Mark Yonkman is the founder of the newly created Super PAC Reclaim the Rural Vote and a rural vote messaging expert. Mark’s background straddles not only the rural and urban worlds but the black/white, gay/straight, and farm/professional worlds as well. Read more of his Rural Whisperer columns here.
My adopted daughter lives in the same world as Kamala Harris – she is mixed race, and Americans struggle to pronounce her first name. She handles all of this the same way as the Vice President. Her birth mother is British (and Viking) and Austrian, and her birth father is Black. Like Kamala, she doesn’t go around referring to herself as a Black woman, but she certainly could. If someone asks her (people often guess she is Filipino), she has fun with it, picks one or two of her countries of origin, and might say, “Well, my mother was Viking, and my father was Malian and Gabonese.” It results in fun conversation.
Kamala does the same. She says her mother is Eastern Indian, and her father is Jamaican. This is clear and precise. I have never heard her call herself a Black woman. It is the press and her allies that call her a Black woman or an Indian woman. Even in JD Vance’s attack, he referred to the Associated Press calling her Black. So what? That is the press, not her.
My daughter experiences the same thing. Her Black allies also refer to her as a Black woman and sometimes pressure her to lean more into being Black. There is indeed a powerful lobby out there focused on Black identity. She would often say to me, “Can’t I just be me? Why do I have to say anything?”
I also navigated this tension during my career. I started out at a law firm with a friend of mine. We were both gay, and it was not a particularly friendly time to be gay in a law firm. I left the firm and eventually became General Counsel of a Fortune 500 company. When I was first promoted to Senior Vice President, I was both the youngest person to be promoted to that position and also the first openly gay person. My friend stayed at the law firm and eventually was made managing partner of a regional office. He was both the first environmental lawyer to be managing partner as well as the first openly gay person to be made managing partner.
In my case, the company announced that I was the youngest person to make Senior Vice President and didn’t mention being gay, which was irrelevant to me and my promotion. In my friend’s case, the law firm announced that he was the first gay person to become managing partner and didn’t mention his environmental background, despite his desire for exactly the opposite.
You can guess who had the better experience. In my case, everyone focused on what my accomplishments were and why that warranted being promoted at a young age. It was a very validating experience. In my friend’s case, people focused on the fact that he was gay. Not everyone knew that. Not what he wanted. And it didn’t validate him as a skilled and experienced lawyer.
My daughter and I cringe every time one of Kamala’s allies refers to her as being Black, Indian, or a woman. It degrades her as a person. And those glass ceilings were broken a long time ago. Does anyone remember Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel or Barack Obama?
The hard “a” and the soft “a”
My daughter also has the same issue as Kamala with her first name. While her name is Andrea, she pronounces it the Italian way as “On-drea” (after her Italian godmother) rather than the American “An-drea.” Only a minority of people get the correct pronunciation on the first try even after hearing how she pronounces it. The people who do get the pronunciation on the first try typically are either highly intelligent or speak more than one language.
Others get it after a couple of tries. And there are some who simply cannot pronounce it “On-drea.” My daughter only corrects people once. Otherwise, it comes off as making fun of their accent.
As others have pointed out, it is very difficult for many Americans to switch from a soft “a” to a hard “a” when a person’s name has both pronunciations in it. My daughter and Kamala both do. Kamala’s last name is Harris. Which has a hard “a”. My daughter’s last name is Yonkman, which also has a hard “a.” It is much easier to say An-drea Yonk-Man than it is to say On-drea Yonk-Man.
The same goes for Dana Bash. I don’t get CNN in rural America and had never heard her name. I assumed it was Day-nuh Bash. But she pronounces it Dan-uh. Soft “a” and hard “a” in the same name. I was amused when Kamala Harris first mispronounced it with two hard “a’s” during her CNN interview.
Like my daughter, Kamala doesn’t go around correcting people. Her allies shouldn’t either. Obviously, Trump and others are deliberately mispronouncing her name. Which is just mean. So lean into it and don’t try to teach them. It would be much more effective to simply say, “Donald Trump, who is mono-lingual, struggles to correctly pronounce people’s names. Bless his heart.”
Changing speech patterns depending on environment or location
Many of us who live in different regions and cultures change many of our speech patterns depending on the audience. It is part of being worldly and flexible. At one point, I spent most of my time in Canada, and a lot of Canadian English snuck into my language. When in the United States, I would deliberately try to erase certain words and change my pronunciation back to American English. Similarly, my language changes from the East Coast to the Midwest. It also changes if I am with a Black boyfriend with his Black friends. I also have a secret gay voice most people never hear.
Kamala wisely doesn’t engage with the attacks on this issue. They are silly. Even here in rural America, people intuitively understand that, of course, intelligent people change how they say things to different groups of people. Indeed, farmers and other capable rural folks who know how things work dumb down what they say when talking to urban people. It works both ways.
Conclusion
How does Kamala Harris want to be remembered? As the first woman of Indian and Jamaican origins to be President? Or as the person who was able to immediately and effectively grab the reins of power from a sitting President, who quickly built a powerful coalition of supporters, and who ended up saving Democracy in the United States? Kamala herself is navigating all of this beautifully. It is time for the press, pundits, and her allies to drop the focus on identity politics and let the Vice President be herself.
