Eye-lah, ill-ah, il-ee-ah, ella, ah-leah, leah, lla, ee-ah, and even Elijah. These are amongst the most memorable versions of my name that people have mistakenly called me. That’s right, Elijah. Like so many other people, I grew up bracing myself when substitutes paused before calling my name during attendance, and I’ve long been accustomed to having to correct people when they try to read my name for the first time. This has never been an issue to me; my name could have several different pronunciations, so when people make honest mistakes the first time they meet me, it doesn’t affect me at all. However, this phenomenon of people not knowing how to say my name has evolved since I got to Penn State, and for the first time in my life, it really, really bothers me. Ever since I started college, I’ve realized that people don’t even try to learn my name.

I’ve always considered myself to be bad at names, which made the first couple of weeks in college incredibly stressful. Meeting new people everyday and not knowing if I’d ever see them again meant that I had to really prioritize who I actually put energy into remembering. At the beginning of the semester, I could not, for the life of me, remember most people, and I took absolutely no offense when they didn’t remember me.

I started noticing something weird, however, well into the first semester. If I were in a group of my friends, and we met someone new, they would learn everyone’s name except for mine. I started suspecting that people in my classes, who I spoke to every day and had introduced myself to multiple times, had no idea what my name was. They’d learn all kinds of personal information about me, but for some reason would never care to find out my most defining characteristic. It started bothering me when I realized that I could tell when someone didn’t care at all to even try, when I could see it in their eyes as I introduced myself to them that they made no effort to process what I had just told them. Of course, I’ve always been guilty of forgetting names too, so I really only started caring when I realized the alarming rate at which it would happen to me, in contrast to my friends.

I have tried to figure out the root of this problem as I become more aware of it everyday, but the only thing that really differentiates me from my friends is my race. I don’t think I have a particularly hard name, considering that it is only three letters, and I’ve found that the important people in my life who I met at Penn State had absolutely no difficulty learning how to say it properly. While it is extreme to say that this behavior is targeted, I feel that I can absolutely consider it disrespectful. For that reason, I continue to call people out, especially when they are recurring characters in my life who have no reason not to learn my name.

Despite how much it annoys me, one great thing has come out of this situation: I’ve become great with names. Using one of my friends, who seems to never forget a name or face, as a model, I’ve started making an active effort to mitigate this flaw of mine. Now when I meet people, I do my best to encode their name using whatever mnemonic devices are necessary. I also try to use their names more in conversation because I believe it’s a huge sign of respect. This situation has forced me to reflect upon my own behaviors and improve myself, and for that, I’m very grateful. A name is a reflection of someone’s identity, culture, and heritage, and I cannot stress enough how important it is to respect people’s names like you would respect the individual themselves. A name is more than a label; it is a story, and especially the most unique names can tell the most interesting stories.

I’ll never forget the pride I felt in 2020 while watching Kamala Harris’s face flash across the TV screen, captioned with the words “first female Vice-President” and “first South Asian Vice-President.” I had never experienced that feeling before, and it had very little to do with Vice-President Harris as a politician, and a lot more to do with the fact that I never expected to see her name on that screen. It was in that moment that I realized how little representation I had seen until that point for girls and women who looked like me, and I also finally understood the value in having figures similar to myself to look up to.

It was at that point that I reflected on Indian characters who had appeared in the TV shows and movies when I was growing up. There was Princess Jasmine, who was supposed to be Middle Eastern, but actually presented as a strange and inaccurate mix between Indian and Arabian. As much as I loved her, I never really resonated with her story or saw myself in her. She was, however, the best I had when I was little. At least Princess Jasmine was an effort to increase inclusivity; the only other examples I can think of were proof that representation can be just as harmful as it can be beneficial. When I think of children’s TV show characters who promoted stereotypes and probably fueled prejudice more than they increased anybody’s sense of belonging and inclusion, one name comes to mind immediately: Ravi Ross.

Ravi Ross from the Disney Channel show Jessie was a paragon of Indian stereotypes. He was nerdy, unathletic, socially awkward, and an easy target for bullies. Similarly to Princess Jasmine, my friends and I never related to Ravi at all growing up, so it was easy for us to discount the narrative the show was forcing upon us about what Indians are like; however, it was easy for us to see the damage that the show was creating in the minds of people who weren’t Indian. It was common for our classmates to hold negative opinions about minorities in our school, so the media cannot fully be blamed for any of the prejudice we faced, but shows like Jessie and Phineas and Ferb, which featured another Indian nerd, Baljeet, certainly made the situation worse. Many of our peers expected me and my friends to behave the way that these fictional characters did, and so we were treated with the same lack of respect that was given to Ravi and Baljeet. Even shows for adults perpetuate these stereotypes with characters like Raj from The Big Bang Theory, and while I understand that characters like these are supposed to create humor in the shows, they can do a lot of damage, especially when they are the only examples of Indian characters that people are exposed to.

The good news is that we have undoubtedly come a long way in terms of representation since I was watching Disney Channel. Since Vice-President Harris’s election, I have watched shows like Never Have I Ever, which follows a character named Devi Vishwakumar and highlights how her ethnicity has impacted her life. I also really enjoyed watching Quantico, starring Priyanka Chopra, a famed Bollywood actress, which doesn’t ignore her ethnicity but also doesn’t fixate on it, allowing her character to develop a real personality instead of just being Indian. Even Kelly Kapoor from the Office provided me some sort of comfort, because despite the fact that her character was created for comedic purposes, the humor was centered around her personality, not her ethnicity. We still have a long way to go in terms of creating sufficient representation for both Indians and other underrepresented groups, but I think the increasing amount of diverse creators who are gaining platforms is a sign that we are heading in the right direction. Having someone to look up to who looks like you can completely change someone’s self image over time, and every child deserves to see themselves in someone inspiring as they’re growing up.