Welcome to Diversity Lens.

Last week Race Equality Matters launched a powerful campaign with a simple premise: everyone deserves to have their name pronounced correctly. The campaign seeks to address the disproportionate levels of name mispronunciation people of colour experience.

When the Vice President of the US Kamala Harris took to office, the explicit mispronunciation of her name was used as a political tactic by those seeking to other her along ethnic lines. Being on the receiving end is not always explicit discrimination, however, it does always send the message that your identity doesn’t warrant the effort.

This week alone I have corrected the spelling of my name 3 times, despite the correct spelling being available in the threads where this occurred.

For ten years, I was the person who introduced themselves as ‘Al’, a relic from a retail job which handed me this new, more palatable name on a badge. No one thought to ask me if I was okay with it prior, forced upon me to make my name "easier" to English customers. Back then it came as a revelation, those awkward othering conversations could be avoided, this was good.

Adopting anglicised names is commonplace amongst people like me, but studies indicate that doing this correlates with overall lower self-esteem. A year or so ago ‘Al’ no longer felt like the easiest option for me.

The imposition of eurocentric ideals of being throughout my life began weighing on me heavily, so I decided to reclaim my identity, and have started to introduce myself as Almaas again, my real name.

This means I am constantly correcting spelling. I concede that double-A is a rarity in this language, there aren’t many Aardvarks named Aaron. Yet my name is Almaas, Arabic meaning diamond, not Al or Almass which have no meaning. That meaning is worth more to me now than having to endure regular conversations where I gingerly correct both colleagues and clients. I will no longer package my identity in a European guise in order to gain acceptance. To conclude I wish to ask you a question, is adapting your name or ignoring common misspellings still the easiest path for you too?