Don’t Call Me by That Other Executive’s Name — All We Share is Skin Color
By: Hurriya Burney
Tags: Work, Women, Leadership, Equality, Diversity

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

I am one of two South Asian women in my department’s senior leadership at my company.

Meena* (not her real name) and I look nothing alike. And so, when one of our colleagues first called me by her name, I was puzzled and then flabbergasted.

This leader (let’s call him Tim) had known me for years. We worked closely together. We were comrades in closed door, war room style sessions where politically incorrect language swam boldly in the air, diving from one end to the other.

Tim first called me Meena during a session like this, one which was fraying into a lengthy two hours.

Although I was stunned, I didn’t react. And neither did he. He rolled right over it. I don’t know if he even realized what he had done. I reasoned that everyone was tired. It was an honest mistake. I chose to let it go.

And then it happened again.

This time it was in our senior management meeting; there were 20 people in the room. When Tim called me by Meena’s name, Meena herself was in the room with us. Sitting nowhere close to me, by the way. I raised my eyebrows.

Were his eyes crossed?

Everyone stared at me. Smirked. Shook their heads in disbelief. Again, Tim rolled past the flub, never acknowledging it.

Someone came up to me after the meeting and brought it up. Commiserated with me. Claimed that it was embarrassing that a senior executive would make a mistake like that. I silently agreed. But then, again, I chose to let it go.

What else could I do, after all?

Tim, long since departed for greener pastures, wasn’t the only one who jumbled my name with the only other brown woman in the room. There were others. Always white men, incidentally.

Why?

I wasn’t jumbling them up with other white men (and there were always plenty of them) in the room.

How hard is it to get someone’s name right? Someone you’ve been working with. Someone you share meals with. Someone you complain with about all the administrative, white collar nonsense that underlies the glory of our glamorous titles.

Brown women don’t all look alike. All we share is a skin-tone and maybe, a cultural background.

Meena and I have ten years between us. We don’t dress alike. We don’t talk the same way. We are not interchangeable affirmative action check marks in the board room.

Our identities have crossed on one other occasion. It was a client that had met Meena at a foundation benefit. The client relayed the details back to her business partners after the fact. The business partners thought that she had met me, and not Meena.

But they knew me, not Meena.

The client could have forgotten the name of the dark-haired South Asian woman in a ballgown that she only met briefly in dimly lit room. After all, both Meena and I fit the description of ‘South Asian female executive at RBC Bank’.

That didn’t bother me. That was just a misunderstanding.

What’s not a misunderstanding is when people who know your dietary preferences, have met your husband, seen your designer shoe collection, and know who you voted for in the last federal election confuse you with another executive — the only other brown woman on the team.