In the Houston Astrodome on February 6, 1967, Ernie Terrell and Muhammad Ali faced off to unify the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. The World Boxing Association had stripped Ali of his title regarding a contract dispute with Sonny Liston after refusing a rematch with the former heavyweight champion. In the meantime, Terrell won the vacant title in March 5, 1965 by beating Eddie Machen.

Ali had won the heavyweight championship in 1964 under his original name of Cassius Clay when he knocked out Liston. Right after this fight, Ali converted to Islam and asked to be identified by his Muslim name of Muhammad Ali.

Prior to the 1967 fight, Terrell refused to acknowledge Ali by his Muslim name and continued to refer to Ali as Cassius Clay.

Ali won the fight by unanimous decision and punished Terrell the entire contest to the point that afterwards, Terrell had to undergo surgery to repair a broken bone under his eye. Ring side observers claimed that Ali taunted Terrell the entire fight with the question “What’s My Name?”

What is the inclusion lesson here? Mispronouncing or incorrectly speaking as well as making fun of someone’s name demeans their identity. The cumulative effect of these micro-messages cause people to feel devalued, slighted, discouraged or excluded.

One of the biggest micro-messages I ever received about my name was from the Washington Times newspaper on August 28, 2001. They wrote the following about me in an editorial entitled “But What is a Chief Without Any Indians.” They criticized my efforts to eliminate American Indian mascots, names and team logos from the Maryland Public School System. “Richard Regan says he is an Indian of the Lumbee Cheraw tribe, though his own Christian name, of sturdy Anglo-Saxon origin, renders this claim suspicious. If he really is an Indian, his parents showed little sensitivity to Anglo-Saxon sensibilities when they appropriated the name Richard for a Lumbee child, and he shows even less regard for the common decencies by flaunting it.”

I frequently hear federal government employees taking liberty with colleague and customer names of citizens who have immigrated to the USA. They fail to realize that for people of color, and English learning employees, their names have cultural and historical significance.

Rita Kohli, assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside and Daniel Solorzano, professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles released a 2012 study entitled  “Teachers, Please Learn Our Names!: Racial Microagressions and the K-12 Classrooms. They found that not getting a student’s name right undermines learning and impacts their world view and emotional well-being.

Education blogger Jennifer Gonzalez goes further by calling this mono-cultural view of dissecting names as an “act of bigotry.” She claims that people on the receiving end of these negative micro-messages receive the implication that they are different, foreign, weird, and unworthy.

One of the lasting lessons my late American Indian grandfather left me was to always be proud of my family name-even if nobody pronounces or spells it right. He would be surprised to learn the number of times I have to say the phrase “That’s Not My Name.”