Mark Krikorian has spent the last few days complaining about people who pronounce Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly, arguing that the correct pronunciation of proper nouns, calling such pronunciations "unnatural" because apparently ignorance is "natural." Needless to say this sort of throwaway comment goes a long way toward explaining why liberals and people of color perceive a knee-jerk hostility toward minorities, since the implicit assumption of such a statement is that despite being born an American citizen, there's something "un-American" about people with Spanish names.
Conor Friedersdorf explains in a thoughtful post why he disagrees with Krikorian:
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.
There's a more basic problem here that has to do with simple respect. You try to say someone's name how they say their name, because that's their name. (You can waive that obligation, as Krikorian has with his own Armenian surname, but that's his choice.) To refuse to do so is just fundamentally disrespectful, especially as a form of ethnic protest against American citizens you regard as "newcomers" for the simple reason that they're not white. Conservatives regularly cloak white identity politics as "color blindness" and assert that they see people as "individuals," but by refusing to say Sonia Sotomayor's name correctly, Kirkorian is revealing that he sees her less as an individual person worth of basic respect than a cultural threat.
-- A. Serwer
