That is exactly how institutional discrimination works. And it hurts and is used to target people. Take, for example, two different databases, one which accepts accented characters and one which doesn’t (because they are not a feature of English names). So you have Jesús Nuñez in the first, but Jesus Nunez in the second. According to certain states’ “exact name match” laws, he now can’t vote or possibly obtain other services, and his entire citizenship might be called into question because the system says the names don’t match. Funny how those things almost never affect those with “standard”, boring (read traditionally white and English-language) names.
Institutional racism/discrimination doesn’t require you to be actively discriminatory. It just requires you not to question any biases that might be built into the system, because they don’t affect you. So you don’t have to keep track of the different possible names you might be listed under. You don’t need to pick a restaurant or a doctor’s office based on what the bathrooms are like, or if there’s stairs down into the dining area.
Since none of those things affect you, they become invisible, and it’s easy not to think of yourself as being disciriminatory. But when you get a loan but DeShawn doesn’t, because some algorithm says that people with non-standard names are more likely to default, you’re participating in it. When you go to that restaurant because the food is really good and you either don’t think about those stairs, or you “understand why they have them” because accessibility ramps are expensive and would cut down on the dining space, you’re participating in it.
So, yes, it absolutely is worth pointing out and calling it out for what it is.
That’s as aggravating as websites that demand I change my password every 3 months, and then complain that “password must be 3-15 characters, and must contain an upper and lowercase letter, a numeric digit, and some kind of un-typable glyph.”
You, sir, have won bbs.boingboing.net for the day. Please take the weekend off!
I’ve had the opposite - my full first name is Yochannah but your average English or American person can’t pronounce the “ch” correctly so I go by Yo. Yahoo used to tell me something like “incorrect name” when I tried to register with it, and it took some guessing to figure out that they meant that it was too short.
The iOS and macOS programming framework has a couple classes to help deal with the complexity of human names in the form of PersonNameComponents and PersonNameComponentsFormatter. The docs make interesting reading.
I ran into this type of system problem very early on in life in the late 70s.
A fill-in-the-bubble school registration form only allowed for 4 characters. My first name is Glenn. For a long time, once “in the system”, I had to fight against people truncating my name because to some people apparently “Glen” is also a valid name and not just a narrow valley.
My company has a client - a financial services organization the would be recognized by 99% of the North American readers of this site.
One of their systems does this - it requires a surname to be at least three letters long. But what blows my mind is that two of the EVPs in the very department that owns this application have last names Ng and Xe.
You created a system that your own boss can’t log into? (actually when I state it that way, maybe it’s delightfully nefarious rather than plain old incompetent)
