Such mispronunciations have been “called out” as racist by a number of voices on the left. In a July 1, 2025 posting about Mamdani on BoingBoing, for example, Jennifer Sandlin condemns the “racial microaggressions of mispronouncing” Mamdani’s name: “one form of racism that seems more subtle but is as destructive as more overt and blatant racism,” she insists, “is mispronouncing a person’s name, a racist microaggression.”
But does this sort of thing in fact constitute a racist microaggression? I think it’s fair to say that mispronunciations can sometimes be microaggressions; if the mispronunciation is repeated again and again, and the speaker is making no effort to get it right, it seems fair to characterize that as a microaggression. (Donald Trump is perhaps the world’s worst repeat offender in this category.) But mispronunciations—even repeated mispronunciations—can also be quite innocent. And, in the case of Mamdani’s name, it’s entirely understandable that English speakers unfamiliar with the name will tend to pronounce it wrongly. A very good October 22 New York Times article (“Why Can’t People Say Zohran Mamdani’s Name Correctly?,” by Emma Fitzsimmons, Benjamin Oreskes, Eden Weingart, and Aliza Aufrichtig) points this out, quoting Professor Laurel MacKenzie, co-director of the NYU Sociolinguistics Lab: “Mamdani has an ‘M’ next to a ‘D’, and that’s hard for English speakers. Our tongues are just not used to making that specific sequence of sounds.”*
In the article MacKenzie is not quoted as having given any explanation for why it should be hard, so I asked another professor (Maureen Okun, who for many years taught linguistics at Vancouver Island University and who is my at-home source for information of an almost infinite variety of types). When we make an “N” sound, she explained, our tongues are right near the front of our mouths, behind our upper teeth—-which is also where our tongues need to be if we’re going to make a “D” sound; the transition from one to the other thus comes very naturally. When we make an “M” sound, on the other hand, our tongues are typically a little farther back, since the sound is articulated by pressing our lips together; it’s thus more difficult for us to transition from an “M” sound to a “D” sound.
The substituting of an “N” sound for an “M” sound in such circumstances is an example of metathesis, a common phenomenon involving the transposition of sounds in order to make a word easier for us to pronounce. Metathesis, it should be emphasized, often occurs without our even being aware of it.
Saying “Mandami” instead of “Mamdani,” then, is an entirely understandable mistake. To be sure, it’s a mistake that we can learn to correct—and a mistake that anyone who is going to be mentioning the name “Mamdani” at all frequently obviously should make an effort to correct. But getting it wrong the first time—even getting it wrong quite a few times—should absolutely not be thought of as a racist microaggression. (It’s worth noting that former mayor Bill Blasio and New York Attorney General Letitia James—-Mamdani supporters both—-are among the many who have referred to him as Mandami instead of Mamdani.)
Mamdani himself has said different things on the subject of people mispronouncing his name. The October 22 New York Times article quotes him as saying, quite reasonably, “I don’t begrudge anyone who tries and gets it wrong. The effort means everything to me.” But he has also sometimes implied that such mispronouncing of names is indeed a racist microaggression. In an October 24 New York Daily News article, Josephine Stratman quotes his words to a “crowd of Muslim men inside the Islamic Cultural Center”: “Raise your hand if you have had to deal with someone mispronouncing your name when you go to work. Raise your hand if someone has looked at you as a Muslim and called you a terrorist.” Mamdani doesn’t ask if the men have had to deal with someone intentionally mispronouncing their names or insistently mispronouncing their names; the mere mispronunciation is what is spoken of in the same breath as the act of calling them terrorist.
Mamdani's campaign logo--focusing on the first name only.
Assuming that the mistake of mispronouncing someone’s name must be a racist microaggression, then, is an unfortunate expression of intolerance. To be sure, it’s a far less egregious example of intolerance than the sorts of outrageous insults that the likes of Trump and Vance and Orban spout daily; throughout most of the world, right-wing intolerance is these days far more widespread, and far more vicious than is left wing intolerance. But the left-wing varieties do nevertheless contribute to a climate of intolerance, and to the increasing polarization of society, and those of us on the left who want to resist that polarization have I think a responsibility to acknowledge and to take issue with the varieties of intolerance that persist on our side of the ideological divide—just as much as we have a responsibility to staunchly oppose the right-wing varieties. If we are to hold out hope of those in the middle concluding that Trump and his ilk are the crazies and that we on the left are reasonable, we had better do our best to be reasonable.
Presuming a mispronunciation of a name to be a microaggression is bad enough. Worse is the tendency to treat real or perceived microaggressions as offenses that are, to quote Jennifer Sandlin again, “as destructive as more overt and blatant racism.” By this line of reasoning, mispronouncing someone’s name is as destructive as levelling a racist insult against someone. It’s as destructive as slavery. It’s as destructive as genocide.
Unfortunately, such illogic has been common in some segments of the progressive left for a generation or more. But the fact that it’s widespread does not make it right. The alleged microaggression of mispronouncing someone’s name is not as destructive as is slavery or genocide. An inappropriate sexist remark is not as destructive as is denying women the right to be educated—or as is the violence of a physical sexual assault. Deadnaming** is not as destructive as is taking away the rights of trans people, or as is physically assaulting trans people.
It’s true that a society in which less severe wrongs are permitted to take root can grow into a society in which far more destructive wrongs become common. But much less severe wrongs are not in themselves just as destructive as are great wrongs, and we should stop pretending that they are.
*Certain sounds may not be inherently easy to form in the human mouth, but if we hear those sounds from early childhood they become easy to say—they become habitual. Distinguishing between an “L” sound and an “R” sound—a distinction that native English speakers find natural—feels anything but natural to a native Japanese or Chinese speaker. Pronouncing a name such as “Scott” or “Spock” without a vowel sound preceding it does not feel natural to a Spanish speaker, since Spanish does not allow SC or SP consonant clusters without a preceding vowell. (A Spanish speaker will thus naturally tend to mispronounce “Miss Scott” and “Doctor Spock” as “Miss Escott” and “Dr. Espock.”) Sounding the “c” in “Ncube” with the correct click of the 15 distinct types of click that are part of the Ndebele language comes naturally to anyone who has grown up hearing and speaking Ndebele; to speakers of most other languages, not so much. I spent three years teaching English in rural Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, and I can attest that it took me some time to learn to say “Mr. Ncube” with even an approximation of the sort of click Ndebele speakers use when pronouncing the word.
Above and beyond pronunciation difficulties rooted in the configuration of our mouths and/or difficulties rooted in linguistic and cultural habit, there can be highly individual quirks. As a Canadian who was born in America and has spent a great deal of time there, for example, I find it almost impossible to hear the difference between the way in which Americans pronounce words such as out and about and the way in which Canadians do so. I honestly can’t imagine how I would go about pronouncing such words any differently than I do now.
**The concept of deadnaming is universally understood in the trans community and among those with contacts in the trans community, but it remains a foreign concept to many others. The most egregious forms of deadnaming involve intentionally addressing a trans person by the name they were known by before they transitioned. Less egregious forms include referencing earlier work with a person’s “dead” name (saying, for example, that the film Juno starred Ellen Page, instead of saying that it starred Elliot Page, or saying that it was James Morris who wrote Pax Brittanica, rather than identifying the author as Jan Morris).
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