Washington
Call her comma-la. That’s how to say Kamala Harris’ first name.
Repeatedly mispronouncing the name — as President Trump and his supporters have often gleefully done — can have racist and sexist overtones, say independent experts and Democratic critics.
“It says you don’t belong, you’re different,” said A’shanti Gholar, president of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.
“It’s meant as an attempt to signal otherness,” added Hilary McLean, a Sacramento-based Democratic strategist.
The Democratic vice presidential candidate is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants. The name Kamala is Indian, and means Lotus Flower, according to Babysname.org.
The latest furor over how to say it was triggered by Sen. David Perdue’s constant mispronunciations at a recent Macon, Georgia, rally as he warmed up an audience about to hear from Trump.
Perdue, a Georgia Republican U.S. senator who has served with Harris in the Senate for the past three and a half years, referred to her as “Ka-MAL-a, Ka-MAL-a or Kamala, Kamala, Ka-mala, -mala, -mala, I don’t know, whatever,” as many in the crowd laughed.
Compounding the Perdue situation was that he is “one of her colleagues from the Senate who absolutely knows how to pronounce her name,” McLean said.
Perdue’s camp insisted the senator meant no harm.
He “simply mispronounced Sen. Harris’ name,” spokeswoman Casey Black tweeted. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”
The senator, she said, “was making an argument against the radical socialist agenda that she & her endorsed candidate Jon Ossoff are pushing: Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all, raising taxes, & holding up COVID19 relief.” Ossoff is Perdue’s Democratic opponent.
But it was the sort of slip that keeps happening.
Trump has mispronounced the name. At a rally in Virginia last month he mockingly called her “Ka-MAH-Luh” three times, and noted “Ka-MAH-Luh, if you pronounce her name wrong she goes crazy.”
Vice President Mike Pence and Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel have also mispronounced the name.
On Tucker Carlson’s program in August, Democratic adviser Richard Goodstein tried to get the conservative talk show host to pronounce her name correctly. “So what?” Carlson replied after Goodstein explained how the name was pronounced.
Earlier this month, Lara Trump, wife of Trump son Eric, and Mercedes Schlapp, a Trump campaign senior adviser, got laughs from supporters during a stop in Pennsylvania as they mispronounced the name, Politico reported.
Schlapp called her “Kuh-mah-la”
Lara Trump chided her that, “You have to say her name right, Mercedes.”
Democrats have pounced on such comments.
Harris Press Secretary Sabrina Singh tweeted that Perdue engaged in a “racist rant.”
“Instead of leading and inspiring, he stoops to mocking the heritage of his political opponents,” tweeted Jon Ossoff, Perdue’s Democratic opponent.
Democrats and civil rights groups are furious about what they see as denigration of Harris, the first woman of color to run on a major party presidential ticket.
“The constant mispronunciation of Senator Kamala Harris’ name is not just a simple oversight,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, an online racial justice organization.
“The repeated and intentional ‘blunder’ is yet another example of Trump’s near-methodical approach of disrespecting and discrediting her as a viable candidate, and ultimately, as a Black woman,” he said.
Experts say the frequency of the focus on her name is telling.
“This has happened enough times and people have not corrected themselves, that it (Perdue’s statement) could be interpreted as a derogatory comment in the guise of an accident,” said Karen North, clinical professor of communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School.
Republicans see the stumbles as routine mistakes.
“It’s not being done on purpose. It can be a hard name to pronounce, especially for a Southern guy,” said Katon Dawson, former South Carolina Republican chairman.
Mispronouncing names is hardly uncommon.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden also has mispronounced his running mate’s name, but not in a sarcastic or mocking way. And he’s corrected any mistake.
What matters is “what you do afterwards. I mispronounce names all the time, but I’m terribly apologetic about it,” said Chris Grant, chairman of the political science department at Mercer University in Macon.
To Grant, the test is this: “If you engaged in mispronouncing the name of a person of color and you’re not apologetic, and you’re aware of what you’re doing, it’s passive racism.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2020 5:00 AM.
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