to Black names in professional spaces.

Because repeated mispronunciation is not always experienced as somebody simply getting a few letters wrong.

For the person whose name is being repeatedly altered, what is being communicated can sound much clearer:

disrespect for culture and identity.

Black American Names Did Not Begin With Modern Naming Trends

Distinctive Black American naming traditions have deep historical roots.

Researchers examining Black names in the United States have documented distinctive naming practices extending into the nineteenth century and the antebellum period. Historical scholarship also shows that names were used within enslaved Black families to communicate kinship and preserve family relationships.

That context matters.

Chattel slavery did not simply exploit Black labor. It created a system in which husbands could be separated from wives, children sold away from parents, siblings sent to different states, and entire family networks fractured according to somebody else’s commercial interests.

Black families therefore developed multiple ways of preserving identity and recognizability under conditions in which separation was an ever-present possibility.

Names were part of that larger cultural system.

After emancipation, formerly enslaved people placed thousands of Information Wanted and Lost Friends advertisements searching for family members slavery had taken from them.

Those notices preserved whatever identifying information families still possessed: names, nicknames, relationships, former locations, ages, enslavers’ names, physical descriptions, family connections, and memories of where someone had last been seen.

The advertisements reveal something important.

Identification was not abstract for Black families living through slavery and its aftermath.

Knowing who someone was—and preserving information that could connect that person back to a family—could have extraordinary significance.

Naming practices existed within that larger environment of kinship preservation.

Black parents named children for fathers, mothers, grandparents, and other relatives. Families developed conventions that connected one generation to another. Masculine names could be feminized for daughters. Pieces of family names could appear in children’s names. Legal names and affectionate family names could coexist.

Not every Black American naming practice has the same origin or meaning.

But collectively, these traditions challenge the idea that culturally distinctive Black names are random inventions without history.

Names can function as family records.

A Name Can Signal Race Before an Employer Meets You

The significance of names does not end with history.

Names can affect contemporary professional opportunities.

One of the most influential studies of racial discrimination in hiring came from economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan.

Researchers sent employers résumés with comparable qualifications while changing the names attached to them. Résumés carrying names perceived as White received approximately 50 percent more callbacks than comparable résumés carrying names perceived as Black.

The applicant had not changed.

The qualifications had not changed.

The employer’s perception of the person attached to the name had.

Later research examining decades of employment field experiments has continued to find substantial racial disparities in employer responses to Black and White applicants.

That gives names an unusual position in professional life.

A name can communicate racial information before an applicant ever enters a workplace.

And once the employee gets inside, that same name can become the subject of a different kind of negotiation.

The Workplace Does Not Become Neutral After the Résumé

A Black professional can spend the application process being evaluated through a racialized name and then arrive at work only to discover that coworkers consider learning that name burdensome.

Names are shortened without permission.

Anglicized.

Misspelled.

Avoided.

Replaced with something considered easier.

Or repeatedly pronounced incorrectly even after the person has provided the correct pronunciation.

It is important to distinguish an unfamiliarity error from chronic behavior.

Everybody encounters names they have never heard before.

Everybody will occasionally pronounce one incorrectly.

That is normal.

The relevant question is what happens after the correction.

There is a meaningful difference between:

“I haven’t encountered your name before. Can you teach me how to pronounce it?”

and

“You have corrected me repeatedly, but learning your name remains optional to me.”

The first communicates unfamiliarity.

The second can communicate hierarchy.

Chronic Mispronunciation Can Function as a Microaggression

Researchers studying professional environments have increasingly examined name mispronunciation as an inclusion issue.

The literature describes repeated mispronunciation, alteration, avoidance, and ridicule of names as behaviors capable of communicating marginalization or exclusion.

Some scholars characterize chronic name mispronunciation as a potential racial or cultural microaggression, particularly when the person has already provided the correct pronunciation.

Research in medical education and other professional environments has documented people describing their names as being shortened, changed, avoided, or treated as inherently difficult by colleagues and authority figures.

The cumulative message can become:

Your identity requires more effort than I am willing to expend.

That is why the seemingly small act of correcting a name can carry disproportionate significance.

“Your Name Is Difficult” Is Not an Objective Measurement

Descriptions of culturally unfamiliar names as “hard” or “difficult” often sound like neutral linguistic observations.

They are not always neutral.

Difficulty is partly produced by exposure.

People become fluent in the sound and spelling conventions they encounter repeatedly.

English speakers routinely learn European-origin names containing silent letters, unusual consonant combinations, irregular vowels, and pronunciations that cannot be reliably predicted from spelling.

Those names stop appearing complicated because they become familiar.

Familiarity trains fluency.

Consequently, calling one set of names naturally easy and another naturally difficult can conceal the cultural standard being used to make that judgment.

This does not mean unfamiliar pronunciations never require practice.

They do.

The professional expectation simply should not be perfection at first sight.

The expectation should be effort after correction.

There Is Labor in Having to Correct People Repeatedly

Name mispronunciation also creates a decision for the person being misnamed.

Should I correct my supervisor?

Should I correct them again?

Do I interrupt the meeting?

Do I let it go?

Will correcting someone in authority make me appear confrontational?

Should I shorten my name because I genuinely prefer the shorter version—or because everyone around me has made using my full name exhausting?

These calculations represent a form of identity management.

Research specifically quantifying the cognitive burden of correcting one’s name remains developing, so that burden should not be overstated as a discrete clinical phenomenon.

But it exists within a much larger research literature on racial microaggressions and psychological stress.

A meta-analysis encompassing 72 independent samples and more than 18,000 participants found significant associations between microaggressions and adjustment outcomes, including stress, negative affect, and internalizing symptoms.

Workplace research likewise connects racial discrimination and microaggressions with poorer psychological and organizational outcomes.

That does not mean every mistaken pronunciation produces psychological injury.

It means repeated identity-based interactions do not necessarily remain psychologically insignificant simply because each individual incident appears small.

A Chosen Nickname and Being Renamed Are Not the Same Thing

People use different names in different contexts.

Someone may use a legal name professionally and a nickname socially.

They may use initials.

They may choose a shortened version.

They may use an entirely different name among friends.

None of those choices gives somebody else permission to invent another option.

The distinction is agency.

When someone says, “This is what I go by,” they have defined how they wish to be addressed in that relationship.

Choosing a professional shorthand is not equivalent to a colleague deciding that someone’s actual name is inconvenient.

One is self-definition.

The other is renaming.

That distinction becomes particularly important in hierarchical environments involving employers, supervisors, educators, physicians, administrators, or other people with institutional power.

Black Names Do Not Need to Explain Themselves

Culturally distinctive names are also frequently subjected to another question:

What does it mean?

Sometimes the question reflects genuine curiosity.

But it can also reveal an assumption that some names are automatically legitimate while others require an origin story.

Not every name translates into a single dictionary definition.

Some describe lineage.

Some combine family names.

Some develop regionally.

Some are inherited.

Some change phonetically over generations.

Some were created by people who simply loved the sound.

Meaning can be cultural without being lexical.

Black American names therefore do not need to become linguistically understandable within another cultural tradition before they deserve respect.

Professional Respect Is Not Complicated

No reasonable workplace standard requires every employee to correctly pronounce every unfamiliar name the first time they encounter it.

A more realistic standard is simple:

Ask how the name is pronounced. Listen to the answer. Practice it. Write the pronunciation down if necessary. Correct yourself when you make a mistake. Use a shortened form only when the person has authorized it. Treat corrections as information rather than confrontation.

Organizations can support the same norm structurally.

Employee directories can include pronunciation fields. Onboarding can distinguish legal, chosen, and professional names. Managers can model correcting themselves without turning mistakes into jokes. Meeting organizers can ask speakers how they wish to be introduced.

These are small operational choices.

What they communicate is considerably larger:

You do not have to become culturally familiar before you become professionally worthy of being addressed correctly.

Because It Was Never Just a Few Letters

For Black Americans, naming exists inside a much longer story.

A story in which families endured forced separation.

A story in which people preserved names, relationships, physical identifiers, locations, and memories in hopes that kinship could survive even when families were torn apart.

A story in which names continued carrying fathers, mothers, grandparents, and family memory across generations.

And now a story in which research shows that names can influence how Black applicants are evaluated professionally—and how people experience inclusion after they enter those professional environments.

So when someone repeatedly misspells, renames, or mispronounces a Black person’s name after being corrected, the person hearing it may not hear an insignificant phonetic mistake.

They may hear exactly what is being communicated:

disrespect for their culture and identity.

Once someone tells you how to say their name, respecting it is one of the simplest professional decisions available to you.

References

• Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American Economic Review, 94(4), 991–1013. https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828042002561
• Cook, L. D., Logan, T. D., & Parman, J. M. (2022). The antebellum roots of distinctively Black names. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History. https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2021.1893877
• Lui, P. P., & Quezada, L. (2019). Associations between microaggression and adjustment outcomes: A meta-analytic and narrative review. Psychological Bulletin, 145(1), 45–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000172
• Álvarez López, L. (2015). Who named slaves and their children? Names and naming practices among enslaved Africans brought to the Americas and their descendants with focus on Brazil. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 27(2), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2014.992396
• Dali, M. Y., et al. (2022). Say my name: Understanding the power of names, correct pronunciation, and personal narratives. MedEdPORTAL, 18, 11284. https://doi.org/10.15766/mep_2374-8265.11284
• Salari, N., Fattah, A., & Hosseinian-Far, A. (2024). Prevalence of workplace microaggressions and racial discrimination: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Safety and Health at Work, 15(3), 245–254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shaw.2024.05.002