The Struggle Continues

Since high school, I had been telling people “yeah, I’m getting braces soon, I’m just not sure yet.” More came with the story: “Well my insurance doesn’t cover them and I don’t have $4,500 to pay for metal on my teeth”… I just gave up. I had the friends I needed, and guys I was interested in liked me. I just learned to deal with the fact that I wasn’t going to get braces and that I would have to love the teeth I have. I started to get my confidence back because, like I had said before, I had the friends I needed and I have a beautiful personality and the guys I was interested in didn’t look at my teeth.

Finally, my senior year-- the end of High School! It was second term in school, in December, and I was enrolled in a class called Minority Studies. It was a class that taught about stereotypes, prejudice, racism and crimes against minorities. It’s a class I believe would benefit a lot of people. In this class we were assigned a project presentation on any topic which we had an interest in. Anything you could think of such as: African Americans, Women, Civil Rights Movement, Obesity, Amish, and even Religions. I had interest in those topics but I wanted to talk about something I knew was not going to be taught: Name Stereotypes.

Name stereotypes is very much an uncommon topic, which left me limited in research materials, but it didn’t seem like something that would be a stereotype. Wrong! This topic taught me that people with unique sounding names or unusual spellings of common names are judged. There are statistics that prove more “American” sounding names on applications get more interview callbacks than African, Asian, Mexican, or Latino sounding names. When someone looks over a resume or an application, they try to put a face to the name. That’s wrong!

Mention names such as “Ashley,” “Sarah,” “Brad,” or “Kevin,” most people picture white Americans. When you hear names such as “Diego,” “Latisha,” “Lia,” or “Rashad,” we think of those as minority names. And that’s probably right. But many of us know that “Christina” is the more traditional American based spelling, while Cristina, without the “h” is more of a traditional Hispanic spelling. Same as the American based spelling for “Ashley” while “Ashleigh” is considered the common spelling for many African-Americans, which I had found through my research.While I was doing this presentation research I realized something. While some are getting judged on their skin color, weight, height, or even clothing choice, others are getting judged on their names! Something they didn’t even get to choose. It’s something their parents chose for them, based on their religion, culture, history or simply because they liked the name.

You may be asking “What's your point?” Well here is it, if someone can judge you on everything I mentioned above, well then I know for a fact they are going to take someone more seriously with straight teeth versus crooked teeth. This topic brought back my insecurity. It reminded me once again of my imperfect mouth. My confidence sunk back down, back to where it was in middle school.