I don’t think they’re suggesting that every student in the class had studied Mandarin.
Sure, but this wasn’t the basis of their complaint. They accused him of deliberately mispronouncing the word and repeating it unidiomatically to make it sound more like the slur and to antagonize. They were factually wrong on both points.
Granted. He late said, "I have since learned there are regional differences, yet I have always heard and pronounced the word as ‘naaga’ rhyming with ‘dega,'” The complaint was technically wrong on this point, as his pronunciation is apparently one among several accepted regional pronunciations.
That technical point doesn’t seem central to the question, however, if he was using the word, not to insult black students, but to seem momentarily like he was being transgressive as a way to make his lecture more memorable.
In any case, I think this is a digression. My question was whether anyone doubts that the professor–not the complainants–" knew that English-speaking American students unfamiliar with Mandarin and not taking a class in Mandarin would do a double-take on hearing it." Do you doubt that?
Feel free to clarify, but you think he said the chinese filler word with the express intention of shocking the class with something that sounds like the english racial slur?
I think that was likely one of multiple intentions. If it was purely unintentional, it’s a pretty significant failure to understand how communication works on multiple levels.
You’re not the first person to make this claim. And there is still not one iota of evidence for it.
No doubt he was aware of the similarity, but I think in lecturing graduate students it’s reasonable to expect that they will not react on the immature level of Joey in Friends hearing the word “homo” in a lecture on anthropology, that their critical thinking skills will be adequate to understand that if you announce clearly that you’re now talking about a Chinese idiom, the students can figure out for themselves that the phonemes in an unrelated language have no semantic connection whatsoever to English. This expectation was correct in numerous prior classes where he gave this example.
And I should clarify that by “significant,” I don’t mean “firing-worthy.” If it was accidental, it’s the kind of dumbass mistake we all make. But it’s a mistake, and a professor of communications ought to acknowledge that, if it is a mistake.
And that’s what he appears to be claiming, so, if it’s true, good on him for acknowledging it.
That’s nonresponsive to what I’m saying. I didn’t say they’d fundamentally misunderstand what he said, I said they’d be momentarily taken aback. Do you understand the difference? Do you think most grad students wouldn’t be momentarily taken aback?
Fine, do a double take, ask did you just say the n-word. He can reply no i said neiga, a chinese filler word that we are discussing in a communications class. And move on with your life.
Okay, so you don’t doubt that. Correct?
Now: do you understand that communication sometimes works on two levels simultaneously? Like, have you heard of double entendres? Do you understand how they work?
(nm, retracted)
But thats not what happened.
So what? He may well have thought about it, and concluded at the level of a postgraduate class some kind of explicit “trigger warning” is patronizing and distracting, because students at that level are obviously smart enough to understand. Again, that was a correct analysis in all prior lectures he gave with the same content.
Are we really going to say that there some burden on speakers now to worry about whether words in other languages vaguely resemble offensive words in English, and no burden on the listen to have any critical thinking skills?
If you’re going to make some credible circumstantial case that this professor was being deliberately antagonistic here, making an “edgy joke” or something, you need to come up with some evidence of other dubious or racist behavior on his part. There is no such evidence.
Not quite, the students were more wrong than this. His pronunciation is the usual pronunciation in Modern Standard Mandarin (when the word is used as a filler). The first syllable in MSM is almost identical to the word “nay” in English. There are, in fact, regional non-MSM variants that sound more like the English slur than the standard pronunciation that he used.
It is also ubiquitously idiomatic to use the word repeatedly when it’s a filler, exactly the way he said it.
At some point, you got to break students out of their American shell. You got to make them more tolerant and accepting of other cultures/languages: “Look, other people say and do things differently than us. America is just one nation out of 200.” Exposure and learning is healthy.
Instead, this incident just lets these students retreat further into their American-centric shell and demand that other languages and cultures accommodate them.
In case no-one has noted this in the thread yet, he chose Mandarin because he is, per his CV (PDF), an expert on China, and a lot of his career has focused on Asia in general, and China specifically.
So maybe he chose it because, in over a decade working on issues related to China, and actually spending a lot of time in China as part of his job, it’s an example that he has heard a lot, and that he feels comfortable using as a foreign-language analog for English communication issues.
Emphasis mine.
But you don’t seem to be claiming a possible intention here; you seem to be claiming, unequivocally, that he knew what he was doing and intended to cause offense or alarm or surprise. I’m curious where your certainty comes from. I understand that we often make assessments about things where we don’t have full information, but in the absence of ANY other evidence, it’s pretty it’s pretty hard to get inside the head of someone you’ve never even met, based on a single utterance. You must be a savant of some sort.
You and everyone trying to justify this nonsense.
Did the guy say the N-word or not?
It seems like a simple question. Dance around the issue all you want. Nobody seems to want to answer it. That is why i keep asking it.
Why on earth? Of course not. Their extreme overreaction makes we wonder what the heck they’ve been taught - that all white people are inescapably racist and out to get them? Pretty sad for them if so.
I bet they do get punished though, if the internet finds out who they are. Because of the current vogue for mob ‘justice’ that you don’t believe in. 
I don’t see why you are so persistent that anything hinges on this alone. After all, it’s a widespread practise among actual racists to use words like “snigger” as code for the slur, with a veneer of deniability. And as we’ve discussed, if someone were wearing a t-shirt with the characters nei-ge on it, it would without a doubt be a racist pun along the same lines - why would you wear a t-shirt saying “that”?
But none of this is relevant to this case, where his citation of the example of the very common filler word in Chinese was perfectly apt and natural in the context of his lecture.
mhendo, are you just fucking with me?