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".)
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just from watching that lecture - he seems like a genuinely good professor. He provided tons of context before he introduced that example, and it's a real-world example from a language that nearly a billion humans speak. By choosing an example that is from a language that is foreign to most of his students - he's helping his students understand that the actual concept he's teaching is not just an english linguistic feature or a western-centric mannerism - it's a communication pattern that occurs widely.
I feel bad for the future UCS students who will miss out on his class. I also wonder to what degree this decision will have a chilling effect on the content of other lecturers at UCS. Could history professors see this as a reason to exclude primary content that reflects the racist realities of the past? Or maybe music professors will reconsider whether they can teach the work of artists who might be cultural appropriation? It's hard to say.
I hope that another university makes this professor a job offer - or at least speaks out in support of his teaching. This seems so bizarre that I can only reckon with it by imagining it's a west-coast cultural phenomenon. I certainly wouldn't imagine this going down the same way in my home state (North Carolina) - but maybe I'm underestimating how pervasive this extreme sensitivity trend really is. There WAS an incident with a professor who got suspended at NC State recently ( https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article235... ) but in that case - the professor was publicly mocking his students in a way that may or may not have been interpreted as sexist. Even if the suspension for that scenario actually overkill (which I think it was) - it seems crazy pants to put the professor who was thoughtfully teaching a lecture in the same category as one who gets a kick out of insulting students for laughs.
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.
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.
> "...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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
>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.
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.
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)
> 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 :)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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"?
> “A video is circulating on the Korean Internet of a black gentleman yelling at and threatening an elderly Korean couple. His violent behavior was the result of him misunderstanding the elderly man’s comment to him. The elderly man reportedly said “니가 여기 앉아” (a sign of consideration) (“You can sit here” = Niga Yuh gi anja”), but not knowing Korean, the man in question interpreted “니가” as the N-word which led to his violent outburst.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
For fucks sake. This sort dumbarse action sets back the cause of equality by a country fucking mile. This stuff happens when you take Dr DiAngelo too seriously and ignore what minorities are saying and just go with your ill informed guilt ridden heart.
Clearly he wasn't saying what is implied. I had assumed that "nà ge" was a slur in mandarin(when I saw the original news report). Its 100% clear from context that its nothing to do with race. Whats more the context is directly linked to the three words he says.
We must strive for equality, We _must_ help wider society by lifting up minorities.
This does not achieve this, in fact it will embolden the dickheads who want to make this a "thing" (SEE! "they" want to undermine us etc etc etc)
Clearly it is a thing, why pretend otherwise? If this were some extremely small minority, it would not have such widespread cultural influence now. It is a thing.
I'd bet big money that even DiAngelo would not find that lecture offensive in any way.
Nor does she advocate for retribution when unintentional slights happen. In her online lectures, she tells a story of how she offended some Black colleagues by making a silly joke. She apologized and they came to an understanding that the colleague would help keep her in-check when it happens again and they carried on.
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.
It is happening because of power. Students have found that they can bully professors and administrators, and bend them to their personal beliefs. It's a sense of power that, like most forms of power, becomes very intoxicating.
This specific case, I would bet dollars to donuts, happened because:
(1) The administration is hypersensitive in light of the wave of race related protests and associated two-sided violence occurring in the country.
(2) Someone aware of the likelihood of that deliberately trolled the administration, probably under a false flag, to produce an incident.
Possibly just for lulz, more likely than that in the hopes of benefiting a particular domestic political faction, but even money it was done on behalf of (though not necessarily at the direction of) a foreign power.
To some students, the word sounded like the N-word in English. The next day a group of Black master’s candidates in the class of 2022 wrote a letter to Marshall Dean Geoffrey Garrett.
“There are over 10,000 characters in the Chinese written language and to use this phrase ... is hurtful and unacceptable to our USC Marshall community,” the letter said. “The negligence and disregard displayed by our professor was very clear.”
even money it was done on behalf of (though not necessarily at the direction of) a foreign power.
Why on earth would you assume that? What are the relatively likelihoods of it being Satanists, alien mind-worms or Marxist-Feminists versus an agent of a foreign power?
Probably because the Students are the paying Customers and not Students in a Government sponsored Institution, you don't want to loose customers so you fire the employee (just a theory)
The thing that gets me is that a university is a place for learning and exploration of the world. If everyone at a university is afraid of getting reprimanded for what at most was a misunderstanding, then where exactly can we expect to tackle the hard challenges of racism and sexism? Obviously we shouldn't accept people being racist or sexist at these places, but we need to provide the space to allow for the difficult conversations without the risk of being "cancelled" for making a mistake. If you cannot, then the concept of academia is pretty much dead.
The leadership is afraid of getting canceled themselves by not acting concerned enough, so they try to save their asses by running in front. Just a way to hold on to one's job in the current environment. I don't think they are true believers.
Cancel culture's greatest achievement is creating just enough fear that non-believers will volunteer to do their dirty work - even without being asked.
I think this is the right answer. The previous dean was fired due to having a high number of discrimination complaints in the business school while he was in charge. Even though IIRC something like 95% of the complaints were deemed to be unwarranted
Because you have a wave of far leftest SJW activity that is sheltering people from any critical thinking, making "safe spaces" where people become too fragile to engage with anyone of differing or opposing ideologies. Disengaging the context of words and giving them absolute meanings (e.g. the entire master/slave fiasco, as if the words "master" and "slave" or others have inherent evil, as opposed to the context they're used in, or the case with the Chinese word used here in the article).
As much as I totally understand the downvoting of this comment, it unfortunately isn't entirely wrong. I desperately want to be an all-in liberal person, and I would rather not have stock phrases in existence that can be misappropriated by the Donald Trump / Katie Hopkins' of the world, but with any knee-jerk reaction from humans there are people who take them to extremes, and this story is one of an increasing number of examples.
Thankfully, we have a media source that is willing to call out stupid examples of suffocating over-liberalism. Most other people don't, all their news is being filtered by traditional (and clickbait) media, and fewer and fewer people are actually looking to get the real story from the primary sources.
That said, I don't think this particular moniker is going to help much. It's already been polluted.
Well I think the phrase has been used by people whose views you may or may not agree with, the phenomenon itself has conditioned companies/organisations to immediately roll over at any whiff of a controversy or face a twitter/social media hate mob.
Yep... I didn't mean so much "it's been associated with certain people" as it's been demonized from the start.
I think there's a difference between honest people saying honest things - even if those things are incorrect or not fully justified - and people with a history of dog-whistling and flat-out repugnant behaviour using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
And there is language on both sides that get this treatment - for example "gaslighting" or "racist", both can be used by vile individuals who would use their power to divert from lies and bad behaviour. But if the term has a good head-start, before its more controversial uses, it's more likely to have benevolent connotations in people's heads, and is less likely to be labelled a "hate-word" from the start.
So while I think that cancel-culture may make a genuine point, unfortunately that word was saddled with baggage from the start, and may never mean what you want it to mean again. As is often the case, we need not just better words, but words with a better history.
That is one point of view. The other point of view is that when you give an organisation (government/large company/ngo/whatever) power to enforce controls on speech, that power could be used for good as well as ill.
How many times have you read a story like this? Like 5 times in the last 10 years? It gets a lot of headlines because it's ridiculous, but it isn't common.
WTF. There's is literally a stand-up skit[0] on this. Moreover, any quick research would show it's the Mandarin filler word. Plus, I dunno, just ask the other Mandarin-speaking faculties and students?
Do you know the number 99 (nine-nine) sounds like the derogatory term for mammary glands in Mandarin? Are they going to redact every instance of the number on campus, on grounds of potential sexual harassment?
They didnt have to ask mandarin speakers. The admin agree that it is a mandarin word, but that understandably people got upset because it sounds like an US slur.
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.
Yes! I am a female in the tech industry, and we are inundated with warnings about going into a male dominated field. I’ve noticed it gets to a point where some women can’t even receive criticism because they think “he wouldn’t talk to another man like that,” even if the criticism is valid. I can see why it happens though. We hear over and over about being harassed and put down that we almost subconsciously get a chip on our shoulder about it.
I’m not saying that racism or sexism doesn’t happen. But I am saying I see how a person can also take something as racist or sexist just because it’s something you’re told to expect.
O guess these things also depend on country, in Eastern Europe where I'm from many high position successful women leaders have stated that gender quotas are actually offensive and they wouldn't want to be so called diversity hire. I think about it often how Americans who get into somewhere because of their knowledge and skill but are part of some minority think affirmative action (discrimination for us), it would be obvious for people to suspect then they are only there because of lowered exceptions.
What is scary is that american gender stereotypes are becoming popular. In my school times I never heard "girls have problem with math", on the contrary, the majority of math and science teachers were women.
Eastern Europe is unique because we never really had our own petty bourgeois being effectively colonized, so farmers became workers and workers became bankers.
Someone really should write a monograph about Eastern European Cooperative Banking, it's quite amazing.
That sounds like the robustness principle, featured in RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) among others: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" or "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive."
Yes, of course if you look for something you will find more of it. But many Black people are in fact not looking for it at all. And yet, it still finds them and it can hurt them because even if the intention is pure, the action can still hurt.
Perhaps you've had someone innocently comment about how nice it is to see a woman in engineering since there are so few? Maybe that doesn't bother you at all. But what if you get that comment constantly, several times a week for you entire career? I suspect it would start to weigh on you and you would become quite exhausted by it. You might even start feeling that you don't belong. Or maybe wonder if your gender is the only thing people notice about you.
Then also imagine that we all wore name tags that identified your career. And now you can't even escape it when you are not at work, you get it at the checkout line too. And from your waiter, etc, etc.
Ironically, the whole over-reaction can be seen as a form of culture imperialism. Punishing people for using other language is itself racism, in this case, to the Chinese minorities. Last time I check, there is no official language in US.
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.
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.
> 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.
The craziest thing about this is that it wasn't - as I initially assumed - a misunderstanding. The Dean's email says the professor used 'a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English'.. 'Chinese'.. 'similar'... ok, yes, and?
It sounds like he can sue for lost and potential lost salary for sure. This is not a legitimate reason to fire him if he was doing it innocently. Students could have said something and he could have avoided it I suppose. However whenever I hear the term "microaggressions" I know I'm talking with an idiot who values being emotional over being logical and just stop the conversation.
Did you watch the video of him using it? While it’s a very common phrase while speaking Mandarin, and while I do not think this is a fireable offense, the professor could have chosen one of dozens of other examples in his lecture very easily.
Are you an expert in Chinese? What, in your opinion, is a suitable alternative example in Mandarin Chinese, then, that is commonly used by speakers of Mandarin Chinese?
I think this is all a huge overreaction. But I also watched the video and honestly it looked like he was saying it because he knew he could get away with it. That's the most likely explanation for why he picked Chinese as an example of another language's "um" word. Just IMO though, no way to know for sure. It was at least tactless. He knew how it would sound.
- "Professor Patton primarily teaches in USC’s Full-Time MBA Program and its Executive MBA Programs in the U.S. and China"
- "He has served as a key advisor to the Center for Asian-Pacific Leadership, a faculty member at the US-China Institute and a leader of MBA learning programs in China and Korea."
I really don't think that Chester Pierce was an idiot who valued being emotional over being logical.
While there is disagreement over how prevalent they are or what if anything should be done about them, micro-aggressions obviously exist. I find this sort of hostility to the very concept perplexing.
Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country."
My view on this is it's the culmination of years of anti free speech trends on campus. It's a sad day when universities which should be bastions of tolerance, exploration and ideas have their culture consistently chipped away at by people who get "triggered" so easily.
It's not confined to universities, either. This growing list of "forbidden words" is making its way into the corporate world, too. Coupled with spineless HR who don't know how to constructively deal with people who claim to be offended. My current company is undertaking a massive, probably thousand man-year (sorry, person-year), effort to scrub all its internal and external documentation and even source code of any forbidden words, replacing them with, for now, non-triggering words. Not one person, to my knowledge has even politely questioned publicly whether this was a good use of company funds. If I was a shareholder I'd be outraged.
A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.
Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.
That's honestly just poor leadership from scared management. Management should be clearly articulating the mission, goals, and "culture" (for lack of a better word) of the company. This gives management and other employees grounds to challenge well meaning but unnecessary social action by forcing proponents to explain how those social actions would align with / further the goals, mission, and culture of the org. Usually proponents of these woke policies are not capable of doing this.
I don't know if there is a word for it, but I see it as a type of social bikeshedding.
In regular bikeshedding we spend a lot of time arguing over minor factors because everyone feels like they can have meaningful input and contribute. Then we gloss over the complicated stuff because it's too hard to get into.
In this case, people feel like they can push hard on relatively minor issues like uses of words and phrases because they can make a noticeable impact. Precisely because they feel powerless to effect actual systemic change. Widespread protest doesn't seem to change much, but targeted complaints can sometimes get someone fired.
There may be an argument that it could work as a ground-up approach similar to NYC's broken window policing, but I personally doubt that. I think the backlash will be a net negative.
In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.
Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.
So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.
On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).
All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.
> In my company, someone objected to the terms “male” and “female” adapter ports or connectors for physical hardware equipment in our data centers, stating it was both offensive to gender non-binary coworkers and also fostered an aggressive general sense of violation of female genitalia.
This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.
Exactly. Or, say you're building some business logic and you need to make some exceptions for VIP partners. In times past, you would add these exceptions to a "whitelist" and have logic to check this list and apply the exception. Now, you need to be very careful to call this an "allowlist" lest the woke patrol pull you aside and warn you that your variable name is insensitive and non-inclusive. I wish I was joking.
And yet whatever the origin (I suspect nobody can seriously claim to definitely state the actual origin of such a term) its usage as such a list, not referring (necessarily, but indiscriminately so some might be!) to black people, dates back at least as far as the Restoration in 1660 England.
And there's generally no exception for old things. Like many products, ours almost never permits breaking API changes, but an exception was of course made (at significant cost) to strip out public facing fields named "whitelist".
I'm surprised master/slave's the hill you want to die on - it's the one instance where the old terminology really is just bizarre jargon that's being replaced with words that are a direct, common-language description of what they do.
I really don't want to die on this hill! It's an example of a behavior I'd engage in if the wokepatrol wasn't there. I don't even speak English at work, I speak French, and we commonly use the words "maître" and "esclave" in that instance.
Whenever any work-environment friction will arise, I'll stop using those words for sure, I value my job more than I value terminology.
I got into trouble any time I said “guys” as a generic term for “y’all”. Also, I got in trouble for saying ladies or girls or women. I’m honestly not sure how I was supposed to describe a group of women. But no matter what noun I used, a colleague got offended. I quit that job as fast as I could. The company is now defunct, but I’m sure that colleague is still a real pleasure to work with wherever he ended up.
Not the OP but I personally enjoy lewd humour and, at a previous job, would crack jokes at some of my female colleagues. At my current job that would be considered altogether inappropriate, Despite the fact that that I only make those jokes around people I specifically know to be like-minded and give as good as they get, and avoid doing it around (or even within earshot of) people who are not ok with it.
But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?
Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation.
Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.
In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.
I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:
>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<
>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<
I would say that's the most likely explanation. Plus, we see very similar things happen in primary education, where the loudest craziest parents cause the biggest potential PR/legal kerfuffles, so the schools often bend to them instead of standing on educational principles.
The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of those Marxists. The cycle goes like this:
1. Liberals assert that henceforth all with be free and equal, and that these things are self-evidently desirable (i.e. using reason alone).
2. Some liberals observe that life is full of inequalities and lack of freedoms. Because everyone is supposed to have equal opportunities, and because liberalism is generally uninterested in historical or traditional justifications for things, unequal outcomes demand an explanation which they find in the assumption of oppressive hierarchies. These liberals become Marxists.
3. They demand affirmative actions be taken in order to rectify these supposed oppressions. Embarrassed by the existence of inequality and lack of freedoms after declaring that their society is meant to have neither, liberals agree to these demands.
4. Realising they got what they wanted with little resistance, and that inequalities and lack of freedoms still exist, Marxists return to step 1.
In this framework the cause is nothing as simple or skin-deep as bad PR or lawsuits. Perhaps fear of those does play a role, but the author argues that the core reason is that the university is staffed by people who are genuinely embarrassed and upset by Marxist critique. Lacking intellectual ammo or a coherent philosophy of inequality, they invariably cave in when faced with outspoken demands that appear to align with their own agenda of equality.
I'm not necessarily against this but I don't think it goes deep enough. I think a better societal/psychological explanation can be found in the first third of Industrial Society and its Future. [0]
Thanks. I've never read that document before. The first third is indeed thought provoking.
What's awkward is I've now read at least three apparently compelling and logical explanations for the left/right divide, but some of them contradict each other in various ways.
A nice example of "Everything I dislike is Marxism".
Marx was extra specific in which his historical analysis was about economic classes. The framework he cites with the opossing groups is not exclusive to marxism, but hey, I guess it wouldn't be scary enough to the casual reader calling it Hegelianism for example.
Weird enough, the article gets a lot right, the critique of liberalism is on point IMO, but I don't really see the point of bringing this to the table. Radical liberalism is self-defeating as the framework fails to acknowledge the power relationships, thus is not surprising that liberal principles can result on illiberal consequences when tried to being pursued. Marxism was not even a thing when the french revolution became a bloodbath, and you can even say taking this event in account, Marxism is more descriptive on the outcomes of revolution than prescriptive.
On my perspective, on the recent events, I see only liberalism eating itself, and certainly I see little Marxist relationship with clear marxist tenants like workers taking control of their economic results. That's unless you're a liberal writing on a liberal magazine, doing mental gymnastics to avoid seeing the failures of liberalism, then you can loosely define Marxism and blame it all on it.
The first part of the essay does go into the question of whether what's happening can be truly called Marxism. I believe he argues convincingly that it can be, although indeed, everyone accepts that the "neo-Marxists" or whatever you want to call them don't call themselves that (BLM leadership excepted!), and they have moved on from an arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races (white vs BIPOC/minorities/whatever it is today). A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication. There's a large population at least roughly familiar with what Marx believed and far more importantly, what happened everywhere his followers took power. The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews. It's not saying he invented the whole thing from scratch.
BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
It's pretty convincing when you read third party accounts of Marxism by right wing spokesman who have a lot to gain to equating what they don't like to Marxism. When you read either Marxists (plenty of others besides BLM) or the ones who you call Neo-Marxists, you find Marxists sighing when not Marxism is called Marxism, and the so called "Neo-Marxists" criticizing Marx.
>arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races.
Every classification is arbitrary, although you can argue about it's usefulness or consistency.
>A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Except the most essential part which makes the framework consistent. But hey, if you squint hard enough even a dog can be a cat.
>Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication.
Marx is known for a lot of things, to be honest I don't be surprised if some isolated community believes that Marx had babies for breakfast, this is an effect of being an ideological boogeyman. Regardless of what you think of communism, it should be hard to deny the depth of his philosophical and historical points, if not that it's a regular POV. With that in mind, adding more legends to the Marxist black legend should be considered the opposite of useful communication.
>The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews.
Yes, as mentioned this is exactly my main problem with the essay, the author even spells out my main point, but still framing this as a external factor "corrupting" liberalism.
>BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
I was not familiar with the writer, and mixed the liberal term with the more American Libertarian. My mistake.
I have said this before and will continue to say this: to put an end to this, liberals in the United States need to openly repudiate identity politics progressivism and cancel culture. Former-President Obama has ( https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca... ); we should too.
Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.
Politics isn't going to solve this. You could elect an anti-PC theorist like Donald Trump, or an old school liberal like Nancy Pelosi, and this sort of thing would keep happening.
The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.
I wish I believed that, but it seems more like a prisoner's dilemma. People get turned by making their self-interest the opposite of the group's interests after being individually targeted with high-pressure tactics.
Anyone who thinks this is all purely organic hasn't been paying much attention.
I'm okay with Obama rejecting identity politics if that's what he's doing, but it seems to me more like he's been spending his time post-presidency advocating for a certain style of incremental reform: just make small fixes right now to make things a little bit better, and as he likes to say: "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice".
The problem I have with that, is that for some problems you can't just fix it with incremental reform, you have to rip the bandaid off, and if you reject any reforms that aren't small incremental fixes to what we have, you end up fixing the small problems and leaving the big structural problems. Opinions will reasonably differ on how to deal with the problems facing society, but Obama's approach seems to me to be a little bit like vacuuming your living room while the house is on fire.
On the other hand, you have someone like Bernie Sanders, who isn't at all shy about advocating for significant structural reforms (similar in scope to the New Deal) and is about as progressive as anyone can be in American politics, yet at the same time he doesn't put any stock in identity politics either. I haven't listened to as much from AOC, but I get the impression she's the same way. In fact, I don't know of any major political leader who fits the mold of the "social justice warrior" or "political-correctness police" stereotype. I haven't run into very many of those people in my day-to-day life either, but my impression is that they're largely people without any great deal of power except maybe on University campuses.
Tl;dr: don't be afraid to vote for progressives in general with the aim of thwarting identity politics. A lot of prominent progressives aren't really fans of it either.
The Constitution is setup to make sure both sides are radical, but usually at equal enough power that changes they make are agreed upon by both radical factions. Strong ideologies are good. Things go to shit when everyone is a mealy-mouthed, middle of the road moderate, or when one side gets too much power.
Lost that thread somewhat post FDR with the expansion of the executive "rule making" bullshit though.
The irony of the new anti free speech movement is that much of it sprung up on Berkeley’s campus (and nearby SF), which is also host to the famous Free Speech Cafe.
That's a vast overstatement. To the point of being ridiculous. This kind of thing happens more than it used to but is still extremely rare. And in this case represents a misunderstanding. McCarthyism was also a government initiative. Private universities can do whatever they want. Someplace like Liberty University actively censors and punishes liberal views, but people are less likely to get upset because it's expected.
At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet.
The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).
At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.
Incredibly tonedeaf on part of the University - they claim to fight for those that are marginalized, but how will the Chinese international students on campus feel, now that a precedent has been set that they'll have to think twice before speaking in their native tongue?
I cannot fathom how anyone can interpret this as being a racial slur?
Nobody believed it was. This was a a demonstration of power by the extreme "progressives", reminding the faculty that they will do exactly as told or be smeared as bigots.
> 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 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:
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 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.
And at no point before it got this far did anyone ask ‘perhaps, part of the knowledge we’re buying for $120,000 and part of the value our future employers will impute into that degree is the cultural literacy and emotional competence to discern when a Chinese colleague is saying “ummmmm” and when they’re casually tossing out racial epitaphs midsentence?’
I think it's important to note that nowhere in the article (nor anywhere else I can find) does it state that the professor was "suspended". Rather, it only says that the professor will "no longer be teaching this class for the remainder of the semester".
I think this is an important distinction because it leaves the door open to the possibility that: 1) the professor voluntarily stepped down 2) the professor will return after the semester is over 3) the professor is being paid during this leave and will suffer no real professional consequences.
In other words, there's a real possibility that the Dean had the following conversation with the professor: "Hey, I know this wasn't intentional on your part, but this is quickly becoming a PR nightmare and I'd like to nip it in the bud. Would you mind stepping down from your post for just this semester until this dies down and I can get a handle on it? This will make everyone's life easier & you'll still get paid anyways."
In this light, there's less reason to be outraged at the Dean.
I think it's important to note that nowhere in the article (nor anywhere else I can find) does it state that the professor was "suspended".
The action was asymptotically close to a suspension (so in attempting to draw a distinction, you're basically splitting hairs).
In other words, there's a real possibility that the Dean had the following conversation with the professor:
More likely that conversation went like this:
"Hey, I know this wasn't intentional on your part, but this is quickly becoming a PR nightmare and I'd like to nip it in the bud. If we were to go by common sense and the basic ethical and intellectual principles this institution claims to uphold, we'd simply explain to the student that (being young and naive as they are) they're clearly jumping the gun and not seeing the forest for the trees -- and are doing themselves way, way, way more harm in delusionally believing themselves to have been 'microaggressed' by what happened, than by even the worst case version of what they fantasize as having happened. But that would require a modicum of ethical integrity and backbone on my own part, which, being the stuffed shirt that I am, you know I don't come even close to possessing. So to make my life simpler, would you mind taking the hit, stepping down from your post and basically allowing everyone to believe you were an insensitive ass (if not in fact an outright racist) for a while? BTW you'll still get paid - and this being USC, that's all anyone really expects you to care about anyways."
Even if that was the case, have you actually read the letter? It alone is so ridiculous that it's worth condemning.
Hell, I think this bit does it alone:
"It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students"
Like, what? Are they going to outright ban all foreign words that could potentially be misunderstood as offensive? Will Kant need a rebranding to be allowed in class again?
It's unbelievable ethnocentrism and the fact that they actually have the gall to claim that they're doing it as a part of addressing systemic racism has to be the cherry on top. This is literally the same line of thought that leads to asking others to anglicize their name because it is offensive.
I agree with you. My claim is that there's "less reason to be outraged at the Dean".
If the professor was executed for this, for most people, there's reason to go to war.
If the professor was fired, for most people, there's reason to be outraged.
If the professor was voluntarily placed on leave with pay, well, maybe you still find reason to be outraged, but less so than the aforementioned scenarios.
In any case, most people in this thread are assuming the professor was fired, and that's incorrect.
PR nightmare is a bit extreme. A few students emailed the dean is all. I feel as though in these situations, you have a moral obligation not to back down if you did nothing wrong. Otherwise the bounds of what one is allowed to say gradually erodes away. Sort of like the “first they came for...” poem
We don't disagree on your point. I'm just pointing out that the degree of punishment enacted on the professor could be much less severe than most people are imagining.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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).
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."
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.
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
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.
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"...
I think all of the comments here that say "McCarthyism and cancel culture have taken over our universities!" miss the point.
The real story is that in the US, we are politically polarized enough to buy into the dean's story that this is the only reason for the suspension.
Universities are run as businesses nowadays and I can assure you that they don't care about angry students unless there is money or prestige to be made in appeasing them. At a past university I attended, class enrollment was horribly broken causing people to miss out on courses they needed to graduate. Basically the whole student body was mad and made it known and sent around petitions, but nothing changed. The fix being pushed by students would literally just require changing a config file somewhere and sending some emails, but nobody cared.
If universities won't lift a finger for issues that cause campus wide outrage, why would I believe that they'd suspend someone after a twitter minority gets unreasonably angry about something like this. I'm at one of the super liberal universities in the US and I can promise you that it really is a minority. Even in the liberal arts classes I've attended, everyone I've met would be like "yeah, that's an unfortunate mistake and at most you should probably just inform him that the word sounds like a slur". I have literally never met someone that would call for a firing except for on twitter. I've also taught classes here and never met one, so I know it isn't a selection effect where I'm in a bubble. I don't get to choose the students I teach.
There is 100% more going on than what the dean is claiming. Maybe it's administrative drama. Maybe the professor wasn't pulling in enough grant money. Maybe the university was eyeing his salary and knew about an adjunct that will do it cheaper and thought that this would be a nice excuse to make a change. From everything I know about universities and from currently working at one, the guy didn't get fired for something as outlandish as saying a word that sounded like something else. It just doesn't make sense.
I once said in a senior staff meeting that we shouldn’t be niggardly with employee benefits. A disturbing quiet dropped over the room and I realized a half dozen white men and women were staring at me, while uncomfortably not making eye contact with our African American Business Development director.
The CEO rebuked me saying that was not the type of language I should be using. The Director of Business Development then spoke, he was a Stanford graduate who was always the nicest smartest guy in the room. He gently corrected the CEO, saying exactly what I understood, it was an Old English term meaning cheapness that had no connection (other than its sound) to the racial insult and he wasn’t offended at all.
Thank god for Johns erudite knowledge of historic English words and his omnipresent empathy but think it illustrates an important point. Intent should matter. Even if the word I used had a connection to a racial slur, I would have been unaware and in no way would intentionally use such a slur, not alone in a group of white men let alone in front of a valued colleague.
That word can never leave my mental database of descriptive terms and phrases, but I fight against its use even more so today, afraid it might unconsciously slip out.
To be honest, when I hear someone use that word, I do assume it's primarily in service of saying something that sounds like the n-word with plausible deniability. It'd be something else if it was a commonly used word
I saw a reddit comment not long ago that said something along the lines of "Intelligence is knowing that the word niggardly has a non-racist etymology. Wisdom is deciding not to say it anyways because it's not worth the hassle" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...)
I don't know, you can tell that some people definitely like to play a verbal version of the "I'm not touching you" game, or get off on telling people "actually, it's not a slur". Obviously I'm not referring to what happened to this professor, though
> Obviously I'm not referring to what happened to this professor, though
Why not? He mispronounced a word, and seems to have deliberately chosen it in order to be provocative. There are a million different pause words he could have used instead.
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!
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
From a movie I watched about 50 times as a youngster: [0]
I wonder if such humor will ever be made again.
(fyi, me and my friends were all white but big fans of Tupac and Snoop and followed the whole Deathrow related dramas closely! Tupac is an absolute legend to me still, what an artist, pure poetry, It's very nice to listen to his music and get an idea about his life.)
"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label." -- From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Jacques Barzun.
Clarification: here the slur is "decadent", not the one mentioned in the article.
Warning: I'm not sure how to formulate that properly, I hope no-one gets offended to much.
I think one of the worst thinks you can do is to be afraid of a word itself. But that's exactly where it has come to. It often seems that just pronouncing the n* word or spelling it out is highly offensive.
But IMHO this is super bad for the people who are offended.
If there is a problem you should speak about it and this include pronouncing and spelling the offensive word.
If you don't you are only helping the people which use that word as a insult and a denouncement. You are now at risk of feeling offended or even threatend from just hearing the word even if it's not directed at you , not used as the insult and maybe you misheard (like above).
Demonizing a word when it's the contextual usage of the word which is the problem isn't really helping anyone I believe.
Don't get me wrong using the word to insult, denounce or describe an person is an absolute no-go and as far as I can tell should stay that way.
But when you speak about e.g. how someone breached that no-go and how that is not ok you shouldn't be afraid to use that word instead.
And yes I'm not using the word here because I know how people can be offended by it.
Still fear the abuse of words but don't fear words itself or the fear might just eat you up.
(Abuse as n* originally only described someone from Nigeria, like Berlin => BerlinER with some shortening. But yes this doesn't matter anymore at all and might sometimes even be used to downplay the insult which is not ok.)
FYI, your etymology is wrong. The n word derives from spanish and latin for black (this itself possibly derived from the proto-indo-european for "night"). While Nigeria and the Niger river come from local African languages for "river", although that pronunciation itself is probably influenced by the same latin-for-black. What eventually became Nigeria was a British company founded in 1886, well after the n-word was in common use for anyone of dark skin.
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.
Okay this makes sense, everyone should know by now that being white and saying the N-word in ANY context is a third-rail. USC likely doesn't want professors who can't figure that out, what else will they screw up?
Putting this here because it quotes the statement of complaint for context, which has got a bit buried - and it may address some of the more superficial commentary:
When I was a child, I was in the supermarket with my mother and apparently I was repeating some Polish phrase containing the infinitive “to be”. The Polish equivalent is “być” which sounds like “bitch”. From what I’ve been told, it drew some attention, but the impression I’m left with is that eavesdroppers were more amused than offended. Similarly, my Spanish-speaking classmates in school found it amusing that a common way to refer to one’s aunt is “ciocia” which is pronounced like the Spanish word “chocha”. The same holds for English words like “duper” as in “super duper” which sounds almost like the Polish “dupa” (especially when spoken in non-rhotic English). This extends to brand names (the name of the German lighting manufacturer Osram is a good example: it is the simple future first conjugation of the Polish transitive verb “to shit all over“).
Given how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, and how international UPenn is, I am having trouble comprehending how a professor could be fired for a perfectly banal Chinese expression which many of us have heard many times in American cities with significant Chinese populations.
I just watched the video and in context, suspending this guy does a disservice to: the student, who must learn to listen and process in context; the educator, who must teach without fear; and the school, that loses revenue because it becomes both feared and a laughing stock. If I've somehow been misled, I don't mean to offend, but seriously, this does not bode well for anyone in higher education.
When I read stories like this I can't help but think of Newspeak[0] from 1984. From afar (not a native English speaker nor a US resident here) it feels like a form of control over people through control of their language.
For people who are confused, here's an informative video on the phrase and misconceptions: https://youtu.be/bqmO4yvoXwQ?t=46. He does a great job with the correct pronunciation too.
The funny thing here is that the professor is speaking English throughout, so when he says 那个, 那个, 那个 … (as the translation for "that, that, that …") it really sounds like the English derogatory word. That explains a lot of the reaction, I think.
Intent matters, and we shouldn't be allowed to be lazy and assume others' intent and then get angry at them because of our own assumptions. I don't see how banning this guy for speaking his language isn't just the most blatant normalized racism. This incentivizes people to remain ignorant and not learn about others' cultures. This is an embarrassing direction for a University to go in.
In general I think this micro-aggression/Karen-culture is an awful direction we are going in. At some point, being offended at everything is itself offensive. It is offensive to me that you choose not to understand me, and instead get mad about some fictitious damages.
The pronunciation is very common in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean. If the offended person ever visits Asia, he'd find himself punching literally every person. This is extremely arrogant and disrespectful of other cultures. It's even more bizarre that the college takes the report seriously.
> It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.
Psychological safety? What does that mean?
I hate these vague, marketing-like terms. Just say what you mean: you find it unacceptable to say something that causes a negative emotion. The problem is that saying it like this makes it sound less problematic — because it is. Whereas using the word “safety” implies a physical danger as opposed to just negative emotion.
那個 is a verbal filler [1] as common and as harmless as um, like, you know…
I remember hearing it as the punchline of a joke highlighting a linguistic and cultural mixup. Never imagined the mixup would be taken as a serious offense.
This is so amazingly stupid it blows my mind. I've always thought the right wing hand wringing over "cancel culture" was over blown, however this is such a stupid case of over reaction that its making me re-evaluate my stance.
See the history of this B-school dean. He was the dean of Wharton b-school before. Prior to that, he was a professor at Stanford.
B-school deans reflect the corporate America: virtue signaling. I think, USC must be paying Dean Garrett at least a million dollar per annum or even more. This is the expected behavior from people like him.
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..
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.
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.
The first time I knew the two words (那个 and n*gger) was from a report about Yao Ming who was a basketball play in NBA. I just thought it'e more like a joke...but, it become real and unreal today
Suspended by someone who has never heard a Chinese person talk to another Chinese person in Chinese. There's at least 1 "n-word" per minute there. Professor should sue their ass.
Good summary : “Please know that there are many people that support you and are sick of this hyper-sensitive, McCarthyism-like environment that is being fostered across the country."
Detective Barbie is very problematic due to extensive transphobic and gender-normative storytelling. Here at the UCC (University of Corrected Culture), we only allow our students to watch videos of kittens.
I'm writing to tell you how deeply offended we are by your flagrant use of s_xualized language in a technology-based forum. It's utterly reprehensible to use a word so closely related to the P-word in a context where people might not reasonably expect to encounter it, and you appear to have no remorse for doing so. Please remove this horrible word (ki____ns) immediately or we'll have no choice but to report you to the moderators.
I've gotten heat for saying this in the past, but the "student" community of certain academic departments are almost looking to be offended at anything these days.
Am I the only one who finds it very ironic that you can't use the "n-word" because it offends the African American community. Yet when you listen to rap music, it's all nigga this and nigga that.
Makes me wonder if these offended students first complain, and then drive home singing along with Snoop Dogg.
> Am I the only one who finds it very ironic that you can't use the "n-word" because it offends the African American community. Yet when you listen to rap music, it's all nigga this and nigga that.
No, racists that are upset that it's not socially acceptable to demonstrate their racism this way conplain about this a lot, you aren't the only one.
Also, within the African American community there has very long been a very large group that has attacked this trend in that particular form of popular entertainment.
> No, racists that are upset that it's not socially acceptable to demonstrate their racism this way conplain about this a lot, you aren't the only one.
Just because racists use certain rights, doesn't mean that the rest needs to give up on those rights.
The laws of free speech, incitement etc. are pretty clear. Offending people is not against the law, discrimination is. And using certain words is definitely not against the law.
But now there seems to be a new law, where you get punished by using something that sounds like "a vile racial slur". It is just very stupid. Which word did they actually use? Sorry, nobody is allowed to answer that, except for "a vile racial slur".
There is definitely racism in US, maybe even more so than in EU. But these kind of actions bring zero to the cause of getting rid of it.
Maybe something needs to be done about discrimination and racism, and not so much about offending people.
I agree, as a non-American this thing is really weird, what's even weirder is that people can't even say the word. It reminds me of Harry Potter and how they call Voldermort as "the one who cannot be named" or something similar. This is really interesting as I don't think I've heard of another culture where some words are avoided in this way, by literally beeping the word in real life. I guess beeping is a big thing in the US after all.
right, but I'm just approaching it as a native english speaker born and raised in the US would hear the word. I wouldn't think it has anything to do with the N word.
As opposed to the those who think a synonym for miserly has something to do with it (they are wrong of course, but at least that sounds very similiar to the american english turned ear)
lol remember 100 years ago when whistles got blown and men this age went over the trenches to face their certain death so we'd have the freedom to cry over being offended literally by sound waves
To echo one of responses to the blog post: What a niggardly (and just plain ludicrous) response to what could only have been an entirely innocuous coincidence.
Not too long from now, USC will look back on this episode with a profound sense of regret and embarassment.
People like to blame progressive ideology for these sort of crazy stuff.
But actually, the real culprit is consumerism and customer mentality of students. The professor was suspended because the faculty is terrified from upset customers. Same goes for all cancel culture incidents.
The hyper producticised media , is using the upset sentiment to get attention (racial clickbait triggers)
But it's riding the tiger, so it needs to keep pace with its own click bait to not get the customers to hate them and boycott them.
This dynamics spills onto the academic realm. Students
at US colleges consider themselves customers. So they must never be made upset. They have silly optic based notions of justice. And the faculty have to comply.
This is what contemporary information capitalism does. Consumes and kill off any sort of idea turning it to plastic product and optics.
Can't let post-modernism and critical race theory off the hook.
Objectively, the statement was not racist and it should not be offensive to anyone. However, objective thought is not in favor anymore as it is associated with whiteness. We must accept the subjective view of the victims as paramount.
If you think that is the reason the dean suspended him, you are being naive.
He suspended him because he's afraid of financial repracussions.
The post modernism went off the rails because of the reasons I mentioned.
Otherwise it could have been a fertile ground for empathy and a way to reconcile our differences. instead it ended up a culture war. Because our culture is war. We are taught to fight and compete from day 1.
For a number of reasons, including this kind of political correct fascism, cost, irrelevant coursework in 95% of majors, ideological approach to knowledge, I think American Universities have jumped the shark.
This action is so obviously wrong I can't but wonder if its not some prank. It would be an ideal prank for the Chinese in particular, to audit the course (at first as an attempt to see how Chinese language and culture is taught here), and then stumble upon this coincidental pronunciation, in the context of a tinder-dry atmosphere of political correctness, and send in (multiple) complaints and watch America burn just a little bit more.
Truth is, if this was the case, then we deserved it. It seems sometimes like America has split into the two races in "The Dark Crystal", and we very badly need a reunification. We need the reason and open-mindedness of the left, and the practicality (and romanticism) of the right. We need to accept the truth that there are real differences between people (even groups of people) and celebrate those differences and not pretend they don't exist. We need to accept the truth that racial/ethnic/religious bigotry is essentially a human universal, which doesn't justify it but it also means you can't stop it with law or strongly worded emails to university authorities.
So yeah, if the CCP is behind this one, I say: thanks. Hope we can learn from it.
P.S. The culprit is the dean of the USC Marshall School of Business, Geoff Garrett, not UPenn. Also, according to the LA Times it was a group of black students, not the CCP. Feel free to call or write (213) 740-6422 ggarrett@marshall.usc.edu or tweet https://twitter.com/USCMarshall/https://twitter.com/garrett_geoff
It would never be accidental. In China, English language students are taught to break that habit for fear of it being misinterpreted by a native English speaker.
It could be opportunistically malicious though, to feign outrage. That’s not beyond the realm of possibility at all.
Edit: people are asking how I ‘know’ this.
——
It is anecdotal, so I should have phrased it more carefully. When I was in mainland China about 15 years ago I talked to several people eager to practice their English, in various regions.
They were aware. One kid in particular I remember vividly having that conversation.
As someone with a number of friends from the mainland, I can assure you it does happen by accident. None of them were taught to avoid saying “na ge” because it is the English equivalent of "that" or "that one".
It is anecdotal, so I should have phrased it more carefully. When I was in mainland China about 15 years ago I talked to several people eager to practice their English, in various regions.
They were aware. One kid in particular I remember vividly having that conversation.
Some English students might be taught that, but I'm far from certain that is the norm. In fact, I just asked three Chinese native speakers who learned English in China, and none of them was ever taught to avoid na ge / nei ge.
> We need to accept the truth that there are real differences between people (even groups of people) and celebrate those differences and not pretend they don't exist.
Is this a position that lots of people disagree with? You see the left talk a lot about the value of diversity, and you see the right talk a lot about differences between groups of people.
Did you even read the article? How is cancel culture "open-minded"? I'm legitimately confused and shook at how you could come to that conclusion... It would be really helpful if you could explain it.
I don't, but I believe "cancel culture" is entirely defined by the left, so again I find the notion of the left being "open-minded" entirely contrary to all lived experience. Can you point to a single piece of evidence for the left being more open-minded?
>I don't, but I believe "cancel culture" is entirely defined by the left, so again I find the notion of the left being "open-minded" entirely contrary to all lived experience.
So.. you actually do. Otherwise the idea of an open minded leftist wouldn't be incomprehensible to you.
> Can you point to a single piece of evidence for the left being more open-minded?
Leftist philosophy has its roots in the French Revolution and the Renaissance, it and the left/right political axis wasn't invented on Tumblr. Traditionally, leftist belief tends to be the secular and progressive counterpart to the conservatism and religious ideology of the right, so by definition, the left tends to be open to new ideas, whereas the right wants to maintain the status quo.
The left was more open minded about secular science versus religion when the right was burning heretics.
The left was more open minded about the viability of models of government other than rule by the Church and a King. The Magna Carta, Declaration of the Rights of Man and US Constitution are all leftist in principle.
The left is more open minded about sexual identity, accepting LGBT culture and nonbinary gender identity, as opposed to the right.
The left is more open minded about race and gender roles, being the side that embraces civil rights and feminism, rather than the right.
The left is more open minded about sexual expression than the right, which still believes any sexual expression outside of monogamous, heterosexual marriage is immoral.
The left is more open minded about cultural and artistic expression than the right. The left writes most of the books that get burned and movies that get banned, because the left is the side constantly transgressing societal norms (which makes them more open minded about than the right in that regard.)
The hacker ethos[0] is entirely leftist, and I can't think of a more open minded philosophy. The right definitely would not have come up with something that threatened the gatekeepers and information brokers keeping Ma Bell, the big 3 tv networks and newspapers at the top of the information pyramid.
And here's something that will blow your mind - not every leftist agrees with cancel culture. Leftists are even more open minded about that than the right, which, like yourself, seems to see the left as some kind of SJW hivemind.
> like yourself, seems to see the left as some kind of SJW hivemind.
I'm unable to have a meaningful discussion here as long as you are putting words in my mouth. I'm not sure why you decided it was necessary to embark on this ideological crusade due to my honest question but I hope you find peace somehow.
If you are finally willing to accept an explanation of what I originally meant, instead of once again claiming that my immediate and complete repudiation of things I never said is just further evidence that I believe—checks notes—some different things I never said, then I guess that's good enough. But I'm merely restating something I already said, so I trust that anyone acting in good faith will not turn around and claim that I've changed what I'm saying.
> (Unless, of course, you're saying [snip for restatement below])
This entire parenthetical which has caused so much grief and/or hysteria is an attempt at counterfactual inductive reasoning. (I tried to set it off with "unless...you're saying...It would not be charitable of me to assume...it's the only way I can make [sense of something you said]". It was a classic ASD mistake for me to assume that this was sufficient for such an emotionally charged subject, I admit.) Maybe I can make it more clear:
You claimed that left acceptance of LGBT is evidence of open-mindedness. I pointed out that you don't get open-mindedness credits for accepting something you already believe. As an exercise in inductive reasoning I was trying to figure out what it would take for your original claim to be true in light of my addendum. For my protection, what should be an unnecessary disclaimer: THE FOLLOWING IS A COUNTERFACTUAL VIEWPOINT TO EXPLORE AN IDEA SPACE, NOT SOMETHING I BELIEVE. In order for the left's acceptance of LGBT to be an example of open-mindedness, it would be necessary for LGBT really to be an outgroup of the left (inductive reasoning), so that when the left would treat LGBT like an ingroup they were really practicing open-mindedness (counterfactual). But the only way LGBT could be an outgroup of the left (which it isn't: counterfactual reasoning) is if it were (hint: subjunctive means counterfactual) so "out" that it's a natural outgroup of everyone[0]. How could some group be an outgroup of everyone? They would have to be (counterfactual! inductive!) morally wrong according to the very few shared moral principles of the left and the right. But since this is obviously not the case, we conclude that it's impossible for left acceptance of LGBT to be evidence of open-mindedness.
> The right considers lgbt people to be morally wrong. The left does not. This makes the right more intolerant than the left.
Yes, yes, this is just the same argument in different words. I addressed it above by pointing out that you don't get open-mindedness points for making the ingroup an ingroup, because... they're already an ingroup. No ingroup gets you open-mindedness points. Only accepting and coexisting with outgroups is open-minded. But with your new statement of the same point I can address it in a different way too:
The left considers people born into wealth to be morally wrong. The right does not. This makes the left more intolerant than the right.[1]
Now of course you don't agree. The usual reasoning trotted out is "but being LGBT is something you're born with, so it's not okay to discriminate on that basis, but everything that the left discriminates on is different and it's okay!" Well first of all this is why I said "people born into wealth", as awkward as it makes the argument. But the objection is wrong anyways, because the left has simply defined all the spectra along which they accept all points as part of "identity" while all the spectra along which there are some unacceptable points (e.g., along the "believes in welfare only"..."believes in charity only" spectrum, only points closer to "believes in welfare only" are acceptable for the left) as part of not-identity, "mutable" characteristics. So in the end both the original statement and also this objection are just examples of assuming the conclusion by declaring that the left's ingroups and outgroups are "right" and the right's ingroups and outgroups are "wrong". According to this way of looking at the world, making LGBT an ingroup is righteous but making wealthy people an outgroup is also righteous, and doing the opposite is wrong and intolerant. Well of course when you make that assumption, then you can only possibly conclude that the right is "more intolerant", because they have made outgroups of all the wrong groups!
Neither the left or the right has a "more tolerant" or "more open-minded" set of ingroups and outgroups because, dare I repeat it again, you don't get open-mindedness points for who is in your ingroups and outgroups, only for how you treat the outgroups. How does the majority of the right treat LGBT? And how does the majority of the left treat people in their outgroups? I'd much rather be LGBT in a mostly right-leaning place than, say, publicly ask questions about the left on somewhere, like, say, HN. Because I've been both, and I am both. And the right treats me far better than the left does; in fact there's no contest because literally no one cares that I'm LGBT—I'm not even the only one in my way-to-the-right-of-me family, and no one bats an eye—but if I even have a question about leftist ideology, let alone actually identifying with an outgroup, it's end of the world level hysteria, making up wild stories about what a crazy right-wing fascist Trumpist racist misogynist Nazi like me must be dogwhistling about. What a nightmare.
The right has never been anything but entirely tolerant of whatever beliefs I hold which differ from theirs; and every time I'm accused of being on the right myself, I believe it a little more and more every time. Another non-personal example is Chick-fil-a. Let's see here... Chick-fil-a serves anyone and everyone with respect and doesn't give a shit who you are as long as you just want to buy a fucking chicken sandwich. And frankly in the south LGBT people love Chick-fil-a as much as anyone; maybe more because you are fucking guaranteed never ever to be discriminated against by their employees. It's not even conceivable. But the west coast elite now... they boycott a business for the sole reason that—how terrifying—the founder believes the wrong things! And therefore every franchisee, every employee, they are all outgroup and not deserving of patronage, and anyone who patronizes them is also evil. Being seen talking to someone wearing a CFA uniform is also sacrilege I'm sure. Wow. Many tolerant, so open-mindedness, wow.
[0] Even though AFAICT, as much as I dislike the guy Trump did have the most legitimately pro-LGBT post-primary presidential campaign ever in 2016; not a statement I expect you to agree with though.
[1]Incidentally, this isn't counterfactual, it's just equally as meaningless as your statement.
I actually already addressed this argument: claiming that to be tolerant you must be tolerant of people you are intolerant of is a circular argument. The LGBT community is an outgroup in society, and by being more open to said societal outgroups, the left is more open minded in general.
To rephrase, your assumption that to demonstrate open mindedness, one must act a certain way towards the outgroup is a self defeating premise. As soon as you provide the requisite amount of acceptance to the outgroup, they are no longer the outgroup, so you are no longer being open minded. Under this framing, everyone is exactly equally open-minded because open mindedness is encoded in our preexisting personal prejudices.
A more useful definition of open mindedness is less relative to the person under the lens. And under this lens, the left is significantly more open minded. Progressives have been the side of social progress since the beginning of politics. That's why they're called conservatives and progressives. Arguing that conservatives are more open to new ideas than progressives seems challenging, given the definitions of the words.
> The left considers people born into wealth to be morally wrong. The right does not.
This is a straw argument. The left does not claim it is immoral to be born into wealth. There are claims about certain systems that pereptuate wealth being immoral, but those arguments don't ascribe some sort of original sin to babies of wealthy people.
> As soon as you provide the requisite amount of acceptance to the outgroup, they are no longer the outgroup, so you are no longer being open minded.
This may seem true if one can't conceive of being accepting of an outgroup. But if we apply this claim to my multiple examples of LGBT acceptance by the right (e.g., my family, Chick-fil-a) then we would (counterfactually) have to conclude that LGBT is an ingroup of the right. This contradicts your claim that "The LGBT community is an outgroup in society". It cannot simultaneously be true that LGBT is an outgroup of the right (surely a subset of society), that treating someone with respect and acceptance makes them an ingroup, and that LGBT are treated with respect and acceptance by at least some people on the right. How do you explain this contradiction?
An argument based on the definitions of "progressive" and "conservative" is no better than saying North Korea is a democracy. In the past twenty years the left has had a shocking reversion to moral puritanism, such as by policing speech. This again contradicts the definitions, so unless we claim that it's reality which is wrong, then we must abandon the original meaning of the words.
Finally, I frankly don't know how to respond to the notion that open-mindedness in the sense we're using it here, or the sense I thought we were using it here (viz. as a rough synonym of "tolerance"), has anything to do with the age of ideas. Moreover I dispute the claim that the left's ideas are primarily new, because they again seem to be a reversion to older ideas; for example, socialism (late 18th century) and the idea that society and history can only be properly be viewed through the lens of race (early to mid 20th century Germany).
> This may seem true if one can't conceive of being accepting of an outgroup. But if we apply this claim to my multiple examples of LGBT acceptance by the right
This doesn't follow. The existence of a continuum of levels of acceptance within the right doesn't mean that the right, as a whole is accepting. Consider if we took this to the extreme: I am accepting of LGBT people, therefore society is. Your parents, as individuals, being accepting of LGBT people does not make the whole of "the right" accepting of LGBT people any more than me, as an individual, makes society accepting.
> It cannot simultaneously be true that LGBT is an outgroup of the right (surely a subset of society), that treating someone with respect and acceptance makes them an ingroup, and that LGBT are treated with respect and acceptance by at least some people on the right. How do you explain this contradiction.
You're using absolute terms when I used relative ones. And when dealing with people, who are fuzzy, relative terms are more correct. I can be more to the right of someone else. Not all right wing people share exactly the same views.
I don't consider supporting politicians who wish to remove your rights to be "accepting". You seem to consider "personal politeness" to be "accepting". If your parents identify as "the right" they presumably support Republican candidates. The republican party wishes to remove the right of lgbt individuals to marry. I don't think that is accepting. Perhaps they don't support those right wing policies, but then by the same token I'd argue that they are not paragons of right-wing ideology, so to bundle them into "the right" is to include moderates under the right wing umbrella. That's why I'm not talking about individuals, but the republican party platform, which is I think as close as well get to an official statement of the beliefs of the right wing.
> Chick-fil-a
I'm lost.
> In the past twenty years the left has had a shocking reversion to moral puritanism, such as by policing speech.
It hasn't though. This is an invention of people on the right. The internet has made it easier for us to see examples of people disagreeing, and the right has done a good job of branding individuals exercising their first amendment rights to criticise as an attack on "free speech". I'll warn that were running headlong into paradox of tolerance territory.
But the right is no stranger to policing speech. Consider that the most commonly banned books in the us schools are the handmaid's tale (sexual themes), harry potter (witchcraft), and 8 books about lgbtq topics. The right likes to shift the focus to cancel culture, but...
> This again contradicts the definitions, so unless we claim that it's reality which is wrong, then we must abandon the original meaning of the words.
This does not follow. I'll also note that someone did go to the effort of explaining why progressive and conservative are fitting (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24402840), and you ignored the body of the response.
> Moreover I dispute the claim that the left's ideas are primarily new, because they again seem to be a reversion to older ideas; for example, socialism (late 18th century) and the idea that society and history can only be properly be viewed through the lens of race (early to mid 20th century Germany).
Compare to the right, which gets it's ideas from the Bible and enlightenment philosophers, both of which predate leftist philosophy by decades or centuries ;). You're also greatly oversimplifying critical theory to the point of parody. Perhaps remove the "only" from your sentence.
... can be used as an apparent counter-argument to literally anything, and is meaningless. I don't believe the contradiction has been addressed at all.
> I'm lost.
Ah yes, a brilliant response to any concrete example I might bring up of leftist intolerance, such as the widespread informal boycott of Chick-fil-a. (This is called an example.)
> I'll warn that were running headlong into paradox of tolerance territory.
The so-called "paradox of tolerance" is literally an admission that the left does not tolerate those with whom they disagree; i.e., they are not open-minded. I'm not sure why you want to bring that up now. The left has twisted the definition of "tolerance" until it means the exact opposite. This is presumably why you can't get past "claiming that to be tolerant you must be tolerant of people you are intolerant of". Of course if the word has been twisted to mean two opposite things, but you still try to use the word to shape your understanding of the world, you will inevitably conclude that acceptance of those with whom you disagree is impossible. It's baked right into the meaning of the word (for you, as it seems to me)! The word has been used to mean both "acceptance" and "agreeing", to the point where disagreement is declared intolerance, which is absurd. I urge you to reject "tolerance" as a notion altogether due to how it's been mistreated, and use more precise concepts for more accurate reasoning.
> Compare to the right, which gets it's ideas from the Bible and enlightenment philosophers, both of which predate leftist philosophy by decades or centuries.
I really don't see much similarity between the protestant Bible (I assume that's the one you mean) and the philosophy of the right. But you have correctly identified enlightenment philosophy as a prominent influence.
How does that demonstrate open-mindedness by the left? The left is (ostensibly) universally supportive of LGBT rights. Liking the in-group is not a demonstration of open-mindedness.
(Unless, of course, you're saying there's something inherently out-group about LGBT; i.e., there's something inherently wrong with it. It would not be charitable of me to assume that this is what you meant, but it's the only way I can make "Supporting LGBT is a demonstration of open-mindedness" into a true sentence. Otherwise... it's never the case that supporting any group—other than the out-group, i.e., the morally wrong group—is a demonstration of open-mindedness. So I don't think it applies to LGBT.)
> given that you appear to identify as part of "the right".
What leads you to believe this? Because I'm asking probing questions about the left? Is asking questions in order to learn a trait of someone on the right, and not the left? Big if true, and I'm surprised that you're promoting this viewpoint.
> To suggest such a thing is closed minded.
First of all, this doesn't follow from any evidence in the discussion so far. But to accuse me of this also ignores the most important word in my sentence, whose formatting you've stripped: "inherently". I was saying that the way to become part of an "inherent" outgroup (i.e. not contingently) is to be morally wrong. But I did not say that LGBT is part of an inherent outgroup. In fact I said literally the exact opposite thing: I said that LGBT is not part of the outgroup of the left, implying that they're not somehow inherently an outgroup. I'm not even sure that there's any such thing as an inherent outgroup; I used the phrase only as part of a counterfactual attempt to derive meaning from your original claims.
It's very frustrating to discuss anything with people who insist on deliberately (as far as I can tell, since I assume a certain baseline reading comprehension from HN commenters) misinterpreting my words, such as by dropping important qualifiers from parenthetical, counterfactual claims and then presenting the resulting manufactured sentence as if I had expressed it as a sincerely held belief! How can you justify such behavior in the pursuit of truth?
----
I can't reply any deeper, but here's my response:
You:
> inherent in an outgroup
What I actually said from the very beginning:
> inherent outgroup
You:
> You are now claiming that lgbt people are not an outgroup of the left
What I actually said from the very beginning:
> The left is universally supportive of LGBT rights.
You:
> To suggest moral failings due solely to being a member of an outgroup is prejudiced and closed minded.
What I actually said from the very beginning:
> I don't think it [being morally wrong] applies to LGBT
In each of these cases, why do you feel it is a useful conversational practice to lie about what I said, when thanks to the power of the internet it's right there for anyone to see? Or is the conversation so emotionally difficult that you honestly believe that I've made claims which are the exact opposite of what I actually said?
Either way, I don't think this conversation is going anywhere. I hope you too find peace.
---
I see you wish to continue the conversation. I too think I have something useful to say about your new claims. However, I cannot continue with the conversation unless you repudiate and delete all of your claims about what I've said and allow my words alone to speak for me. On what other grounds could I possibly continue the conversation?! Until you do that I can only assume you wish to continue in bad faith.
> On what other grounds could I possibly continue the conversation?! Until you do that I can only assume you wish to continue in bad faith.
I've tried, to the beat of my abilities, to state my interpretation of your words clearly. As far as I can tell, you agree that my comments have value.
I invite you to clarify, but to accuse me of anything in bad faith is upsetting, unfair, and I'll note, a violation of the hacker news guidelines. It is possible that I misunderstood you, but you should address that by adding clarification, not by demanding that I remove my own statements. When you called me a liar, I didn't demand you remove the offending statement, not when you claimed, more than once now, that I'm acting in bad faith. I simply clarified since your accusations held no merit. I only ask that you do the same. Clarify, and de-escalate instead of accusing people of acting in bad faith. If my statements merit a response, respond.
This is made all the more confusing since I cannot know which statements you feel are me speaking for you. I don't believe I've spoken for you at all. I've provided my interpretation of your words. And you seem to want to respond to some of what I've said. Removing my clarifications or something that you wish to respond to is a disservice to the both of us.
And again, I invite you to clarify if I misunderstood, but I ask you to do so assuming good faith on my part. It's the same courtesy I extend to you.
On a more technical note, I believe I can only edit one of my posts, and it's the most recent one where I defend myself from your accusations that I am a liar.
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.
Please don't make speculations like that about HN. I'm pretty sure it's against the rules, and even if it isn't, it doesn't foster good discussions.
You can't always know what is the reason a story is or isn't on the front page. For the record, at the moment, this story is the top story on https://news.ycombinator.com/active, which is the main way I personally view HN. So I doubt it's being actively hidden.
That document could use a clarification for the "Ask HN or Show HN" section. I didn't see an option to make an "Ask HN or Show HN" in the UI. Do we just add that text manually? Does the software recognize it as special keywords? If so, is it case-sensitive and does it need spaces or a colon?
It's been obvious for a while that the US is primed for its own Cultural Revolution. It's why I ironically support the various West-Coast separatist movements, because the inevitable communist hell hole created would remind folks how bad life can be. Also ironically, Trump be the US' saving grace from all of this, at least for now.
To play sort-of devil's advocate, while the concrete situation is completely over-the-top, it's easy to imagine that "nà ge" could become an actual racist dog whistle if widely enough known.
E.g., I personally believe there is ample room for criticism on the way the Israeli government treats Palestinians (to put it mildly). There are some attempts to define any and all criticism on the Israeli government by non-jews as anti-semitism, which frankly seems ridiculous to me.
Nevertheless, it's also true that "solidarity for Palestine" and "criticism on the Israeli government" are frequently used as covers and dog-whistles by actual antisemites. Marches in solidarity of Palestine can be easily be co-opted by Nazis if the organizers don't work too actively prevent it, even if the original intention was genuine.
In a similar way, white supremacists, racists, etc, might start to use "nà ge" as a substitute for the slur and attempt to back down with some bullshit excuse like "I was just speaking Chinese" when called out.
This is not advocating banning words preemptively because they could be used as slurs (nor banning pro-palestine demonstrations) but to stay vigilant. Context matters, but this goes both ways.
Since you are playing devil's advocate anyway, could you try to defend the concept of dog whistles? Recent events suggest that if someone wants to be racist they simply will, without any attempt to disguise it.
I also think it is too convenient to give one political movement the ability to say that their enemies are secretly racist (aka evil) even though everything they say is actually innocuous.
While the antisemitism example resonates somewhat, antisemitism withing the anti-Israel political movements is:
A) not coded at all, and
B) not a good reason to dismiss all anti-Israel arguments all of the time.
Therefore, it is hard to see how the concept of dog-whistles is at all useful.
But why are the students like that in the first place?
It sounded outlandish to me at first, but over time it seems more and more likely that it could be the result of decades-long subversion campaigns that sought to supplant western/enlightenment ideals with authoritarian-marxist ideals which view speech as inherently dangerous:
Students are "like that", because they feel powerless and complicit by slaving away in a virtually for-profit education system, that they see as part of the problem.
They understandably want change, progress, solidarity, etc. Basically think of this as the very very very watered down version of a student protest. After all young adults are the prime age cohort who are sensitive to social issues. This requires no organized subversion.
They attack those who they think represent the school. The dude they see in the classroom. "Little do they know" the decisions are made by administrators. (Only strictly research/science decisions are still handled by profs, but they also don't really do much other than churn out grant proposals and papers.)
And this was seen in the debates (shouting matches?) that faculty members had with students elsewhere. (I'm thinking about a video about some safe space protest.) It was not some nameless administrator trying to persuade (and educate) the emotional students, but someone that actually cares about education yet the decision about not hosting a lecture by some controversial figure is usually made by the administration, to play it safe. (While the initial decision to host some event is usually made by some club/group, approved by the administration. And that approval just gets withdrawn.)
Of course looking at this with a very reductionist first principles eye it makes sense. Students don't want to learn from someone they don't consider at least a bit an authority figure. So they then voice their grievances to them too. And if the educator cannot do anything about those problems, then he/she was just a fake authority figure all along. (And then just a bit of cognitive dissonance helpfully informs them that from this it logically follows that whatever said educator had said is wrong/useless. And so young folks go ideology shopping, and that's why suddenly there are post-cultural Marxo-modernists everywhere.)
It might happen elsewhere too, but we just don't know about those instances. The 24-hour constant breaking news cycle is perfected in the US, and some of that bubbles up to HN, whereas similar events from other countries doesn't even make much "news", much less make it out of that country.
Plus it might simply be that because US public discourse has become more polarized than that of other countries.
I get where you're coming from, but by phrasing it this way you draw up the image of a secret cabal of influential marxists waging a "campaign" via gullible students. That's not really doing the rest of your argument justice.
As always, the much more likely story is that these students are gullible and silly totally by their own means.
>I get where you're coming from, but by phrasing it this way you draw up the image of a secret cabal of influential marxists waging a "campaign" via gullible students.
Probably because the "cultural marxism" conspiracy theory originated from the Nazi conspiracy theory of "cultural bolshevism". The idea that Marxists are subverting Western society is a delusional theory pushed by far-right lunatics.
>But why are the students like that in the first place
Show their might over others probably.
Please leave Marx alone, he was the guy that spoke against the royalty and for a fair system. Lenin and Stalin of course is a complete different thing.
There's a bit of irony that, in response to a commoditization of education, your response is to blame "marxists." If anyone, blame marshall field because the customer definitely isn't always right.
True, i hate it when someone thinks Marx wanted the real-world communism of the USSR, his ideas where in fact the opposite. The Communist Party of the USSR where nothing else then the Czarist regime under a different flag, now Russia is a 'Democracy' and again has a Czar.
>The Communist Party of the USSR where nothing else then the Czarist regime
Some should explain to your parent commenter that Stalin itself grew up under a conservative Church like seminarium, under the influence of the Orthodox Church.
In essence, Stalin converted a socialist regime to another one under Neo-tsarism with a bureaucratic state.
> it could be the result of decades-long subversion campaigns that sought to supplant western/enlightenment ideals with authoritarian-marxist ideals which view speech as inherently dangerous
You must be joking. Please - tell me you are joking. It's hard to believe an educated adult could actually say what you are saying with a straight face.
EDIT: someone else here said it better: "The idea that Marxists are subverting Western society is a delusional theory pushed by far-right lunatics."
This is so far out there that there must be something else going on.
From his profile, the dean (Geoff Garrett) does not seem like someone who would be overly concerned with something like this.
Could it be a play for Trump? If not, is there something special with the power relationship between the MBA students and the University? Could it be a large company paying for their employees degrees threatening to withdraw?
Of course, we have no idea of the context. But if it was anything like the linked video - and it could have been worse - it’s perfectly understandable why students would be surprised and perhaps upset.
If you disagree, its worth asking yourself, what reaction would you expect if you were a chinese professor enunciating the word “cunt” during a lecture, with no prior warning?
That video IS the context. It's Covid era - everything is streamed. We are all watching the same thing the students saw.
And if a Chinese professor prefaced the use of that word with an explanation about that word's usage in another language, I would find that a very memorable educational experience. That's it. I don't need to be warned about a sound because a similar sound with a different meaning is used in negative ways.
I would expect them to use their brains and understand that this is a word in a foreign language that has a completely different meaning than the offensive word in their own. Is that too much to ask for?
No, I really can't see why. And like many other women in this world, I've actually experienced being called that word in a threatening way. Sound alone does not make a word scary. Context and intent matter.
As far as saying "motherfucker" - I'd expect chuckles from any students paying attention. Then class would continue. It's not like students haven't heard all of these words before.
In combating against bigotry, it is important that we do not become bigots ourselves.
Regarding painful words, it is my position that policies against uttering them (for people without any intent to hurt) must essentially be no more a courtesy to those sensitized against them, because of words with multiple meanings and foreign languages with different meanings, and also because what is taboo on one society may not be taboo in another. Punishing the reasonably ignorant seems to be immoral to me.
Being sensitized to painful words spoken by people who don't mean them seems to me that it needs to be counted not on the person who says them and does not mean them, but on the people who said them and meant them and made people sensitized to them in the first place. It is the continued damage created by bigots, making words that in some situations are necessary to speak (or far too inconvenient to not use) painful to some because of their bigoted use. The rest of us can try to avoid them, but morality-wise, it looks to me more supererogatory for those in a position to do so rather than a moral obligation.
* In combating against bigotry (racism, xenophobia, etc.), we must be wary that our anti-bigotry policies aren't themselves bigoted.
* On slurs and other words that hurt: we cannot punish people who say them if we do not have proof that they intend to hurt. Some people think that even saying them unintentionally ought to be punished, because someone gets hurt even though none was intended. But because words like these so frequently get said
- out of necessity
- out of ignorance
- because it is tremendously inconvenient (considering foreign language meanings, multiple meanings, etc.)
it's unrealistic to put this onus on everyone to avoid these words, especially when bigots can so easily make another word a taboo word. My position is that it is a courtesy (and not moral obligation) to actively try to avoid using taboo words and think of synonyms and circumlocutions to avoid hurting someone when none is intended.
When analyzing the cause of the hurt, I think we should analyze the pain that happens when hearing someone says a hurtful word unintentionally as not primarily caused by the person saying the hurtful word, but by the person or people that sensitized the hearer into feeling hurt upon hearing the painful words, but having a delayed effect.
For those thinking it's crazy, consider how we assume seeing trigger warnings for rape etc before certain content are normal and approved in our societies.
It could be simply a cry for a trigger warning: this lecture may contain words which sound similar to words which cause trauma. Sounds okay to me.
I predict that you will see these trigger warnings before Chinese subtitled films, lectures which talks about the Chinese language at the very least within a year. The university is ahead of the curve, this is progress and a natural extension of current protections against reliving past trauma.
If trigger warnings in general are also considered crazy, to say so would get you instantly fired in every YC startup and silicon valley corporation.
I just watched the video after reading the article, and the video -- if it's of the incident to which people were objecting -- wasn't as cringey as I expected it to be; however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
Maybe, if he saw the problem, he could've prefaced the example with warning, or otherwise acknowledged the sensitivity. I didn't get a sense that the offense was intentional.
The article had a comment that suggested someone didn't see how the similar sounds were a problem.
One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood.
I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.
This hurtful mistake could be a learning moment for the professor, and maybe he could then help a lot of other people to also learn something constructive from it, and help everyone move forward in understanding and helping each other.
> I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
I’m learning Mandarin Chinese and consequently have use "nei-ge" quite a high number of times and I also happen to know English and it NEVER occured to me it is somehow related to the n-word before today. People who want to see racism could find everywhere anyway, it’s a lost battle.
Not using words that could be insulting in other languages is an impossible tasks and ridiculous thing to ask given how many of them there is.
> would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
People who aren't racist don't anticipate that kind of "problems" because we don't obsess about race. Furthermore, while the words may sound "problematic" to a non Chinese speaker, anyone with some fluency would probably not even notice the similarity.
Let's do an experiment. Read the following aloud (the louder the better), preferably to another person:
The person who uttered it is a professor lecturing on language and culture. So it's unfortunate if they weren't aware of that aspect of cultural sensitivity in language, or accidentally missed it this time.
As I said, I think this could be a constructive learning moment for a lot of people. (Though it might not be, if all dialogue is shouted&voted down by a team rivalry: between those who want to cancel everything they disagree with, and those who presume to understand the situations of everyone else and are the better arbiter of what everyone else has a right to care about.)
>I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
If you're speaking Mandarin you are going to hear this homophone with even less context than the professor is giving. Should professors slow down their lectures (which he did explaining the context) or compromise their education by simply not covering the topic to protect the sensibilities of adults?
>One reason I would suspect it's a problem (which I heard in a TV show, in which a character explains how an anti-gay slur is hurtful to them), is that they grew up hearing that slur hurled in the context of other injustices, from childhood. I can also imagine that insensitivity to how hurtful a slur is could feel like a signal that someone doesn't understand or care about the associated injustices.
I've at least experienced hearing slurs in negative contexts, and people discussing them brashly without "contextualizing" it. Sometimes it's pretty jarring, sometimes it feels bad. I still have absolutely no patience for not even engaging in, but enforcing under threat to somebodies career that they engage in the practice of trigger warnings. That is just using peoples suffering to push a personal agenda which nominally will help other people but which evidence shows will not help other people.
Or you know, we could just tell these idiots to grow up or get therapy.
There was no malice intended here at all. If people can't even hear a word from another language that vaguely resembles a racial slur when used in a non malicious context then they probably need therapy. Not coddled.
>however, I would've hoped that an expert who was lecturing about language and culture would've anticipated the problem, and been more sensitive to it.
The problem with that line of thinking is that there is no "problem" to begin with, aside from an inflated sense of entitlement from a group of outrage enthusiasts who believe context is irrelevant.
I think you need to be developmentally disabled to genuinely think that foreign language words that resemble curses in your language are offensive. It's not on the professor to do backflips to protect against people looking for excuses to get offended.
I'd say it's not merely a curse word, for reasons I already suggested in the comment to which you're replying: I argue that it's understandably hurtful to some, and is associated with immense, tragic, shameful wrongs towards groups of people.
Separately, could you have made your point without saying that anyone who thinks differently than you must be developmentally disabled? Would it have been sufficient to say you don't understand why someone would think differently? Or, if you were very confident, and felt some emphasis were needed, could you have emphasized with more detail in a logical argument?
It's more that I think the only way you can be earnestly offended by something like this is if you're stupid, and I don't think they're stupid. I think they're dishonest. It's not reasonable to be offended by phonemes in Cantonese. I don't think they're sensitive, I think they're lying.
Thanks for the explanation. I wouldn't be surprised if some people are feigning outrage. But it's intuitive to me that some others would be genuinely bothered by the appearance of insensitivity to culture in language, by a professor who seems to be speaking as an expert about language and culture. (Not that there's anything wrong with a foreign language, nor with the coincidences in sound, of course.)
If I saw someone in the class who seemed offended, or they mentioned it to me, I'd reach out to the professor privately. Or, if I knew the professor, and had occasion to see this, I'd ask them if they thought there might be a sensitivity they want to realize and address.
Like, look at it in the first person. Can you imagine being hurt if you were being taught Indian and one of their words was "kike"? That's incomprehensible to me. It's totally loopy.
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