Will the real Darain Faraz please stand up?

This post is part of a series collated to celebrate Black History Month by members and friends of LinkedIn’s Embrace Employee Resource Group.

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Two weekends ago I celebrated my birthday – and it was one of the best birthdays I’ve had in quite some time. Loads of friends: school friends, new friends, former colleagues and even my two-year-old making an appearance and partying until about 10pm (but that’s a different story).

When I arrived at work the following day, one of my colleagues was telling me what a great time she had at the party, and then looked at me in a slightly curious way and said, “but I should tell you that some of your friends don’t seem to know you that well. They call you Darren.”

This would be quite a shocking revelation, and it would put a bit of a dampener on my birthday celebrations, if it weren’t for the fact that my school friends have very good reasons for calling me Darren. After all, I spent years telling them that was my name. Come to think of it, it’s actually more surprising that my colleagues know me as Darain. It says a lot about the pros and cons of different ethnic identities – and it says a lot about how unconscious bias still operates in the workplace, sometimes in ways we don’t expect.

How Darain became Darren

My Arabic name is technically pronounced Dah-ren… and when I started school, I remember my form teacher tripping over it and asking a few times what my name actually was. I thought it was an odd question but after hearing the roll call of my classmates… “Andrew, Ben, David… Da… Da… how do you say it?”, I made a quick decision that I wanted to make it easy for her. Just as importantly, I wanted to fit in. And in that moment, I created a new identity as Darren. It would stay with me for 15 years.

From talking to colleagues , I would say that the experience of changing a name this way is far from unusual. Sometimes it’s conscious; sometimes, as in my case, it’s more instinctive – and starts off with being eager to please. However we come to adopt them, these new identities stick around because of the impact that they have on unconscious bias. We may not realise what we’re doing at first, but by adopting a westernised name, or allowing others to project one onto us, we’re assimilating. We’re removing the easiest barrier that we can remove when it comes to fitting in.

 Appreciating the value of fitting in

When my parents arrived in the UK from Pakistan in the 1970s, they had a tough time being included. They are warm, kind and generous folk but they never quite felt integrated into the community in Luton, UK (certainly in the early days) – and this affected me. I wanted what they couldn’t have, and wanted to have more control over how others responded to me. There were no other Asian kids in my class and I simply took the decision to be like everyone else. 

I did well at school and a few years after I first started introducing myself as Darren, my new identity and I moved to a new school. I made great friendships here, including those friends still using my adopted school name 15 years later. I also acquired a posher new accent... well posher than my Lutonian accent anyway. This was no more planned than my name-change. I’m just one of those people that finds my accent changing to reflect the voices I hear around me. However, the combination of my new name and my new accent meant that it was impossible for people to pigeon-hole me as being of a particular race or ethnicity unless I was actually standing in front of them.

How Darren defused unconscious bias

I felt the benefits of this the first time that I ever applied for a job. My first gig was as a waiter, and I had an interview with the owner of the restaurant over the phone. It all went well and so I turned up at work for my first day – and the expression on the owner’s face was a picture. “Oh, you’re brown!” he couldn’t help saying. I didn’t take any offence – and there was none really to be taken. This man never once treated me differently or made me feel less included as a result of my true ethnic identity. He wasn’t reacting in a racist way – he was just flabbergasted that his mental picture of me didn’t match up to reality.

His response shows why the assimilation involved in changing names makes such a difference. There was an unconscious admission there that he would have mentally categorised me differently if I’d sounded like my father and introduced myself by my Arabic name. He might well have given me the job anyway, but there would have been a different process involved in deciding I was right for it. Darren made things easier; it helped him to get past that initial unconscious bias. 

Recent research in the US found that companies were twice as likely to call an ethnic minority candidate for an interview if they had removed all references to race from their resume before applying. Strikingly, they found that this bias held true even for companies that claimed to value diversity. Changing one’s name shouldn’t make a difference but it clearly does. 

I was very happy as Darren. It didn’t feel at all strange to be called one thing by my mum and family in Pakistan and one thing by everyone else (who doesn’t have different nicknames from different groups of people?). I never actually felt the need to change the spelling of my name. The way that I spoke and introduced myself did everything for me. So why, after 15 years, did I suddenly go back to introducing myself as Darain?

Ethnic difference and differentiation

It happened when I took my first job in PR. I was living in Australia at the time, and I remember walking into the office, meeting my boss, and seeing her double-take when she tried to relate my name as it was written down to my name as it was pronounced. “So… what are you actually called?” she asked me. “You say you’re called Darren – but that’s not how you pronounce this name.”

As a seasoned PR professional, she had a very different perspective on the value of an ethnic identity. She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t embracing my Asian roots and my unusual name, because she saw something that I’d never actually thought of: the value, not of fitting in, but of standing out. The way she saw it, the chronic underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in PR could work massively to my advantage as an Asian man. My difference was differentiating. I quickly came to see that she was right. The aspect of myself that I’d instinctively shied away from at school was actually a huge asset when it came to creating a professional brand.

Today, I spend time volunteering with the Taylor Bennett Foundation, which works to support people from ethnic minorities who pursue PR careers. Every six months or so, I host trainees from the Foundation at LinkedIn. There are often some of those trainees with names that others find difficult to pronounce – and I always stress to them the value of embracing those names and using them as a secret weapon within PR. The feedback they give me confirms that my experience isn’t unique. We’re lucky to work in an industry where a majority of people are working to overcome their own unconscious biases – and embrace ethnic identities. And that can give us an advantage. 

Taking control of your identity shouldn’t seem strange

Writing down my story, which I’m doing for Black History Month, does make me think differently about it. I wonder if I should feel guilty for the way that I’ve been able to use unconscious bias for leverage in my life and career. When it suited me to fit in, I could subvert my identity and go some way to switching off the bias of others. When I wanted a point of difference, I could dial up my ethnic identity again, confident that I was working in an industry where that would be embraced.  

Should I feel conflicted about this? Absolutely not. The fact is that taking control of our identity and how we present ourselves is a vitally important part of being an empowered human being. It’s something that I think people in a majority ethnic group take for granted – but it’s often not an option for the rest of us. Our ethnic identity tends to supersede everything else in the way that others respond to us, and it can deny us the space to construct an identity of our own. In his unwitting, keen-to-fit-in way, Darren gave me that space. And Darain then allowed me to take advantage of it.

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