Growing up as the child of immigrant parents, I often felt out of place in my predominately white neighborhood. Aside from being one of the only Brown kids in my school, I also had — at least according to many of my teachers and peers — a “hard to pronounce” name. (FYI, it’s not that hard to pronounce! Here’s how you say it.)

In my twenties, when I decided to reclaim the correct pronunciation of my name, one of the things I repeatedly heard from people who had only ever known me by the incorrect pronunciation of my name was:

a) that they wish they’d known they were saying my name wrong and

b) that they don’t know how to ask someone the correct pronunciation of their name in a way that doesn’t seem rude or awkward.

Learning the right way to ask someone about the correct pronunciation of their name is such an important skill for anyone who wants to be more inclusive. So in this video, I share a helpful script for you to use when you want to ask someone about how to pronounce their name correctly.

Watch now!

The post How to Ask Someone the Correct Pronunciation of Their Name appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

Our names are so important. Names are a huge part of our identity, a reflection of our cultural backgrounds, and more. Speaking from my own experience, having your name mispronounced repeatedly feels really awkward and alienating — you start to feel like you’re the “other” or an outsider.

But correcting people when they mispronounce your name can also feel awkward and difficult, especially as a person of color, when you’re already consistently on the receiving end of biases related to your cultural background.

In this video, I share how to get people to pronounce your name correctly if you have a “hard-to-pronounce” name, based on my own experiences with people mispronouncing my name.

Watch now!

The post How to Get People to Pronounce Your Name Correctly appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

Whenever I do a keynote speech or a workshop, I always make a point of sharing a bit about myself, including the fact that I am a Sikh. I ensure that I use the correct pronunciation of Sikh, and so inevitably after my presentation someone will approach me to say something to the effect of, “OMG, I had no idea that I’ve been saying Sikh incorrectly all these years! How do you say it again?!”

In one of my previous videos, I talked about the frustration that those of us who have names that seem harder to pronounce — or put another way, aren’t “white sounding” — experience when white people in particular try to give us nicknames or change the pronunciation of our names to be easier for them (a manifestation of white supremacy, by the way).

But as BIPOC, our names aren’t the only words that get mispronounced. It also happens to the names of our cities, holidays, cultural practices, and even our faiths — hence the reason why “Sikh” and “Sikhism” continue to be mispronounced.

In this video, I share the correct pronunciation of my religion and why it’s so important that we, as Sikhs, reclaim the correct pronunciation in order to interrupt this racist micro-inequity.

Watch now!

The post Language Matters! Why I’m Reclaiming the Correct Pronunciation of Sikh appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.

Do you know how to say my name in the correct Indian pronunciation? I ask this because I can’t tell you how hard it is for most people to say my name correctly!

From a young age, people consistently got my name wrong. Even though my name is common in India, where my parents immigrated from, in Canada my name is quite unique, and for years it was a constant source of teasing and bullying. Eventually I gave up on having people pronounce my name correctly and just went by “Ree-too”. I started to hate my name.

This is a common experience for so many people who have “hard to pronounce” names. Many of us will change the pronunciation of our names or even legally change our names to more Anglo (i.e. white) sounding names (I personally wanted to change my name to Carice for a while…) just to avoid having to constantly hear our names mispronounced.

The pressure I felt — and which I know many other people feel — to have an Anglicized (“white”) name is tied back to white supremacy and is a manifestation of the racism and racial bias that people of color have internalized for generations.

In this video, I share why our names are so important and talk about why we should reclaim our names as a key part of both interrupting white supremacy and living as our authentic selves.

Watch now!

The post Help! I Have a Hard to Pronounce Name appeared first on Ritu Bhasin.