Basically, a Caucasian anchor at Philly station is in a discussion over NAACP “burial of the word” ceremony (where they “buried the n-----” word). During that NAACP ceremony, the word is used, without euphemizing it, a hundred times or so. During the discussion, anchor says “Does this mean we can finally say the word n-----?”.
Long story short, anchor is eventually fired for saying that. A black co-worker uses the “n-----” word in email that he sent to station management several times. That co-worker is not in any way punished for it.
The anchor since cannot find a job in the industry. He sues. The suit has been dragging on forever.
So -
Should the guy win the suit? IMO, it’s pretty obvious he’s in the right.
If the word is such an anathema, shouldn’t the moral usage ban apply to everyone (including NAACP)?
I’m not positive about how the law is applied here, but I don’t think “person who uses a racial slur in a certain way” is a protected class for employment. From the story, he wasn’t fired for being white – he was fired for saying n----- in a context that his superiors deemed inappropriate. Maybe it wasn’t actually inappropriate, but I don’t think that necessarily means he wins the lawsuit.
Not necessarily, though perhaps. I believe that privilege exists, and privilege can prevent me and others from fully understanding the meaning and effects of certain slurs when uttered by people who don’t belong in the targeted group.
He gets fired, and, to nobody’s surprise, no other stations want to hire someone that is going to make them look bad, when the job is to make the station look good.
The person who wrote the word in an email to management didn’t make the station look bad. The NAACP didn’t make the station look bad, AND they don’t work for the station.
I don’t believe in banning words. I wouldn’t use it myself. It would sound weird/dissonant if it came from someone I was talking to. But the weirdness/dissonance would not depend on the race of the speaker.
He didn’t use the word on air. He used it in an internal discussion, referring to the usage of the word in the NAACP ceremony, in a non-derogatory manner. How does that “make the station look bad”?
He used it in public, right (as opposed to in his own home, or something like that), even if it wasn’t on air? He wasn’t in that discussion as a bystander, he was there as a journalist, if I understand the story correctly. So in his role as a journalist, he used a racial slur in what was considered an offensive way by at least some present, even if it may have not been meant derogatorily. It’s not hard to see how that might “make the station look bad”.
EDIT: the discussion was at work, but it was not “in public”. So I retract the “in public” part.
Maybe that does too. He’s certainly entitled to make that argument. I don’t know if it legally holds water, though, in terms of marking the firing as unlawful.
When I was asking “Should the guy win the suit?”, it wasn’t only addressed to lawyers. Laymen are allowed to have opinions as well. Maybe this should be moved to IMHO.
I’m going to use that word in e-mail, but sign all my e-mails: “Eonwe, a black man,” so that way people know not to be outraged by my use of the word nigger.
In seriousness, the “rules” around that word are ridiculous and riddled with unclear exceptions. The fact that using the word nigger in a meta-discussion about the use of the word nigger is anathema to some is bizarre to the extreme.
I have to wonder if there was already some bad blood between this guy and his colleagues. I can’t imagine a well-loved coworker getting the can for this (and, I can’t imagine a well-loved coworker being the sort of guy asking if he can “finally” use the word nigger).
Every few months, when this topic invariably comes up, I always wonder whether these people actually think anyone would believe they were born last week, or if they are actually as stupid as they seem. If you’re white and you use the ‘N…’ word in a pubic forum, you are either daring to be challenged or you’re simply an idiot.
Maybe he is regularly a troll at work and this little piece of trolling is what finally got him “banned”. I think the right thing to do is have a jury look at everything in context and make a decision.
If a white and a black person each say the same word, and you fire one of them because he wasn’t the right color to say that word, isn’t there at least reasonable grounds for a suit?
The parenthetical comment seems to me to be the crux of the issue. What an obnoxious question to ask at a meeting. I cannot imagine my relationship with my white co-workers surviving such a question, let alone with my black co-workers: it suggests that the only thing keeping me from using the word in conversation is that I think I’ll get in trouble for it, and not some baseline minimal human decency.
And that’s totally and completely different from someone using the word to discuss an incident in which someone asks such a question.
The discrimination here isn’t against a white person using the word vs. a black person using the word, I think: it’s against a person using the word to ask a fairly vile and obnoxious question in person (and don’t play innocent here, he wasn’t Just Asking Questions) and someone recounting the incident in writing.
That said, even if there were an exact parallel where the only difference was the race of the speaker, hell yeah that’s an important difference. Someone using an epithet that refers to their own group is completely and entirely different from someone using an epithet to refer to another group. I’m undecided on whether the law should respect that difference, but from the standpoint, again, of some very baseline and minimal human decency, it’s a difference that’s real.