She Says Sotomayor... and So Should We!
I spent two years as an immigration columnist and blogger at the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. On many occasions, I dealt with the language surrounding America’s Latino population, both immigrants and citizens. The term “illegal immigrant” is preferable to “undocumented worker,” I argued, since some people who are here unlawfully aren’t actually workers. But I found it it bad form to simply calling people “illegals,” a shorthand that is dehumanizing — it robs folks of their noun, as though their identity is captured solely by a single adjective that describes their legal status. “Anchor baby” always bothered me too. Having spoken to countless illegal immigrants, I’ve never met one who conceived a child as a means of anchoring themselves in this country — imagine being that poor, and going through the sacrifice of raising a kid on the speculative prospect that many years later they might help you gain legal status through family unification provisions. (Alternatively, imagine being a kid who people referred to as though your identity in life was determined by the intentions of your parents.)
The creepy language used to describe Judge Sotomayor brought back all these memories. Hilzoy flags a couple of examples. In a similar vein, Mark Krikorian is getting flak for this post:
Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference)… and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.
….This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
Mark is quite wrong, but before I explain why I’d like to defend him from his most virulent critics. If you follow the immigration debate, you’ll find a lot of ugly rhetoric and thinly veiled racism, and you’ll also find some folks who manage over many years to navigate a fraught subject without engaging in hateful nonsense or bigoted ideas. Those folks are a welcome respite from the ugliness, and having read him for many years, I’ve always found Mr. Krikorian to be that kind of immigration commentator.
So why do I find the comments quoted above so mistaken? For one thing, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about a women born in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents as “a newcomer.” For another, it is common practice to defer to the pronunciations used by most anyone of European ancestry. Let’s imagine for the sake of argument, however, that Judge Sotomayor were an immigrant, and that Mark was asserting that even deferring to pronunciations used by European newcomers is wrongheaded. (There were, after all, a lot of European immigrants to changed their names as part of the assimilation process.) Nevertheless, I think the standard Mark sets for when newcomers ought to adapt is flawed.
My view is that America ought to demand the patriotic assimilation of its immigrants and their children, but that “assimilation” ought to mean no more than subscribing to the foundational ideals that ground our nation. To put things more specifically, I think that newcomers should buy into the idea that everyone possesses an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that the Constitution sets forth a political system that we all accept as legitimate, that an effort is made to learn English insofar as it’s required to participate in our democracy, and that you’ll protect and defend these few basic propositions if they’re attacked by outsiders who would seek to overturn them.
So long as an immigrant buys into those ideals, he is as American as any of us, no matter the pronunciation of his name, his religion, the language he speaks in line behind me at the supermarket, or whether his language cohort is sufficiently big that I’m forced to press one for English, which I don’t mind doing.
On a somewhat related note, having spent my college years appalled by the way that left-leaning campus groups sought every pretext possible to declare folks guilty of latent racism, and did their best to circumscribe discourse within the confines of a particularly pernicious kind of political correctness, I am dismayed to see that several prominent figures on the right are now calling Judge Sotomayor a racist. Whether she merits confirmation I haven’t any idea, but she certainly deserves the benefit of that doubt.
I can’t follow you where you’re going with this, Conor. We are a creedal nation in the sense that the legitimacy of our system of government depends on a philosophical assertion to a greater degree than many nations, and in the sense that the nation grew up under that system of government as much or more than the other way around – but we do not have a creedal test for citizenship. If I believe that the idea of an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a beautiful lie, am I un-American? If I were not born a citizen, should I be denied citizenship?
Rather than being part of a creed we must endorse as Americans, I’d call the Declaration part of a heritage we must embrace. We must say: well, even if those words are, in some sense, not really true, they are our distinct untruth; they define us whether they are true or not, much as a Jewish unbeliever can be distinguished from a Catholic unbeliever.
Or, to put it another way:
“In this chapel are ancestors – you cannot deny that. When I purchased the estate, I acquired the chapel and its contents. I don’t know whose ancestors they were – but I know whose ancestors they are. And I shudder to think that their descendent by purchase (if I may so style myself) may have brought disgrace upon what I have no doubt was an unblemished escutcheon.”
We are a nation of General Stanleys.
— Noah Millman · May 28, 05:49 PM · #
I’m having trouble imagining the two pronunciations of Sotomayor’s name. Generally, don’t we resolve it like most language issues – she can pronounce it however she wants, and the rest of us will pronounce it as best we can, and over time, we’ll come to some happy medium. (The main rule for how we pronounce things like Rome, Paris and Houston Street seems to be we do what we do, after all).
As to calling Sotomayor a racist, (1) it’s despicable, but (2) it’s kind of an act of evil genius — it gets a jump on the argument that people who oppose Sotomayor are themselves racists, and it may force the media to navel-gaze on the question of what Sotomayor’s inclusiveness/diversity/empathy stuff means, which is probably bad for her and good for her opponents. I agree that it’s a shame to take the discourse down to the lowest common denominator, and it’s not fair to her, but it’s probably unavoidable.
— J Mann · May 28, 05:50 PM · #
I will ponder this, Noah.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 28, 06:04 PM · #
Nonsense, Conor. As a red-blooded American, I am henceforth referring to PEG as “PAS-kel” and certain Vietnamese friends as “Na-GOO-yen.”
— Matt Frost · May 28, 06:05 PM · #
Well sheesh, why don’t all those people with names ending in -ian to just drop it. Anyone with a name ending in -ian is obviously more loyal to Armenia than America.
— symeon · May 28, 06:08 PM · #
“For another, it is common practice to defer to the pronunciations used by most anyone of European ancestry.”
Out of curiosity, do you pronounce your name “free-ders-dorf” or “fry-ders-dorf”? If the latter, do you correct people who anglicize it?
— gabriel Rossman · May 28, 07:21 PM · #
Sorry, Conor, but I find what Krikorian said there indefensibly hateful and stupid and I know lots of people, including occasionally myself, who’ve paid costs for atittudes like his (side note: I really do respect “Bobby” Jindal rather less because he does not, as an adult, go by “Piyush.”) What an ass Krikorian is.
Noah’s idea is interesting in lots of ways. One reason I like it is that I generally feel that I, a child of immigrants, still bear the burden to try to “set right,” say, America’s history of slavery, segregation and discrimination, and I accept as necessary that (say) affirmative action will in some cases discriminate against me. I’ve heard others use this as an argument against affirmative action (as it was used in California, where East Asians were being shut out). But I have appealed to something like Noah’s idea: we all inherit the history.
— Sanjay · May 28, 07:23 PM · #
As an American who has been exposed over the years to Spanish words, I naturally pronounce her name so-toe-my-OR, which is pretty close. But, as an American who hasn’t actually learned Spanish or spent years practicing the intonations, I don’t, for example, roll the final R.
That strikes me as perfectly reasonable.
— James Joyner · May 28, 07:57 PM · #
Sanjay,
I agree that what Mark said is wrong, but I have a strong presumption that he isn’t being hateful due to a long history of reading his stuff, and finding no hatefulness. But we can at least agree that his position on this is quite mistaken.
James,
It strikes me as perfectly reasonable that people do their best to pronounce names as their holder prefers, but that lots of mistakes are tolerated, because hey, who has spent a lot of time practicing the intonations of various languages?
Gabriel,
I pronounce it free-ders-dorf, and I don’t even correct people when they call me Colin, perhaps because I’m so bad at remembering names that I often don’t even get that close.
Noah,
You wrote, “If I believe that the idea of an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a beautiful lie, am I un-American? If I were not born a citizen, should I be denied citizenship?”
No. Upon reflection, it isn’t belief in the inalienability of it all that I care about so much as the implicit oath to value life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Put another way, if a would be immigrant said that once afforded citizenship he’d try his best to establish a caste system in the United States, and that members of the lowest cast would no longer be able to choose their profession, I’d deny that guy’s application.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 28, 08:54 PM · #
I think it’s funny that I had no idea how to pronounce “Scalia” or “Souter” until I heard them pronounced by a superior, but I am happy to defer to the pronunciation dictated by the language from which they come. Like I used to say in my head when reading my entry-level con law textbook, does Krikorian say “SCALE-ee-uh” or “SOW-ter”? If so, he should change.
— Brad · May 28, 09:27 PM · #
You have to admit her name is a lot of fun to say. It works well with various accents.
— Joules · May 28, 10:22 PM · #
I think you’re on the money here. Good post.
— nicholas · May 28, 11:53 PM · #
Good post. Reminds me that Reagan was regularly referred to as “ree-gan” in the ’50’s & ’60’s because that is how that name was usually pronounced. Once Reagan made his personal preference widely known, only those intent on showing him disrespect persisted in referring to him as “ree-gan.”
— Randy · May 29, 01:01 AM · #
Re: the above comment on “freedersdorf” vs “FRYEdersdorf”:
I don’t think that insisting on “SotomaYOR” implies that we should necessarily defer to Old World pronunciations all the time. One of the great rights of this country is the ability to determine one’s own self-identity – whether or not that hews to traditional pronunciation. It’s your name. You get to pick how much you want it to assimilate and how that fits in with your vision of America.
Mike Birbiglia (birBIGleea) famously said, “I’m Italian… Sometimes people come up to me and they’ll be like, ‘In Italy, it’s pronounced ‘Bir-Bee-Lya.’ And I’m like, ‘In America, you’re annoying.’” That’s his prerogative. It’s his damn name. And if Sonia Sotomayor wants us to put the emphasis on the last syllable, well, that appears to be a manifestation of her right to self-expression and free speech, which is very American. Besides, I’ve known kids with absolutely ridiculous names – Dijion (like the mustard) comes to mind – and I don’t refuse to call them that because I think they’re odd. It’s no different for someone whose unusual name happens to come from another country (or, in this case, a US territory).
Also, are you familiar with <A HREF=“http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/09/betty-brown-texas-republi_n_185108.html”>Betty Brown</A>?
— Hillary · May 29, 02:24 AM · #
Obviously the solution would be for her to pick a clear, simple English name. I suggest Featherstonehaugh (which is pronounced “Fanshaw,” of course).
— Russ · May 29, 06:03 AM · #
hillary,
i was the one who asked whether mr. freidersdorf uses the german or english pronunciation of his name and i didn’t mean anything different from what you said, i was mostly getting at the empirical point that over time many people will voluntarily bring their surnames’ pronunciation (and even spelling) into conformity to the language of their host country and will choose first names from the host country’s stock for their children. my own normative opinion is that people should be free to choose whether to anglicize or preserve and others should show good faith in trying to honor these wishes however people who have (by local standards) unusual names should likewise be graceful about mistakes. this all strikes me as pre-political intuitive manners rather than any kind of cognitive ideological point of principle. fwiw, as a californian i have no trouble with spanish pronunciation.
again as an empirical matter, there’s a big difference between (for lack of a better term) foreign names which are ethnic markers but not class markers and what can charitably be described as creative names which are strong class markers.
— gabriel Rossman · May 30, 01:12 AM · #
I find it vaguely amusing in a way that is sort of meta to the OP topic that Gabriel seems to think Conor’s surname is Freidersdorf (which would indeed probably be anglicized as Free- or Fray-), when at the top of the page it is spelled Friedersdorf, eliminating the whole sub-issue.
— bayesian · May 30, 06:02 AM · #