There's two ways of pronouncing it, both acceptable in Mandarin. In English they would be something like: "naugh guh" and "neigh guh". The latter pronunciation is the one under discussion.
It's especially bad that this gets pulled up on a lecture about filter words.
If you listen to any native Mandarin speakers for more than 5 minutes you'll likely hear this word. If anything, being educated of it's existence allows you to recognize it as a legit word used in every Mandarin and not freak out when you hear Chinese people talking and think they're talking smack about black people.
I remember noticing in China that it seemed very common in Chinese casual chitchat, but to Western ears it sounded inappropriate. In the context of a lecture, I imagine it would come down to whether the delivery seemed genuinely part of the point or an excuse to push boundaries. Hard to gauge without audio/tone.
I can’t think of why you’d report this unless you had a serious issue with the lecturer or they were being purposefully inappropriate.
那（nà,that）个（gè,one）。 Also 'umm, uh, like, so'. English has the same thing, for example when you can't think of a word and just start with 'that, those'.
'Eh, what's that.. that, uh, the name of that function?'
It's pretty easy to mishear it, but 99% of the time you can see from the context that they're not just wildly dropping n-bombs..
Endowments are not the privilege – government supported loans and grants are the privilege.
If private universities want to fire people for ridiculous reasons that's bad but should be legal. However it's disgusting the government supports them.
> Last Thursday in your GSBA-542 classes, Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better.
This was apparently written by a university dean, in a Western country, in 2020. Not during the Dark Ages or the Inquisition, in 2020.
Assuming it's true, if that does not make people pause and doubt human progress, I don't know what will.
I too am just embarrassed for everyone when I read these apologies, somebody go talk to the accreditation boards for that university and get it re-evaluated.
Apart from the impact to the professor and his students who have been denied a learning opportunity, this is the larger cultural problem - validating the simplistic "other side". Both teams are rallying around straw men for each other to attack, driving polarization over essentially nonsense. Meanwhile anyone arguing for sanity gets labeled as an other for not toting the unreasonable party line. Despite claiming to be opposed to one another, Cancellers and Trumpists are just two faces of the same destructive force.
Students of Swedish or Danish at this university will (presumably) be ignorant of the word "slut" (end, finished), and maybe the number six ("sex" / "seks") too.
"We will start the Danish course with the numbers. En, to, tre, fire, fem, fem plus en, syv, otte, ni, ti."
I'm currently studying Danish and can't help but be amused when every 'lyt og gentag' exercise ends with 'slut'. But just as in the OP, it's not even the same vowel as the English word, so the resemblance is only passing. How absurd that careers may be ruined by using the wrong two consonants next to each other. How absurd that we call it progress.
The exercises I am doing are using spaced repetition tools for vocabulary and listening, using textbooks for fine-tuning grammar and pronunciation, and as a writing exercise that's more fun than translating fourteen-thousand different variations on 'the red cat ate a quick mouse', I have just begun attempting to translate the classic children's novel Moonfleet into Danish.
Some good resources:
Spaced Repetition
* Duolingo
* Anki - there are Danish decks readily available online
Textbooks
* Danish: An Essential Grammar (excellent, but too dense for
younger kids)
* På vej til dansk (listening exercises, accessible to all)
Websites
* ordnet.dk: excellent online Danish dictionary - I find the phonetic transcriptions invaluable - while they may be inaccessible to younger children anyone can benefit from the plentiful audio snippets. I use this [1] greasemonkey script to help easily download the audio clips when they are particularly helpful, for example as exemplars of particular vowels.
* Wiktionary: A reasonable source of translations for Danish. A good accompaniment to Den Danske Ordbog. The IPA transcriptions don't tend to be quite as good as the ordbog though and there are some surprising gaps.
* Google Translate: Useful as a starting point, although I don't treat it as authoritative.
Misc
* Radio - DR P6 Beat - I'm only able to understand the odd word but I still find this useful for getting to grips with the sound of spoken Danish. Also they play pretty good music (although in case anyone from P6 Beat is reading, the correct number of times to play 'Brimful of Asha (Fatboy Slim Remix)' in a day is not 3).
* Reddit - /r/Denmark - I use this as an accessible font of colloquial Danish.
* Twitter - I follow Danish journalists for the sports I enjoy (Grand Prix racing and road cycling) to get repeated exposure to small fragments of Danish through the day.
Good luck! This is more effort than most European immigrants put in.
You will probably need a native speaker to help your pronunciation, especially for the 42 vowels, and the soft D, and stød.
For my first year studying Danish in Denmark, I could only speak "foreigner Danish" -- the bad accent that, somehow, other foreigners seem to understand (perhaps because we have a limited vocabulary) but which causes Danes to look confused, and repeat what they said in English.
Thanks for the encouragement. I think my soft d is pretty good but I'm definitely a beginner with regards to the vowels and the stød. It's all part of the challenge, though :-)
Awesome list, looks like you're making a real effort. Tough language to learn, mainly because the range of correctness seems quite narrow. English by constrast seems to have a huge range.
I think it corresponds to the number of non-native speakers. English speakers are used to hearing people from every corner of the globe speak our language, so we are pretty unfazed by an accent. Danes - like, I think, most speakers of languages that remain largely isolated to their land of origin, have no such exposure - and thus tolerance - to accented speech.
In my experience, most professional immigrants to Denmark have more trouble learning Danish than they would if they'd moved to Sweden or Norway instead.
Before I moved to Denmark, an hour with a Swede plus reading the back of Lonely Planet taught me enough Swedish reading and pronunciation to order food in the airport in Swedish. Danish takes weeks or months of exposure to get an ear for the language, plus more weeks/months of practise to be understood.
It's certainly possible; I know adults from all over Europe whose can speak Danish from reasonably to very well. It does take more effort and more motivation than elsewhere.
(I wrote professional, since this is based on a typical situation of a couple of hours of Danish class a week, plus homework. I can't compare children, other workers, refugees etc, as their situation is so different.)
That's interesting to hear. I must admit I am at least a little bit attracted to the challenge of learning a language that's known for being difficult, though of course the vast majority of what attracts me towards Denmark (over other Nordic and European nations) is lifestyle and political factors.
In Swedish, the last station of e.g. a subway line (the terminus) is a "slutstation". (slut=end, station=station)
It should be the same word in Danish, too.
I've seen native English speakers giggle at that word, for obvious reasons -- when this word pops up all of a sudden while in a mass transit, and one interprets it as an English word, the association is truly bizarre.
But of course the word obviously does not mean some kind of a prostitute central, just like "nà ge" is not part of rap music lyrics.
What I wonder about, and this has been in the news briefly, is the transformation of mening of the Danish word "neger". Somehow people are starting to think it has the same sting as term referred to in the article does in the US, when actually it's purely an archaic term for someone of African origin. People are getting upset about it and giving it a meaning from another context.
"I am deeply saddened by this disturbing episode that has caused such anguish and trauma."
We should be considering the implications of this claim, if it were true. There's a generation of young adults in this country that have been brought up so emotionally weak that they can be traumatized by a white person uttering sounds that resemble the n-word.
In other words, we have given white people unimaginable powers over the psyche of young minority Americans, because of an upbringing that shielded them from racially insensitive content.
In this case, perhaps the best remedy would be exposure therapy with Russell Peters:
For laughs, there is a hundred year old Hungarian/Serbian hard candy called Negro. The author's name was Pietro Negro, and the candy is charcoal black because of liquorice and doped with menthol, which gives it a distinctive medicine taste. People love it or hate it, I love it personally. In the meantime, more flavours are developed in Serbia, with eucalyptus, peppermint, lime, caramel... And all of them called Negro because it's just a strong brand name.
Nevertheless, every once in a while there is some wiseguy trying to make a story out of it, just ruining the fun. If we really want to take that discussion, I would argue that it's actually an homage to people of color, being so popular yet unrelated to colonialism or slavery and treated like a folk remedy for a sore throat.
I (don't) look forward to the future where the translation for "I have a black car" in Spanish would be "tengo un auto n-asterisco-asterisco-asterisco-asterisco"...
If he was suspended for that, it is truly a sad day for USC. There seems to be 0 malicious intent; he's explicitly referring to "that that that" before saying it in Chinese. This is a common way of saying "um..." in fast speech. He also seems like a good professor. It's too bad some student found the need to complain when it is obvious there is no bad intent meant.
He was suspended for that??? Ridiculous. Seriously, the far left has ruined educational institutions. They are so obsessed with attacking "racism" or "hate" even when neither are involved. They don't care about context, they don't care about intent, they don't care about ANYTHING. This seriously needs to stop
As someone who is also quite a bit left, the actions of the university admins is just aggravatingly dumb. I'd ask you to have nuance and don't classify all the "left" as this idotic, hopefully you're not as reductionist as the people who got "offended"..
I'd point out parent used "Far-left" in the same way I'd use Rar-right. They absolutely would not be calling everyone to the left of center crazy, in the same way I'm sure you wouldn't say everyone who is a member of the far-right represents everyone who is right-leaning.
Assuming parent was lumping left-leaning and far-left together is hardly a good-faith interpretation of their comment
There have been tons of memes about this exact misunderstanding in SAT for a while...
The first few times I heard it (as a native English speaker) it made my head turn but it's such a commonly used part of Chinese that after hearing it for the thousandth time you stop hearing it as English.
EDIT: After watching the video I have to say that the combination of pronouncing it a bit off and surrounding it with English made it sound pretty bad on the surface, but it definitely didn't sound intentional.
It's not like he just threw it into an English sentence the way we often do with French (when it seems the mot juste) though - he was actually talking about the word and its usage!
Lmao. I go to school with a lot of mandarin speakers (CU) and it’s fun to see non-Chinese-speaker’s ears perk up when they hear something so close to a racial slur.
I made a joke about this exact scenario years ago.
> Lmao. I go to school with a lot of mandarin speakers (CU) and it’s fun to see non-Chinese-speaker’s ears perk up when they hear something so close to a racial slur.
Don't tar all non-Chinese speakers with the same brush. As far as I can tell, this is a purely American phenomenon. No other country is so addicted to taking offense that foreign languages are now danger zones.
The (feigned or insular) offense seems to be an American phenomenon, but ears perking up doesn't imply offense. Rather it implies attention, attention which should be followed by learning.
This word means "uhmm" and you can hear it dozens of times in a single conversation.
It sounds like an English-language racial slur, but you stop being surprised to hear it pretty quickly when living in China. The story isn't loading for me, so I don't know the context, if this was a native Mandarin speaker speaking in Mandarin...
Reminds me of the time someone pointed out that "salut" the french for "hi" sounds like "stupid donkey" in Mandarin (or maybe Shanghainese, I forget).
More in Shanghainese than Mandarin, a lot of my French friends were teased by their Shanghainese partners because of that.
This is really an example of a university administration that rejects culture and critical thinking in favor of quick snap judgement and celebrating ignorance. I'd expect better of universities, they should be a bastion of culture and critical thinking standing against idiocy. And instead of punishing that teacher, they should explain and make sure students understand that there are other cultures and that context matters.
The entire lead up to the professor saying it is the professor also explaining how certain cultures like in Chinese have pause words. There is absolutely all the correct context. The entire suspension is absurd.
yes, you hear it in chinese dramas all the time (which i watch subtitled), usually as a phrase trailing off ambiguously/uncertainly. the incident seems much ado about nothing.
Again, context is everything. What an utterly spineless, pathetic response from a risk averse management type - to throw their colleague under the bus.
Exactly. Otherwise it is nothing more than a politically correct reaction to everything that moves in the direction of what they think is 'offensive'. Even if it unintentionally "sounds" like it.
For the professor there is no 'Please, I can explain...' and there is no redemption. Instantly found guilty. This is the clownworld order folks.
> "...utterly spineless, pathetic response from a risk averse management type..."
the same thing happens with the corona responses of universities. colleges could open with distancing rules, sensible mask usage (inside, not outside), testing, and swift quarantine. that would basically eliminate spread in the learning environment.
the problem, of course, is outside the learning environment, where students will inevitably let their guards down and mix unsafely, but that's not the purview of the university. these are (young) adults, and the university's responsibilities end at the campus edge. what the university can do is refuse access to the infected on campus (in conjunction with plentiful testing), and provide swift and compassionate support for students who do get infected (and can't come on campus), without overstepping into paternalism.
then the responsible students will have access to the education they desire (and paid for), while the irresponsible will be denied (temporarily, likely having to repeat a semester or even a year). this will incentivize good behavior without resorting to autocratic mismanagement like this.
I did some Chinese courses last year and "na ge" is something that will get repeated frequently because of how Chinese make their sentences. There is another one "nei ge". They are an important part of the Chinese language.
Edit: just watched the video. He was not teaching a chinese course. A bit of a suspicious example he picked if you ask me.
On the other hand, if you're an African American doing a business deal in China, it is also almost certainly the best example, and might genuinely be the most valuable thing that you take away from that class. Specifically, "sometimes people speaking Mandarin say something that sounds like 'ni__er'. It is not actually 'ni__er', and is completely unrelated to my race."
That could easily be the difference between "deal" and "end of relationship".
The filler word is "nei ge" and not "neh gah". The "ge" is pronounced as "gue" and "nei" like "ney". But it might have been a totally innocent mistake.
So in Korean, the word for "you" is 니가 (pronounced "nee-gah"). Example usage: 니가 언제 먹었어요? (When did you eat? "Nee-gah un-jeh mug-uss-uh-yo") I can't help but wonder if the use of this word would also elicit a similar reaction...
EDIT: I briefly forgot this, but there is a similar Korean word "내가" which is "me" or "I", and pronounced "ne-gah". Example usage: 내가 이 밥을 먹었어요. (I ate this food. "Ne-ga ee bap-uhl mug-uss-uh-yo")
EDIT2: Korean is not my native language so forgive me for this, but "you" is usually just 니 ("nee"), and "me" or "I" is just 내 ("ne"), but the 가 ("gah") part is used like a conjunction to connect to the rest of the phrase.
EDIT3: Ok, so I talked with a better Korean speaker about this and 니가 "nee-ga" is sort of a regional dialect (kind of like a slang term) for 너가 "nuh-ga". 니가 "nee-ga" is more commonly used in southern parts of South Korea, as the proper way of saying/spelling "you" is 너가 "nuh-ga". My Korean is influenced with the southern regional dialect as my parents were from that region. Sorry for the possible confusion. (So just "you" is 너 "nuh".)
Probably not. The difference in vowel sounds, timing and intonation don't give it the same feel. It's pretty noticable when you hear Mandarin spoken because the word is usually spoken pretty quickly then the speaker trails off because they're thinking of what to say... Sometimes they say it two or three times on a row. So it really stands out.
In Korean, the vowels ㅣ (ee sound) and ㅐ (eh sound) are different in the written language. There are actually more difficult things such as ㅐ and ㅔ (both "eh" sound) which can get confusing when trying to spell Korean words. In practice, I personally don't get confused differentiating between "nee-gah" and "ne-gah", but that may have been due to me having Korean parents and being used to that terminology since birth.
I know nothing about the language being discussed here, but the answer is no, it doesn't lead to misunderstandings. How do I know this? Because it's a natural language. The language exists for no reason other than the fact that it works. If the words sounded exactly the same you could safely assume that they either communicate the difference some other way, or the difference simply does not matter to them.
An example of communicating something in a different way would be how in Spanish the pronoun is completely dropped in most cases. This is because it's completely redundant as the verb will be conjugated to include the pronoun.
An example of things not mattering is in English where we don't distinguish between rivers that flow into other rivers and rivers that flow into the sea. French speakers might be confused (how do you know whether it's a fleuve or a rivière?), but the answer is we simply don't care.
When learning a natural language, always assume that it works for them. Your aim is not to be able to translate your language to theirs, it is to be able to communicate your thoughts into their minds. Keep an open mind about what's important to transfer and how this can happen.
> but the answer is no, it doesn't lead to misunderstandings
Natural languages offer misunderstandings between native speakers all the time. A sentence like "Bajó" in Spanish or "They went downstairs" in English can have many different antecedents for the listener to choose between (bad subtitle translations can give you a master class in this). If I say "the food is hot," do I mean it's temperature-hot or spicy-hot?
I would refine your statement to simply point out that natural languages aren't damned by misunderstandings because:
(1) You have the tools to disambiguate ahead of time if you think it might be ambiguous. "Maria bajó", "Maria went downstairs", "They both went downstairs together".
(2) The listener can simply ask for clarification.
(3) It doesn't necessarily matter. The point of the story was that John couldn't enjoy the soup, not whether it was too hot or too spicy.
All that said, I think the person above was just asking how similar the pronunciation was between two words.
I wonder how those who want to find the cause of their failure in other people's success eventually deal with the fact that Nigerian immigrants into the USA are far more successful compared to African Americans while they are visually indistinguishable from them. Will the Nigerians be accused of having some form of privilege? Will they be called 'white' just like Asians are now often considered to be 'white'? Will saner minds prevail, find the reasons for their success and emulate these so they end up on the same level?
Nigerian inmigrants travelled an ocean, for sure they have money and a huge set of values, and they are not afraid at all of either racists or potential disadvantages. They had it worse in Nigeria.
Here in Spain the Nigerians are seen as hard workers with an incredible spirit of superation.
They may well be right about that, and yet there's still an obvious difference there. Also, keep in mind that immigrants tend nowadays to come from the better-off strata of their home societies. There was a study about this making the rounds just recently, but I've unfortunately forgotten what it was called.
Additionally, it's important to note that modern day racism is more damaging to already marginalized groups or those that have historically suffered from it.
In other words, a well educated Nigerian immigrant may not be damaged as much by the same level of racism as a Black person decended from slaves.
There exists an underclass in Ireland who have the same origin as the other Irish - but have many of the issues that exist in the African-American community.
Live to about 50, developed a different dialect, very high crime rate - expected to be underestimated, constant violence, high domestic abuse, high illiteracy, very large families, living in squalor.
Doesn't fit neatly into any faction's magic box of solutions.
Right explains the world by Biology. The Left explains the world by Culture. The Liberals explain the wold by Environment.
It is possible that you only need to scoop from one box to find a policy - but...
If a society has not solved a problem for a long time it's likely the solution is in higher dimensions.
Our political order is good at solving problems with 1 factor or 2 factors but I think our weakness appears when we need 3 factors simultaneously because it is not possible to select for that.
That is an odd definition of 'left', 'right' and 'liberal'. There are plenty of people on the 'right' side of the political spectrum who put far more emphasis on culture than they do on biology, I'd go so far as stating that this is the majority of those on the 'right' side. The same goes for the 'left' side, most people think in terms of culture instead of biology. It is only on the fringes of both sides of the chamber that you encounter people who put weight on biology, from 'white supremacists' and 'black supremacists' to followers of identity politics where people like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that 'white people' are by definition racist.
You need to define the term 'environment' to make clear what it is you mean here, it has far too many meanings to be useful. The essence is that the extremes on the 'left' and the 'right' bear close resemblance to each other, they use different symbology and make some different claims as to where they get their justifications from but if you remove those symbols and justifications their actions are more or less identical.
Error report. I should have switched Environment to the Left, Culture to the Liberal faction.
For the definition of Environment - it is used loosely but it is the physical facts of a location - climate, soil quality, material resources including non-human biological animals - wildlife and livestock.
Culture is a looser definition - it can mean food preparation techniques, language but also tools like combs and wheels and abstract tools in people's brains.
Nigerians today have to deal with the legacy of colonialism, war, pogroms and famine. (1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War
"The Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War and the Nigerian-Biafran War) ... between 500,000 and 3 million Biafran civilians died of starvation."
You stated that American blacks had to deal with the legacy of slavery that happened more than a century ago. The epicenter of modern day slavery is Africa, with Africans enslaving other Africans. In 2018, about 62% of the African population endured some from of slavery.
If immigrants from Africa do better than native blacks, it isn't due to the legacy of slavery. Jamaicans, Dominicans, and Haitians have endured the legacy of slavery too, yet these immigrants do better economically as well. If systematic racism was real, it would hold back all blacks.
See "Black rednecks and white liberals" by thomas sowell for more info (Thomas sowell is a black american economics professor and writer, for any in the audience who decide what is worth reading based on the skin color or ethnicity of the author)
No worries, people who decide who is worth reading based on skin color also introduced the oreo concept so their world view doesnt have to be challenged.
This offhand reason does not happen regularly. There are cases of places without historical slavery who perceived as poor workers and places with historical slavery who are known for their work ethics.
Here's a fight(more like an assault on the elderly) that broke out between a black American on a South Korean bus because the elderly people, who probably don't speak a word of English or know English racial slurs, referred to him as "you" in their own language in their own country: https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/88xlz4/a_bl...
I've always found the US obsession with taboo words quite baffling. I used to tease Americans of my acquaintance by pretending to be offended when they said "oh my god" (dildo in French) or nick (fuck.)
Context matters a lot in linguistic, and the Sapir-Worff hypothesis is not just unproven, it's almost certainly completely wrong.
The Norwegian word for blacks used to be something that isn't allowed to be uttered anymore. It started becoming a problem only after we got a few black American migrants, and other migrants influenced by American culture to Norway. These people didn't understand the context of the word, and so they became violently offended when anyone used the word, even if the the word has always been a completely harmless description and not a slur within Norwegian culture. (Trust me, you'd know if a slur was used!) But because it offended so many newcommers, and since a synonym was readily available, Norwegians didn't think it was a hill worth dying on, and so they just cut it out of everday use. Today it is regarded as a big faux pas to use the word. Meanwhile some Norwegians still feel offended that foreigners who do not understand their culture, take to dictating how Norwegians should or should not speak. Personally I honestly don't know which is worse; offending someone because you said something with the best of intentions, or forcing someone to submit to arbitrary rules to avoid that they get offended, even if you utter such words with the best of intentions.
Uttering a word someone finds offensive "with the best intentions" doesn't make it less offensive. If you continue to utter the word, then your intentions are probably not as pure as you think.
I am guessing the word here is "neger", and is more akin to the US use of the word "negro" than the slur "Nier"[looks like HN censors even my censored version of the slur to "Nier"]. Even in the US "negro" has mostly fallen out of general use, and is considered derogatory in most casual contexts.
As mentioned in sibling thread, unless GP is 80 years old and has had their head in the sand for the last 30 of them, the word in question is likely "svart" (black) rather than "neger" (negro).
It would have been nice if GP had actually noted the word, and no they do not need to be 80 years old to have possibly meant "neger", it depends I guess on their intentions...
Edit: Frankly I am not sure why they would have meant "svart" while blaming specifically "American migrants". It seems "neger" would be much more immediately offensive to someone coming from the US.
If the speakers knows they are causing offense by using a word that was used to subjugate slaves, it starts to look like an extension of that racial subjugation. The word was used by speakers of a different language, and didn’t historically have the same meaning in Norway. But given the increased cultural and economic integration present in modern society, we all have to become a little bit aware of issues that are affecting people we interact with, in order to be decent citizens. At the same time, if somebody doesn’t know the pain they are causing, we should inform them with kindness and forgiveness.
After the Holocaust, some terms historically used to describe Jewish people became verboten, essentially out of respect for the serious nature of the consequences of anti-Semitism. Do you think it’s unjust that this cultural prohibition extends to nations that didn’t participate in the Holocaust? Might it be appropriate to treat the international calamity that is slavery with the same seriousness?
To answer your question more directly: The onus is mostly on the people who were subjugated to continue suffering the lasting effects of that. The burden on the people who find out that a word they use causes harm seems quite small in comparison (a good example of a “first world problem”). Whether that burden is too harsh to bear is up to each individual.
I think "cultural prohibition" of words is generally bad, extending to words that are forbidden in the US. The idea of "privileged words" that only a subset of people can utter is ridiculous to me. It's particularly egregious when it is essentially American imperialism on language used in other countries.
> To answer your question more directly: The onus is mostly on the people who were subjugated to continue suffering the lasting effects of that.
They are required to suffer the lasting effects of racist policies past or present. There is zero responsibility to be offended by homonyms of offensive terms.
> The burden on the people who find out that a word they use causes harm seems quite small in comparison (a good example of a “first world problem”). Whether that burden is too harsh to bear is up to each individual.
There shouldn't be a burden on them, period. A person being offended by homonyms is a result of their own stupidity. The only exception to that being someone saying said homonyms in bad faith... which clearly isn't the case here.
I don’t believe it’s the case for the Chinese phrase in the original post, given that it’s such a basic filler word that is ingrained in the minds of all speakers. In the case of the Norwegian word, which actually has the same etymology and definition, with just a connotation that differs regionally, I think people can’t plead ignorance in good faith once they are made aware of the modern global context. This is especially true of any “holdouts” after the word becomes taboo.
Yeah, and etymologically the n-word shares the same origin as "neger", "negro", and "negre" which all originate from the latin "niger." Ultimately their usage in Norwegian, Spanish, French, and Latin are not the same as the n-word in English, which is used in very specific contexts and almost always in reference to people.
> I think people can’t plead ignorance in good faith once they are made aware of the modern global context.
It's not a global context. It's an American context. Chinese people aren't thinking about the n-word at all and a black American living in China would be expected to adapt to the reality that the word is neither offensive nor is it on Chinese people to adjust their behavior to make them feel better. The issue is once again with the person who takes offense.
Forcing people to change their entire language to accommodate a group (especially one that is completely foreign) is asinine.
> The idea of "privileged words" that only a subset of people can utter is ridiculous to me.
This comment made me stop to think. Thanks for that.
When I zoom out and try to generalize, I think:
- "can utter": it is not so much about what you can officially say or not say, but rather what is socially acceptable, whatever your social context is. For example, if you're a priest, saying "fuck" in a sermon would probably be frowned upon or worse. Even more so if they continued to do so even after being told by their congregation or colleagues that it is not acceptable.
- "privileged words": I don't have children, but I suspect there are words that parents (and "society") prefer their kids don't say and even reprimand them for it. Whether or not that restriction is a bad thing (limiting free speech?) I cannot say for sure yet, but it seems that privileged words, as you say it, emerge. I haven't thought more about other examples beyond children (maybe there aren't any) or whether the children example is invalid.
That seems like an unreasonable statement when meeting a culture that's not your own. Let's say you're offended by the word "blank" because of cultural transgressions that have happened throughout the last 100 years of history in your country.
You then emigrate to a different culture that hasn't experienced the context of these transgressions. The word "blank" is in their language used in a purely descriptive sense. You make it very clear to everyone you meet that you find their word for "blank" offensive, but the local alternatives are more clumsy and those who try to use them will likely confuse or be misunderstood.
I don't consider it reasonable to expect others to conform to your offense in this case; it's a case of forcing a cultural context onto a culture where it doesn't apply.
Americans have a bit of a reputation for this kind of thing, unfortunately. Probably due to the massive export of American culture that was alluded to elsewhere.
There is obviously nuance, but if the word sounds like a slur, and is used generally to describe people of a certain race, then the offended can certainly express their offense, and the culture should consider the offended person's position.
In this case I am pretty sure the word is "neger", and yeah, I don't think we should mourn or handwring over any sort of great loss of Norweigian culture/heritage that has occurred due to them being more sensitive to using that word to describe black people. Cultures evolve.
Looking into it, it does not look like this is solely influenced by American "cultural colonialism". Objections to the use have also been from black people who are not from the US. There may be some level of cultural ignorance regarding the connotations of the term, and its place in history. It seems "Americanisation" is often blamed, and "best/good intentions" used as an excuse to continue to use a word that offends.
There is an interesting paper by Marianne Gullestad that goes into some of the previous historical debate over the term, it is not newly controversial. Culture continues to evolve.
The word in question is not "neger", it's "svart". Translating to "negro" and "black", respectively. The former has been considered old-fashioned or pejorative for a couple of decades, the latter has only recently become disputed.
The politically correct version for "svart", would be "med mørk hudfarge" ("with dark skin color") or, if you want to push the edge of propritey, "mørkhudet" ("dark-skinned").
And sure. If someone takes offense or are clearly hurt by it, it's not like I'll go out of my way to insult them. But it's five syllables where one would convey the same meaning, without any intention of offense. It's not a hill I'd choose to die on, but as a matter of principle... I'd very much prefer if we wouldn't adopt an excessive fear of insult here.
I'm pretty sure that most people who take offense at this, are taking offense on behalf of others. Which is in itself a somewhat superior or paternalistic attitude that I'm not sure that all minorities appreciate.
It seems "neger" was still debatable according to this reddit thread from 2012 https://www.reddit.com/r/Norway/comments/ylcpw/what_do_i_cal... and Marrianne Gullstead paper seemed to indicate it was still being hotly debated in the early 2000s, not that it had fallen completely out of fashion by then. It sounds like the situation is still evolving. Is there anything that highlights the controversy around "svart"?
The main point was that if you continue to use a word that someone described as offensive to them then it's hard to argue "best intentions", and it comes off as either laziness or disdain for that person.
You can take those offended by proxy with a grain of salt, but in some cases there is truth behind what they are saying, and it should still be considered.
Disdain for the use of "neger" in Norway was actually prompted largely by internal groups, not "American imperialism". The historical context around how the word developed does not put it in the best light. It's antiquated at best, and derogatory/offensive at worst.
The same happened in Italy, but I think that the change happened after dubbed American movies started using the Italian word to translate the n word. This associated the originally neutral word to offensive contexts, so the word meaning started changing for those who learned it in those contexts.
I think what the original author is hinting at is happening for years now. Maybe op meant something like Negerkuss or Mohrenkopf (Negerkuss now is Schokokuss or Aufgeschaeumte Zuckermasse mit Schokoglasur) and Zigeuner-Sausse/Schnitzel (this one was only recently).
And yes I got the feeling that american culture and american "stuff" is slowly but surely pouring over and I hope that misused words like the now "default meaning" of racism (racism in america can now "only be applied" to minorities whereas, of course, racism can in every country of the world can be had against any other "race") will stay an american thing and not be copied by us.
I know of both of these and don’t find them comparable in any way. Both words (Neger and Zigeuner) have, all my life, been used as derogatory words to describe certain people.
Also with sexuality. My worry is that with the American cultural imperialism through Hollywood our European liberal approach to sexuality will become more puritanical. E.g. sex only after 18, teenage sex is more or less illegal (19y/o with a 17y/o).
Friends of mine already think that American laws around sexuality are valid worldwide and sex with an under-18 is forbidden. Which is absolutely false in the case of Germany.
Please don't add flamebait. If you want to make a factual point, great, but do so without swipes. We don't need regional flamewars here, or nationalistic flamewars, or any flamewars.
That's trivially disproven. Using the snake graph from fivethrityeight[1] as a proxy for "crazy conservative"-ness, three[2] of the top five liberal states don't have "strict age cutoffs" (which I interpret as having a lower age of consent that's limited by the partner's page). On the other hand, three[3] of the top five conservative states do have "strict age cutoffs".
Age of consent in the US varies from state to state, with the lowest being, I believe 14 years old in some states. The "18 or older" mentality probably has more to do with working in porn, hence all the "barely 18" type labels.
I also found it very baffling from a French standpoint. Obviously, spouting out des "gros mots" in polite society is frowned upon but the the magical thinking around 4 letter words in the US is on a whole other level.
The country was founded by puritans and it still shows in many ways.
>I've always found the US obsession with taboo words quite baffling
Once a puritan, always a puritan. Religion inspired worldviews get dilluted into the general culture and inspire even those that don't believe (and in the US, where assimilation is everything, even those that come from other cultures).
It didn't disappear. I still constantly hear and see in the internet usage of негр, нига or нигер (transliteration of the n-word). But the meaning always depends on the context, most of the time it is neutral - just referring to a black person, sometimes negative - infamous S.L. Jackson phrase "что этот ниггер себе позволяет", and sometimes positive: "нига, как дела" - can be equivalents to "what's up, bro", it's rarely used as joke-greeting.
Local blacks don't seem to mind when someone call them this way, because it rarely has negative connotations.
I can't tell if you're being serious, but that link is one person saying that they think a group should move away from using some terminology, that's a bit of a leap from "You cannot say these words."
Here's a definitive source... The word originated from French military slang in 1918 from Algeria. Something about getting shot in the back. The abbreviations in the etymology section of the page are hard to make out
There aren't that many taboo words in America. You can validate that by watching a few episodes of most any Netflix or cable tv drama. Europe, however, actually has illegal words. It is illegal to say heil hitler in germany or display nazi symbols. And I believe france has certain english words banned from official use.
那个 is the chinese equivalent to "uh/um". Just imagine how many times a probably nervous professor would say "uh/um" during a lecture. The professor also is likely not great at english or has a strong accent.
Not sure how anyone could mistake this for a racial slur with hateful intent.
Like.. in Spanish the word "negro" is "black". Can Spanish teachers now no longer use that word? Crazy.
It's like when chat filters (e.g in games) censor words based on the 'English' language. When I chat in dutch / flemish, my friends just see me censored for quite common words in our language. And they're often not even spelled the same as the English word that is bad.
25 years ago (give or take), a man filed a lawsuit against Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia. He was helping his son write a report on Niger but accidentally added a letter. The emotional distress it caused to him and his son led to the lawsuit.
From what I can tell, those countries are now racist based on their names and should be fired.
History books should be burned.
No human should ever speak to another human again.
But we all need to be in offices in close quarters once the pandemic ends, so that we can fire each other for accidental using the word "she" in a conversation.
> It's like when chat filters (e.g in games) censor words based on the 'English' language. When I chat in dutch / flemish, my friends just see me censored for quite common words in our language.
I'm Dutch and play AoE2 with some friends. The in game chat is basically useless for us. Just about every Dutch sentence will be blocked.
We tried switching to English, but every color (!) is now also banned. Asking "who is joining the blue team?" will become censored... Good job Microsoft.
> "Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better."
It's unbelievable that this "understandably" caused pain to anyone. There is a linked recording of him using the term. Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.
The dean and faculty should stand behind the professor and educate whoever got upset about this that you can not expect punishment for obvious misunderstandings.
Also, it might be really helpful to add (nà ge) to the title as it's impossible to make out the essence of the article for anyone who doesn't know the logographics.
> this "excuse letter" looks exactly like what a victim of a sham trial would write
As far as I see the letter behind the link was written by the "judge" in this "trial": "Geoff Garrett,
Dean" -- it's he who wrote:
"Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students."
Depending on the Mandarin dialect, it can sound almost exactly the same (as many Chinese people had discovered in English-speaking countries). I guess that what’s happened. We Russians are usually told to never say the Russian word for “book” while in the US, or there will be consequences :)
There's a common strain of thought in the US that it's actually a sign of maturity to be pained and upset by words. Immature people, the theory goes, don't have enough empathy to understand why a common word in a foreign language could be so hurtful.
This is hardly surprising. We used to have lots of civil social discourse. Media, elites, and intellectuals would engage in such discourse and would present sometimes opposing thoughts. Only with such discourse will there be no room for radicals. And look what's been happening, moderates of a few years ago would be considered far-right today. Anyone with different opinions, now matter what reasons they offer, will be labeled with the usual: bigot, racist, fascist, and xenophobia. Media like WaPo and NYT and CNN published all kinds of articles that argue XXX is racism, like milk, like maths, like interior design.
I think you're making your own counterargument: if you prioritize civil discourse, you necessarily exclude radicals - you've limited the space of discourse by insisting that the only acceptable propositions are those that people can reliably be civil about. Fewer people were making extreme claims, but many of those extreme claims could have been debated rationally, were people interested in doing so. It is a Potemkin discourse: it looks very peaceful and respectable, but it looks that way because it's artificially removed from actually discussing the state of our society.
So, I am happy to engage you in debate, and I'll even do your job for you by trying to precisely name the propositions that you think are so obviously incorrect.
Most of the hits I see for "milk is racist" is about the alt-right using milk drinking as essentially an aesthetic symbol, which seems like a) a factual observation b) not a claim about milk itself being racist, but about its adoption as a racist symbol.
I see a 2016 CNN article called "math is racist," which, if you read it, is clearly arguing that mathematical models are being used in ways that reinforce racism, not that the brute facts of mathematics are themselves racist, either. This argument is generally widely accepted, so I'm curious if you disagree with it.
I can't find any articles about interior design being racist, but I do see articles about the interior design industry confronting race problems. This doesn't sound surprising or extreme either - I'd expect that most industries have race problems of some sort.
You'll note that I have not called you bigot, racist, fascist, nor xenophobia [sic], and I'd appreciate if you returned the favor and engaged my arguments on the merits.
There's also the moving goalposts of what's considered "extremist", especially where it's reduced around extremely small confines of acceptability, and invoking long-tail assumptions as direct accusations of intent against people.
Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.
(The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)
> Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-.... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.
I don't think anyone thinks the "math is racist" article is uncivil. I think they think it's stupid. And the title "math is racist" is pretty undeniably laughable.
The content of the article "Sometimes mathematical tools are used to reinforce aspects of racial inequality" is much more reasonable. But people dislike this because it's a motte and bailey argument - the headline "math is racist" is a ridiculous proposition that is totally unsupported by the content of the article.
> (The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)
There is no serious argument that 'math' is racist. There are serious arguments that mathematical tools have been and are used to reinforce racial inequality. That is nowhere near the same thing as "math is racist".
It's a completely clickbait headline (like most things you'll find on sensationalist outlets like CNN). If you read the full article, there's not anything like a claim that "math is racist".
My only takeaway from this is just another point to deduct from CNN's credibility, rather than that this author is saying "math is racist".
> Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.
In the linked video it sounds exactly like the slur, To a surprising extent.
It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!
I’d be surprised just to hear a word sounding like “fuck” in the middle of a chinese class, although it’s probably not considered as offensive.
It doesnt surprise me at all that some people were upset and it seems very unwise on the part of the professor, who would surely know that this would provoke a reaction. A suspension from teaching his one class for a term will defuse the situation and perhaps he can return to teaching after.
>It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!
What possible other details could there be? We literally have the recording of what happened before. He explains that there is a filler word in chinese, gives the english translation and then the chinese word. Do you really think it's reasonable to expect an additional warning? Should every philosophy lecture come with a short preface that the word 'Kant' may come up and is not intended to cause any harm? (mind you, the dean's letter is actually way more strict: it literally straight up says that these words are 'unacceptable', no qualification about a warning or anything).
Hell, how far do you think this should go? If a student has a potentially offensive sounding name, do they have to give a warning before they introduce themselves? Or should they have to anglicize their name?
In the video it was clearly preceded by "in Chinese". And he was talking the whole time about filler worlds. Clearly, context has been established. And the audience of a communications class at university level can be expected to understand that other languages contain words that might sound offensive to English native speakers. Do people really think Prof. Patton intended to insult people of color, in an online class? Are people really getting offended when Chinese use 那个, or when they overhear Russians discuss кни́ги? Will I get censored for merely mentioning these words and not child-proofing my post with "warning: words in this post might be considered offensive"?
I think that microaggressions are real, that language really has import, and I've been noticing those kinds of things more and more on a daily basis. But this is entirely unwarranted and a gross overreaction.
Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebook news feeds. I can easily imagine the headline "Marshall School of Business refuses to discipline lecturer who repeatedly said the n-word in class" followed by a dissembling write-up of angry students and vague mentions of the fact it wasn't intentional. This kind of thing can turn into a reputational firestorm and do real long-term damage to student recruitment.
Deans of educational institutions are between a rock and a hard place. If they were in charge of the narrative, it would be possible to be reasonable and say "This wasn't something to be upset about, and here's why". But they rarely are in charge of the narrative and want to shut these issues down as quickly as possible.
I can imagine a reasonable way forward might be to get the students and lecturer together to talk over the issues, and have a nuanced discussion about differing languages, much like what's happening in some of the comments here. But by the time you've organised that the firestorm is well underway and the damage is already done.
But that kind of controversy is supposed to be a good thing for universities! I'm not saying you're wrong as a matter of organizational dynamics, but it reads to me like an explanation of why a liquor store owner might prefer to only sell soft drinks. What's the point of a university where ideas can't be freely discussed?
Frankly, the point of the university today is to provide a service for paying customers. When you see a job posting that says that a bachelor's degree in such-and-such field is required, the employer is hardly asking to get candidates who have spent four years freely discussing ideas like they're one of the figures in The School of Athens; they're asking to get candidates who know certain things and have experience doing a bit more self-directed work than they would in high school. (That's also why the university degree can be reduced to a GPA instead of a dissertation or set of publications.)
Now, it's definitely a problem for society that people who want to spend their lives engaging in academic debate, which is a thing we should encourage, can rarely find a job that supports them in doing so, and the closest they can find is providing vocational training to 20-year-olds who are ready to leave the academy once they've received the service they've paid for. But it doesn't really help either the professor or the student to pretend that the modern undergraduate classroom is anything else.
(Slight correction, this is an MBA class, not undergrad.)
This decision doesn't even make sense from the perspective of vocational training. Being able to hear 那个 without great pain and upset is a directly job-applicable communication tool - there are many jobs working with Mandarin speakers that students won't be able to handle if the word traumatizes them.
This seems like a perfect example of why micro-aggressions are bullshit. Any right-thinking person can see that those taking offence to this are wrong, while the theory of micro-aggressions posits that because they are offended their feelings are valid and the professor must be in the wrong.
That's not the way I understand microaggressions, which aren't to do with whether someone is offended or not. The idea is that if, for example, you're black, and day in, day out, there are lots of little things that on their own aren't worth being upset about (for example, people not holding the door for you, pushing in front of you in line, crossing the road rather than walk past you, assume you're low-level staff rather than a manager) it's the cumulative effects of those small - micro - things that really adds up. The whole idea is that they don't matter on their own, and if they were the exception rather than the rule then they'd be easy to ignore.
In terms of what you're saying about this particularly case it's pretty simple - what happened here is not a micro-aggression because it's not aggressive at all, so the use of the term here by the dean is simply wrong.
> Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal or behavioural indignities, whether intentional or unintentional
It’s the unintentional part that I take issue with, which means that it’s not on you to understand the context of my statement, it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.
I agree that your definition makes perfect sense but I don’t think the sort of people who spend a lot of time worrying about micro-aggressions agree that the intention of the “aggressor” matters, as is perfectly evinced by this situation:
> “We would rather not take his course than to endure the emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcome environment for us Black students.”
I think at some level this comes down to the age old argument of Ignorance vs the Common Good.
An extreme but relevant example: If a person is ignorant of the harmfulness of bleach, and injects their children with it with intent to cure an ailment, are they guilty of a crime? If so, is it the crime of being ignorant?
So from that lens, can a person act aggressively without intending to? In a technical sense, I think not. Aggression is, by definition, a state of intent. When we say "act aggressively", we likely mean "act in a way that suggests an aggressive intent". It's our interpretation of intent based on action.
An important note here is that it's our interpretation of someone else's intent.
I don't think emotional offence should be treated exactly like physical harm. Different people may take offence from different actions, and it's not fair to require everyone to judge accurately what is and what is not offensive to all the other people they're going to interact with, especially in a society that is aiming for diversity. In East Asia, where most people think alike, it's easier to guess people's reaction, but it's definitely not so in other parts of the world.
For physical harm, however, ignorance should not be an excuse. It may reduce the responsibility, but it should not completely remove it. Not knowing something can kill doesn't change the fact that one had actually killed.
I don't know where you get the impression that in East Asia most people think alike, though I won't call it microaggression but rather self-centered cluelessness. Agree with your other points though.
> it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.
This is the crux of the matter for me.
It seems to me that an American professor teaching Chinese should be well aware that repeating a word that sounds like “nigger” might cause offence, and that therefore it would be wise to discuss this beforehand.
Its far from “impossible” to imagine that this situation would arise.
>I agree that your definition makes perfect sense but I don’t think the sort of people who spend a lot of time worrying about micro-aggressions agree that the intention of the “aggressor” matters, as is perfectly evinced by this situation:
Let's not paint everyone with the same brush.
Lots of people are going to be upset by a lifetime of daily microaggressions - and rightfully so! - that are not going to be upset that a different language that has a word that sounds vaguely like a slur.
Some people will. I won't say they're wrong to have a gut reaction to hearing a word and misunderstanding it as something else. But I do think that they do need to understand that the word they heard isn't the word they thought they heard, and work from there.
But I don't think it's fair to say that everyone concerned with microaggressions in general will also fail to understand that 那个 is not the slur that it somewhat sounds like.
> It’s the unintentional part that I take issue with, which means that it’s not on you to understand the context of my statement, it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.
I don't know that that is the only way to interpret how to behave.
Another way to think about it is simply to be aware that a colleague or friend from the non-dominant group (e.g. a woman, a Romani person in Germany, a Spanish speaker in the USA) experience many things every day that makes them feel less worthy, less welcome, on the outs so to speak, not because of the content of their mind and heart, but because of the group they were born into (I can give countless examples I've heard from friends & colleagues, if you're curious).
Now that you and I have that awareness, we can decide whether and how we can be supportive and add to that load. It could even be as simple as acknowledging when I see it.
Maybe if you can imagine that this is your significant other or child - what would you want for them?
If you don't understand micro-agressions, then you don't understand bullying. Because that's all micro-agressions are. Unintentional bullying.
Intentionality is not relevant with micro-agressions. Parse the nomenclature all you like, but people unintentionally cause harm all the time.
The issue is when as a society, those things are so commonplace that they repeat over and over in a constant loop.
For example, if someone accidentally bumps into you while passing you on the sidewalk, it's no big deal, they apologize and both people move on. Now imagine that everywhere you go, people keep bumping into you and apologizing all day long, multiple times a day.
You know no one means anything by it, but the aggregate of all that bumping is terribly frustrating and you can't even take it out on any individual person because you know they didn't mean it.
That's what many minorities deal with. And white people are completely clueless to what they are doing.
No one is talking about punishing the micro-agressors. Just educating them so we can minimize the distributed bullying campaign that we have been subjecting people to and give them some breathing room.
If they are really worried about such headlines, I can tell you the next escalation level: geography lecturer dismissed because of using an N word (northpol)
To have Prof. Patton suspend for this, I'd argue this has cause great pain to Chinese speaker to see a legitimate phrase, correctly used and taught (by a foreigner no less), be deemed racially inflammatory, with the Prof. suspended.
Two possible futures for ill-informed over-political correctness:
1. It continues to be pushed by those at the tops of organizations, which leads to a new pseudo-language of baby-talk that is constructed to be as inoffensive as possible. Simultaneously a ‘black market’ counter-culture emerges of those who don’t comply.
2. The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being offended and move on.
> The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being offended and move on.
You'd hope so. But that complaint in the article might have happened regardless: it only takes a few indefatigable die-hards to keep that machine going.
With Twitter, now all it takes is one person and maybe 100 stars (none of which may actually be real). The "mouthpiece of democracy" is completely broken.
It's pushed by the top because it's virtue signaling. To stay silent is to be complicit. Yet at the same time it's a lot cheaper than actual change. And bored administrators can spend money on PR campaigns and harass lecturers and researchers, and go home to their comfy house and continue to vote to support their own lifestyle.
Some time ago a fellow countryman, a basketball player, made it into NBA. After a controversial ruling by a judge that one of his teammates performed a foul, he kept yelling "ni ga, ni ga, ni ga". Contextually translated, he meant "he hadn't touched him".
He had to apologize profusely and explain to no end what he meant. Regardless, his career was soon over after that.
We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :(
>We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :(
And it's in English as well. Growing up in Europe but heavily influenced by American Music, Movies, TV and Internet one grows up thinking that N----- or Nigga is fine to use. You hear it all the time, especially in music.
Couple that with the fact that we don't really have "career-ending words" in Europe and it leads to a lot of awkward moments. You can't even say the word, and Americans tend to censor the word even when anonymously typing it online. I did because this is an American forum, but it's really weird to see to be honest. You can't even say the word as part of a debate over the word.
The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...
Yeah, I also noticed that Americans tend to handle every taboo word like "Voldemort". From when I was kid I always found it so odd how Americans use all of these one-letter variants of their taboo words (n-word, f-word, etc) even when everyone involved in the conversation is an adult and should be able to handle a bad word. It's one of the weirdest parts of their culture to me.
One way to think about it is that there's almost no context where it would be constructive for a non-Black person to use the word (including singing a song, for example). Why? Because there is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context.
That's why the n-word euphemism was created and is the norm. It provides an acceptable replacement. When someone violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for a large group.
> A while back a Dutch coach was forced to resign after using the word because it was in a song: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/18/fc-cincinna....
> The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...
From the article (emphasis mine): "Jans is alleged to have used the slur while singing along to a track being played in the Cincinnati locker room. A player is understood to have told Jans, who is Dutch, about the significance of the n-word in America. Jans is also understood to have made an inappropriate remark about slavery during a team visit to memorials in Washington DC in October.
I do not know what the details are around "inappropriate remark about slavery", but if I was a player (esp. a black player), I would find it difficult to respect that coach.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadEdit: TIL there's a Wikipedia article dedicated to the "r after every word" in Beijing dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua
Source: lived in Beijing for 5 years & wife is from Beijing.
http://baike.baidu.com/l/DQeulhMm
There is of course no issue at all.
If you listen to any native Mandarin speakers for more than 5 minutes you'll likely hear this word. If anything, being educated of it's existence allows you to recognize it as a legit word used in every Mandarin and not freak out when you hear Chinese people talking and think they're talking smack about black people.
This whole thing is just silly.
I can’t think of why you’d report this unless you had a serious issue with the lecturer or they were being purposefully inappropriate.
'Eh, what's that.. that, uh, the name of that function?'
It's pretty easy to mishear it, but 99% of the time you can see from the context that they're not just wildly dropping n-bombs..
If private universities want to fire people for ridiculous reasons that's bad but should be legal. However it's disgusting the government supports them.
This was apparently written by a university dean, in a Western country, in 2020. Not during the Dark Ages or the Inquisition, in 2020.
Assuming it's true, if that does not make people pause and doubt human progress, I don't know what will.
"We will start the Danish course with the numbers. En, to, tre, fire, fem, fem plus en, syv, otte, ni, ti."
Some good resources:
Spaced Repetition
* Duolingo
* Anki - there are Danish decks readily available online
Textbooks
* Danish: An Essential Grammar (excellent, but too dense for younger kids)
* På vej til dansk (listening exercises, accessible to all)
Websites
* ordnet.dk: excellent online Danish dictionary - I find the phonetic transcriptions invaluable - while they may be inaccessible to younger children anyone can benefit from the plentiful audio snippets. I use this [1] greasemonkey script to help easily download the audio clips when they are particularly helpful, for example as exemplars of particular vowels.
* Wiktionary: A reasonable source of translations for Danish. A good accompaniment to Den Danske Ordbog. The IPA transcriptions don't tend to be quite as good as the ordbog though and there are some surprising gaps.
* Google Translate: Useful as a starting point, although I don't treat it as authoritative.
Misc
* Radio - DR P6 Beat - I'm only able to understand the odd word but I still find this useful for getting to grips with the sound of spoken Danish. Also they play pretty good music (although in case anyone from P6 Beat is reading, the correct number of times to play 'Brimful of Asha (Fatboy Slim Remix)' in a day is not 3).
* Reddit - /r/Denmark - I use this as an accessible font of colloquial Danish.
* Twitter - I follow Danish journalists for the sports I enjoy (Grand Prix racing and road cycling) to get repeated exposure to small fragments of Danish through the day.
Hope this helps :-)
[1] https://pastebin.com/raw/LygwA6bN
You will probably need a native speaker to help your pronunciation, especially for the 42 vowels, and the soft D, and stød.
For my first year studying Danish in Denmark, I could only speak "foreigner Danish" -- the bad accent that, somehow, other foreigners seem to understand (perhaps because we have a limited vocabulary) but which causes Danes to look confused, and repeat what they said in English.
Check out this guy, he's making good progress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwS4d_p90o
Before I moved to Denmark, an hour with a Swede plus reading the back of Lonely Planet taught me enough Swedish reading and pronunciation to order food in the airport in Swedish. Danish takes weeks or months of exposure to get an ear for the language, plus more weeks/months of practise to be understood.
It's certainly possible; I know adults from all over Europe whose can speak Danish from reasonably to very well. It does take more effort and more motivation than elsewhere.
(I wrote professional, since this is based on a typical situation of a couple of hours of Danish class a week, plus homework. I can't compare children, other workers, refugees etc, as their situation is so different.)
It should be the same word in Danish, too.
I've seen native English speakers giggle at that word, for obvious reasons -- when this word pops up all of a sudden while in a mass transit, and one interprets it as an English word, the association is truly bizarre.
But of course the word obviously does not mean some kind of a prostitute central, just like "nà ge" is not part of rap music lyrics.
The town of Middelfart is reasonable compensation.
We should be considering the implications of this claim, if it were true. There's a generation of young adults in this country that have been brought up so emotionally weak that they can be traumatized by a white person uttering sounds that resemble the n-word.
In other words, we have given white people unimaginable powers over the psyche of young minority Americans, because of an upbringing that shielded them from racially insensitive content.
In this case, perhaps the best remedy would be exposure therapy with Russell Peters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrsWp07BwVk
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/The_fil...
Nevertheless, every once in a while there is some wiseguy trying to make a story out of it, just ruining the fun. If we really want to take that discussion, I would argue that it's actually an homage to people of color, being so popular yet unrelated to colonialism or slavery and treated like a folk remedy for a sore throat.
Assuming parent was lumping left-leaning and far-left together is hardly a good-faith interpretation of their comment
The first few times I heard it (as a native English speaker) it made my head turn but it's such a commonly used part of Chinese that after hearing it for the thousandth time you stop hearing it as English.
EDIT: After watching the video I have to say that the combination of pronouncing it a bit off and surrounding it with English made it sound pretty bad on the surface, but it definitely didn't sound intentional.
I made a joke about this exact scenario years ago.
Don't tar all non-Chinese speakers with the same brush. As far as I can tell, this is a purely American phenomenon. No other country is so addicted to taking offense that foreign languages are now danger zones.
It sounds like an English-language racial slur, but you stop being surprised to hear it pretty quickly when living in China. The story isn't loading for me, so I don't know the context, if this was a native Mandarin speaker speaking in Mandarin...
Reminds me of the time someone pointed out that "salut" the french for "hi" sounds like "stupid donkey" in Mandarin (or maybe Shanghainese, I forget).
This is really an example of a university administration that rejects culture and critical thinking in favor of quick snap judgement and celebrating ignorance. I'd expect better of universities, they should be a bastion of culture and critical thinking standing against idiocy. And instead of punishing that teacher, they should explain and make sure students understand that there are other cultures and that context matters.
Why do humans always allow this to happen? The easiest way to shut down those bureaucrats is to ask publicly what their actual intellectual output is.
They often tend to get very silent. Also works for whip crackers in the software industry.
Exactly. Otherwise it is nothing more than a politically correct reaction to everything that moves in the direction of what they think is 'offensive'. Even if it unintentionally "sounds" like it.
For the professor there is no 'Please, I can explain...' and there is no redemption. Instantly found guilty. This is the clownworld order folks.
It is all they can do.
the same thing happens with the corona responses of universities. colleges could open with distancing rules, sensible mask usage (inside, not outside), testing, and swift quarantine. that would basically eliminate spread in the learning environment.
the problem, of course, is outside the learning environment, where students will inevitably let their guards down and mix unsafely, but that's not the purview of the university. these are (young) adults, and the university's responsibilities end at the campus edge. what the university can do is refuse access to the infected on campus (in conjunction with plentiful testing), and provide swift and compassionate support for students who do get infected (and can't come on campus), without overstepping into paternalism.
then the responsible students will have access to the education they desire (and paid for), while the irresponsible will be denied (temporarily, likely having to repeat a semester or even a year). this will incentivize good behavior without resorting to autocratic mismanagement like this.
Edit: just watched the video. He was not teaching a chinese course. A bit of a suspicious example he picked if you ask me.
That could easily be the difference between "deal" and "end of relationship".
EDIT: I briefly forgot this, but there is a similar Korean word "내가" which is "me" or "I", and pronounced "ne-gah". Example usage: 내가 이 밥을 먹었어요. (I ate this food. "Ne-ga ee bap-uhl mug-uss-uh-yo")
EDIT2: Korean is not my native language so forgive me for this, but "you" is usually just 니 ("nee"), and "me" or "I" is just 내 ("ne"), but the 가 ("gah") part is used like a conjunction to connect to the rest of the phrase.
EDIT3: Ok, so I talked with a better Korean speaker about this and 니가 "nee-ga" is sort of a regional dialect (kind of like a slang term) for 너가 "nuh-ga". 니가 "nee-ga" is more commonly used in southern parts of South Korea, as the proper way of saying/spelling "you" is 너가 "nuh-ga". My Korean is influenced with the southern regional dialect as my parents were from that region. Sorry for the possible confusion. (So just "you" is 너 "nuh".)
EDIT4: PSY (of Gangnam Style fame) has a song titled "Champion" that uses 니가 "nee-ga" a lot:https://youtu.be/uA4fV7Y14eg?t=49
I speak no Korean at all, but had no trouble telling them apart. Speakers of the language will undoubtedly be more competent than me.
https://translate.google.com/#view=home&op=translate&sl=auto...
An example of communicating something in a different way would be how in Spanish the pronoun is completely dropped in most cases. This is because it's completely redundant as the verb will be conjugated to include the pronoun.
An example of things not mattering is in English where we don't distinguish between rivers that flow into other rivers and rivers that flow into the sea. French speakers might be confused (how do you know whether it's a fleuve or a rivière?), but the answer is we simply don't care.
When learning a natural language, always assume that it works for them. Your aim is not to be able to translate your language to theirs, it is to be able to communicate your thoughts into their minds. Keep an open mind about what's important to transfer and how this can happen.
Natural languages offer misunderstandings between native speakers all the time. A sentence like "Bajó" in Spanish or "They went downstairs" in English can have many different antecedents for the listener to choose between (bad subtitle translations can give you a master class in this). If I say "the food is hot," do I mean it's temperature-hot or spicy-hot?
I would refine your statement to simply point out that natural languages aren't damned by misunderstandings because:
(1) You have the tools to disambiguate ahead of time if you think it might be ambiguous. "Maria bajó", "Maria went downstairs", "They both went downstairs together".
(2) The listener can simply ask for clarification.
(3) It doesn't necessarily matter. The point of the story was that John couldn't enjoy the soup, not whether it was too hot or too spicy.
All that said, I think the person above was just asking how similar the pronunciation was between two words.
...so I would not be surprised to see that at some point happen at a real university.
At RPI, the number of Asian professors and students plummeted after Shirley Ann Jackson took over.
Nigerian inmigrants travelled an ocean, for sure they have money and a huge set of values, and they are not afraid at all of either racists or potential disadvantages. They had it worse in Nigeria.
Here in Spain the Nigerians are seen as hard workers with an incredible spirit of superation.
In other words, a well educated Nigerian immigrant may not be damaged as much by the same level of racism as a Black person decended from slaves.
Live to about 50, developed a different dialect, very high crime rate - expected to be underestimated, constant violence, high domestic abuse, high illiteracy, very large families, living in squalor.
Doesn't fit neatly into any faction's magic box of solutions.
As a society, we unfortunately discriminate against people based on lots of different factors.
Biology, Culture, Environment.
Right explains the world by Biology. The Left explains the world by Culture. The Liberals explain the wold by Environment.
It is possible that you only need to scoop from one box to find a policy - but...
If a society has not solved a problem for a long time it's likely the solution is in higher dimensions.
Our political order is good at solving problems with 1 factor or 2 factors but I think our weakness appears when we need 3 factors simultaneously because it is not possible to select for that.
You need to define the term 'environment' to make clear what it is you mean here, it has far too many meanings to be useful. The essence is that the extremes on the 'left' and the 'right' bear close resemblance to each other, they use different symbology and make some different claims as to where they get their justifications from but if you remove those symbols and justifications their actions are more or less identical.
For the definition of Environment - it is used loosely but it is the physical facts of a location - climate, soil quality, material resources including non-human biological animals - wildlife and livestock.
Culture is a looser definition - it can mean food preparation techniques, language but also tools like combs and wheels and abstract tools in people's brains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Civil_War "The Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War and the Nigerian-Biafran War) ... between 500,000 and 3 million Biafran civilians died of starvation."
This is just scratching the surface.
If immigrants from Africa do better than native blacks, it isn't due to the legacy of slavery. Jamaicans, Dominicans, and Haitians have endured the legacy of slavery too, yet these immigrants do better economically as well. If systematic racism was real, it would hold back all blacks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Nigeria
See "Black rednecks and white liberals" by thomas sowell for more info (Thomas sowell is a black american economics professor and writer, for any in the audience who decide what is worth reading based on the skin color or ethnicity of the author)
Pesonally I belive anybody should read Sowell
Maybe it's not only "the legacy of slavery".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it was a German professor talking about buttermilk do you think he would given a build up?
Context matters a lot in linguistic, and the Sapir-Worff hypothesis is not just unproven, it's almost certainly completely wrong.
Spoiler alert: this one is worse.
It was a Norwegian word probably new to those offended. Isnt the offense absurd? Nobody should bend for that.
Edit: Frankly I am not sure why they would have meant "svart" while blaming specifically "American migrants". It seems "neger" would be much more immediately offensive to someone coming from the US.
After the Holocaust, some terms historically used to describe Jewish people became verboten, essentially out of respect for the serious nature of the consequences of anti-Semitism. Do you think it’s unjust that this cultural prohibition extends to nations that didn’t participate in the Holocaust? Might it be appropriate to treat the international calamity that is slavery with the same seriousness?
To answer your question more directly: The onus is mostly on the people who were subjugated to continue suffering the lasting effects of that. The burden on the people who find out that a word they use causes harm seems quite small in comparison (a good example of a “first world problem”). Whether that burden is too harsh to bear is up to each individual.
> To answer your question more directly: The onus is mostly on the people who were subjugated to continue suffering the lasting effects of that.
They are required to suffer the lasting effects of racist policies past or present. There is zero responsibility to be offended by homonyms of offensive terms.
> The burden on the people who find out that a word they use causes harm seems quite small in comparison (a good example of a “first world problem”). Whether that burden is too harsh to bear is up to each individual.
There shouldn't be a burden on them, period. A person being offended by homonyms is a result of their own stupidity. The only exception to that being someone saying said homonyms in bad faith... which clearly isn't the case here.
> I think people can’t plead ignorance in good faith once they are made aware of the modern global context.
It's not a global context. It's an American context. Chinese people aren't thinking about the n-word at all and a black American living in China would be expected to adapt to the reality that the word is neither offensive nor is it on Chinese people to adjust their behavior to make them feel better. The issue is once again with the person who takes offense.
Forcing people to change their entire language to accommodate a group (especially one that is completely foreign) is asinine.
This comment made me stop to think. Thanks for that.
When I zoom out and try to generalize, I think:
- "can utter": it is not so much about what you can officially say or not say, but rather what is socially acceptable, whatever your social context is. For example, if you're a priest, saying "fuck" in a sermon would probably be frowned upon or worse. Even more so if they continued to do so even after being told by their congregation or colleagues that it is not acceptable.
- "privileged words": I don't have children, but I suspect there are words that parents (and "society") prefer their kids don't say and even reprimand them for it. Whether or not that restriction is a bad thing (limiting free speech?) I cannot say for sure yet, but it seems that privileged words, as you say it, emerge. I haven't thought more about other examples beyond children (maybe there aren't any) or whether the children example is invalid.
You then emigrate to a different culture that hasn't experienced the context of these transgressions. The word "blank" is in their language used in a purely descriptive sense. You make it very clear to everyone you meet that you find their word for "blank" offensive, but the local alternatives are more clumsy and those who try to use them will likely confuse or be misunderstood.
I don't consider it reasonable to expect others to conform to your offense in this case; it's a case of forcing a cultural context onto a culture where it doesn't apply.
Americans have a bit of a reputation for this kind of thing, unfortunately. Probably due to the massive export of American culture that was alluded to elsewhere.
In this case I am pretty sure the word is "neger", and yeah, I don't think we should mourn or handwring over any sort of great loss of Norweigian culture/heritage that has occurred due to them being more sensitive to using that word to describe black people. Cultures evolve.
There is an interesting paper by Marianne Gullestad that goes into some of the previous historical debate over the term, it is not newly controversial. Culture continues to evolve.
https://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/pdf/Gullestad...
The politically correct version for "svart", would be "med mørk hudfarge" ("with dark skin color") or, if you want to push the edge of propritey, "mørkhudet" ("dark-skinned").
And sure. If someone takes offense or are clearly hurt by it, it's not like I'll go out of my way to insult them. But it's five syllables where one would convey the same meaning, without any intention of offense. It's not a hill I'd choose to die on, but as a matter of principle... I'd very much prefer if we wouldn't adopt an excessive fear of insult here.
I'm pretty sure that most people who take offense at this, are taking offense on behalf of others. Which is in itself a somewhat superior or paternalistic attitude that I'm not sure that all minorities appreciate.
The main point was that if you continue to use a word that someone described as offensive to them then it's hard to argue "best intentions", and it comes off as either laziness or disdain for that person.
You can take those offended by proxy with a grain of salt, but in some cases there is truth behind what they are saying, and it should still be considered.
I swear, going through the tunnel to Ticino is like going through a time machine.
And yes I got the feeling that american culture and american "stuff" is slowly but surely pouring over and I hope that misused words like the now "default meaning" of racism (racism in america can now "only be applied" to minorities whereas, of course, racism can in every country of the world can be had against any other "race") will stay an american thing and not be copied by us.
Friends of mine already think that American laws around sexuality are valid worldwide and sex with an under-18 is forbidden. Which is absolutely false in the case of Germany.
>California
Hollywood told us otherwise to Europeans, them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
[2] Vermont, Hawaii, Maryland
[3] Wyoming, West Virginia, Idaho
The country was founded by puritans and it still shows in many ways.
Once a puritan, always a puritan. Religion inspired worldviews get dilluted into the general culture and inspire even those that don't believe (and in the US, where assimilation is everything, even those that come from other cultures).
When I was a kid, it would never occur to me that the Russian word негр has negative connotations.
Now, the word негр disappeared from public use.
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/niquer
Here's a definitive source... The word originated from French military slang in 1918 from Algeria. Something about getting shot in the back. The abbreviations in the etymology section of the page are hard to make out
They were probably confused because you were mixing English 'oh my' with the well known Québecois word for a small penguin (un gode).
If anyone here vicariously forms opinions from black people telling you what to believe, you now have my opinion.
Not sure how anyone could mistake this for a racial slur with hateful intent.
Like.. in Spanish the word "negro" is "black". Can Spanish teachers now no longer use that word? Crazy.
It's like when chat filters (e.g in games) censor words based on the 'English' language. When I chat in dutch / flemish, my friends just see me censored for quite common words in our language. And they're often not even spelled the same as the English word that is bad.
TL;DR: There is nothing new under the sun.
History books should be burned.
No human should ever speak to another human again.
But we all need to be in offices in close quarters once the pandemic ends, so that we can fire each other for accidental using the word "she" in a conversation.
I'm Dutch and play AoE2 with some friends. The in game chat is basically useless for us. Just about every Dutch sentence will be blocked.
We tried switching to English, but every color (!) is now also banned. Asking "who is joining the blue team?" will become censored... Good job Microsoft.
It's unbelievable that this "understandably" caused pain to anyone. There is a linked recording of him using the term. Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.
The dean and faculty should stand behind the professor and educate whoever got upset about this that you can not expect punishment for obvious misunderstandings.
Also, it might be really helpful to add (nà ge) to the title as it's impossible to make out the essence of the article for anyone who doesn't know the logographics.
As far as I see the letter behind the link was written by the "judge" in this "trial": "Geoff Garrett, Dean" -- it's he who wrote:
"Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students."
Sounds very similar! Say no more!
Why, aren't they adults? (Over 17 will do in most countries to consider them so).
Or rather, to tell it as it is, it is a mix of the fragility of spoiled brats and feigned offense to be used to advance one's self...
It's a matter of time we got into this hysteria.
So, I am happy to engage you in debate, and I'll even do your job for you by trying to precisely name the propositions that you think are so obviously incorrect.
Most of the hits I see for "milk is racist" is about the alt-right using milk drinking as essentially an aesthetic symbol, which seems like a) a factual observation b) not a claim about milk itself being racist, but about its adoption as a racist symbol.
I see a 2016 CNN article called "math is racist," which, if you read it, is clearly arguing that mathematical models are being used in ways that reinforce racism, not that the brute facts of mathematics are themselves racist, either. This argument is generally widely accepted, so I'm curious if you disagree with it.
I can't find any articles about interior design being racist, but I do see articles about the interior design industry confronting race problems. This doesn't sound surprising or extreme either - I'd expect that most industries have race problems of some sort.
You'll note that I have not called you bigot, racist, fascist, nor xenophobia [sic], and I'd appreciate if you returned the favor and engaged my arguments on the merits.
(The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)
I don't think anyone thinks the "math is racist" article is uncivil. I think they think it's stupid. And the title "math is racist" is pretty undeniably laughable.
The content of the article "Sometimes mathematical tools are used to reinforce aspects of racial inequality" is much more reasonable. But people dislike this because it's a motte and bailey argument - the headline "math is racist" is a ridiculous proposition that is totally unsupported by the content of the article.
> (The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)
There is no serious argument that 'math' is racist. There are serious arguments that mathematical tools have been and are used to reinforce racial inequality. That is nowhere near the same thing as "math is racist".
My only takeaway from this is just another point to deduct from CNN's credibility, rather than that this author is saying "math is racist".
In the linked video it sounds exactly like the slur, To a surprising extent.
It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!
I’d be surprised just to hear a word sounding like “fuck” in the middle of a chinese class, although it’s probably not considered as offensive.
It doesnt surprise me at all that some people were upset and it seems very unwise on the part of the professor, who would surely know that this would provoke a reaction. A suspension from teaching his one class for a term will defuse the situation and perhaps he can return to teaching after.
What possible other details could there be? We literally have the recording of what happened before. He explains that there is a filler word in chinese, gives the english translation and then the chinese word. Do you really think it's reasonable to expect an additional warning? Should every philosophy lecture come with a short preface that the word 'Kant' may come up and is not intended to cause any harm? (mind you, the dean's letter is actually way more strict: it literally straight up says that these words are 'unacceptable', no qualification about a warning or anything).
Hell, how far do you think this should go? If a student has a potentially offensive sounding name, do they have to give a warning before they introduce themselves? Or should they have to anglicize their name?
Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebook news feeds. I can easily imagine the headline "Marshall School of Business refuses to discipline lecturer who repeatedly said the n-word in class" followed by a dissembling write-up of angry students and vague mentions of the fact it wasn't intentional. This kind of thing can turn into a reputational firestorm and do real long-term damage to student recruitment.
Deans of educational institutions are between a rock and a hard place. If they were in charge of the narrative, it would be possible to be reasonable and say "This wasn't something to be upset about, and here's why". But they rarely are in charge of the narrative and want to shut these issues down as quickly as possible.
I can imagine a reasonable way forward might be to get the students and lecturer together to talk over the issues, and have a nuanced discussion about differing languages, much like what's happening in some of the comments here. But by the time you've organised that the firestorm is well underway and the damage is already done.
Now, it's definitely a problem for society that people who want to spend their lives engaging in academic debate, which is a thing we should encourage, can rarely find a job that supports them in doing so, and the closest they can find is providing vocational training to 20-year-olds who are ready to leave the academy once they've received the service they've paid for. But it doesn't really help either the professor or the student to pretend that the modern undergraduate classroom is anything else.
This decision doesn't even make sense from the perspective of vocational training. Being able to hear 那个 without great pain and upset is a directly job-applicable communication tool - there are many jobs working with Mandarin speakers that students won't be able to handle if the word traumatizes them.
In terms of what you're saying about this particularly case it's pretty simple - what happened here is not a micro-aggression because it's not aggressive at all, so the use of the term here by the dean is simply wrong.
> Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal or behavioural indignities, whether intentional or unintentional
It’s the unintentional part that I take issue with, which means that it’s not on you to understand the context of my statement, it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.
I agree that your definition makes perfect sense but I don’t think the sort of people who spend a lot of time worrying about micro-aggressions agree that the intention of the “aggressor” matters, as is perfectly evinced by this situation:
> “We would rather not take his course than to endure the emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcome environment for us Black students.”
An extreme but relevant example: If a person is ignorant of the harmfulness of bleach, and injects their children with it with intent to cure an ailment, are they guilty of a crime? If so, is it the crime of being ignorant?
So from that lens, can a person act aggressively without intending to? In a technical sense, I think not. Aggression is, by definition, a state of intent. When we say "act aggressively", we likely mean "act in a way that suggests an aggressive intent". It's our interpretation of intent based on action.
An important note here is that it's our interpretation of someone else's intent.
For physical harm, however, ignorance should not be an excuse. It may reduce the responsibility, but it should not completely remove it. Not knowing something can kill doesn't change the fact that one had actually killed.
This is the crux of the matter for me.
It seems to me that an American professor teaching Chinese should be well aware that repeating a word that sounds like “nigger” might cause offence, and that therefore it would be wise to discuss this beforehand.
Its far from “impossible” to imagine that this situation would arise.
Let's not paint everyone with the same brush.
Lots of people are going to be upset by a lifetime of daily microaggressions - and rightfully so! - that are not going to be upset that a different language that has a word that sounds vaguely like a slur.
Some people will. I won't say they're wrong to have a gut reaction to hearing a word and misunderstanding it as something else. But I do think that they do need to understand that the word they heard isn't the word they thought they heard, and work from there.
But I don't think it's fair to say that everyone concerned with microaggressions in general will also fail to understand that 那个 is not the slur that it somewhat sounds like.
I don't know that that is the only way to interpret how to behave.
Another way to think about it is simply to be aware that a colleague or friend from the non-dominant group (e.g. a woman, a Romani person in Germany, a Spanish speaker in the USA) experience many things every day that makes them feel less worthy, less welcome, on the outs so to speak, not because of the content of their mind and heart, but because of the group they were born into (I can give countless examples I've heard from friends & colleagues, if you're curious).
Now that you and I have that awareness, we can decide whether and how we can be supportive and add to that load. It could even be as simple as acknowledging when I see it.
Maybe if you can imagine that this is your significant other or child - what would you want for them?
Intentionality is not relevant with micro-agressions. Parse the nomenclature all you like, but people unintentionally cause harm all the time.
The issue is when as a society, those things are so commonplace that they repeat over and over in a constant loop.
For example, if someone accidentally bumps into you while passing you on the sidewalk, it's no big deal, they apologize and both people move on. Now imagine that everywhere you go, people keep bumping into you and apologizing all day long, multiple times a day.
You know no one means anything by it, but the aggregate of all that bumping is terribly frustrating and you can't even take it out on any individual person because you know they didn't mean it.
That's what many minorities deal with. And white people are completely clueless to what they are doing.
No one is talking about punishing the micro-agressors. Just educating them so we can minimize the distributed bullying campaign that we have been subjecting people to and give them some breathing room.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076NVFT5P/
Seems like their current system makes that all too easy.
Also, sounds very open to potential blackmailing of people. :(
I'm not gonna lie, my blood boiled over this one.
1. It continues to be pushed by those at the tops of organizations, which leads to a new pseudo-language of baby-talk that is constructed to be as inoffensive as possible. Simultaneously a ‘black market’ counter-culture emerges of those who don’t comply.
2. The entire enterprise collapses under its own weight and exhaustion. People get tired of being offended and move on.
You'd hope so. But that complaint in the article might have happened regardless: it only takes a few indefatigable die-hards to keep that machine going.
A few complaints should not be able to make a university give in/up. They do so because there is a big group amplifying the outrage.
I am not sure a majority is necessary. There's no magic happening at 50%.
As... I don't remember where put it: You are not the voice of the people; you just happen to be loud, and wearing a microphone.
[edit] see also: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-ellis-usc-marsha...
Won't happen, until it brings them benefits.
He had to apologize profusely and explain to no end what he meant. Regardless, his career was soon over after that.
We, non-native speakers, must be really careful about using words in our own language that may sound offensive in the other language. What a world we created :(
Which country? Do you have a link to any article on this? Or a name I can search for?
The basketball player in question was Marko Milič: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Milič
And it's in English as well. Growing up in Europe but heavily influenced by American Music, Movies, TV and Internet one grows up thinking that N----- or Nigga is fine to use. You hear it all the time, especially in music.
Couple that with the fact that we don't really have "career-ending words" in Europe and it leads to a lot of awkward moments. You can't even say the word, and Americans tend to censor the word even when anonymously typing it online. I did because this is an American forum, but it's really weird to see to be honest. You can't even say the word as part of a debate over the word.
A while back a Dutch coach was forced to resign after using the word because it was in a song: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/18/fc-cincinna...
The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44209141
The Wikipedia entry explains the historical context of why the word is so extremely painful - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger
One way to think about it is that there's almost no context where it would be constructive for a non-Black person to use the word (including singing a song, for example). Why? Because there is not a way to neutralize the emotion and history behind the word in any context. That's why the n-word euphemism was created and is the norm. It provides an acceptable replacement. When someone violates this norm, it creates resentment, intense frustration, and great offense for a large group.
> A while back a Dutch coach was forced to resign after using the word because it was in a song: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/feb/18/fc-cincinna.... > The fact that you aren't even allowed to sing along with a song without muting yourself on certain words that the singer sings anyway... it's just mind boggling to me...
From the article (emphasis mine): "Jans is alleged to have used the slur while singing along to a track being played in the Cincinnati locker room. A player is understood to have told Jans, who is Dutch, about the significance of the n-word in America. Jans is also understood to have made an inappropriate remark about slavery during a team visit to memorials in Washington DC in October.
I do not know what the details are around "inappropriate remark about slavery", but if I was a player (esp. a black player), I would find it difficult to respect that coach.