Language, hearing and race

Racism is not always about acts of commission, but acts of omission or just facts of perception. It is not enough not to consciously discriminate against, or be violent against, people of another skin colour; one has to push back against unconscious ways in which one prejudges, marginalises or renders invisible those who are not like oneself. This can be harder than it sounds, precisely because of the unconscious nature of the mechanisms that produce these effects.

Part of the mechanism is the brain's capacity for identifying patterns and familiar structures. Being anglophone, and surrounded by a dominant paradigm that supports that, my hearing is attuned specifically to English sounds, and particularly to English-sounding names.

Krisnan Guru-Murthy is a news presenter who has been a favourite of mine since he presented the children's news bulletin programme "Newsround" during my early teens (in the early 1990s). He's a Hindu, British, and ethnically Indian (as in the subcontinent, not North America).

When I first heard his name, I honestly thought he was called "Christian Guru Murphy". Murphy is a common last name (often associated with Ireland, but why wouldn't a man with brown skin have a name like that?) and "Christian" is also a word that is used as a first name for boys. "Guru" is just a word that I knew existed. My unconscious brain shuffled the syllables and sounds that came in through the aural nerves until they made shapes that were familiar to it in the context of "this is what a person's name looks like". So I actually heard his name as "Christian Guru Murphy". It wasn't until I spoke to my father about him, and Papa pointed out my mistake (by saying, "why would a Hindu be called Christian?") that I realised what had happened. Papa said the correct name for me so that I could hear the difference now I was listening for it, and so I learned that my brain has this bias to render invisible those whose names are not typically English or Western in sound.

Sometimes it's just a question of imagining the wrong spelling (for example, I transcribed Emeli Sandé as Emily Sanday the first time I heard her name - fortunately, the caption came up a few seconds later on the telly so I learned my mistake).

Of course, with Guru-Murthy, there was the rather glaring clue that I might have misheard (and continued to mishear for a couple of years) that the guy in question was obviously not White, although at the time I thought I was being oh-so-colour-blind and non-racist by not assuming that his name would be anything other than what I imagined I heard. (Of course, being colour-blind as a White person simply means to uphold the racism of others by not seeing it: I still have this problem, but try to fight against it in myself.)

There aren't that many similarly glaring examples as the Krishnan/Christian one above: a lot of the time, foreign-to-me names just don't form sounds similar enough to familiar words or names, so my brain has to accept them "as is". Of course, I can't know for sure how many examples I might have missed and, perhaps, still float around in my misperceptions. But by the fact that, ever since that teenage mistake, I'm aware that this is an issue for me, I know to be alert to situations where I might be making a mistake and double-check my perception against reality.

These things go deep, and racism isn't just about nastiness - the real battle is always within ourselves, to spot these kinds of unconscious biases and become conscious of them, so that hopefully we can do better.