Just like how condemning people who call the cops on black people having cookout in the park may have a chilling effect. Or the lady who reported the suspicious math problems next to her, resulting in a professor’s interrogation and a two hour delay for all passengers. Hell we have an active Doper who at least at one point was adamant that he would call 911 on anyone he saw doing something that was perfectly legal but that he happened to not like. While the stakes here are certainly lower than calling the cops on someone, fucking with someone’s livelihood is certainly something I hope everyone thinks twice about before sicking HR, a dean, etc. on someone. And if, whether by malice or ignorance, normal human empathy doesn’t do the trick, maybe a little ridicule will.
No way I’d hire anyone who’d write something like that. Way too fragile. How would someone like that deal with an angry customer who was actually shouting at them?
File a report with HR?
I lived in China for two years and in the Tianjin region, the word “nega” really does sound like the slur, but you learn to hear it(and say it when you speak Chinese) without even thinking about it.
The word can be pronounced “nuh guh” depending on the accent, but “nig-uh” or “nay-guh” is also common depending one where you are.
I have a friend (American) who spent two years in China teaching college-level English, and she said one thing she always had to do with her 1st year students was teach them not to say “ney-ga” (that’s how she spelled in it her letters) when they were speaking English. She would teach them what the American “pause” words were “uh,” “um,” “well,” “like,” and sometimes she would have them speak Mandarin, but try to use American pause words in place of “ney-ga.”
A lot of the students in their “goals” that she had them fill out at the beginning of the year said they wanted to visit America, and many said they would like to go there for grad school. She hammered this point home so they wouldn’t make this faux pas in the US.
But people speaking Mandarin, wherever they speak it, should be free to speak it without worrying that people think that are inserting an American obscenity.
“Shit” means “navigation” in Hebrew." Well, OK, it’s more like “shiet,” but it’s the same way Israelis pronounce “shit.” A better one is “Fee Kol,” which sounds just like “fecal” in the right context (different contexts can change pronunciations slightly) means something like “consensus.” It’s in a prayer, and it always make my bar mitzvah class giggle, because they weren’t following the Hebrew well, so it stood out to them.
In Sweden, the middle finger isn’t an obscene gesture. In Swedish Sign Language, it’s a phoneme, so two people speaking Swedish Sign Language look like they are giving each other the finger from time to time.
This just happens when people are speaking a language you don’t know. You try to pick out things you do know, wrong though they may be.
People need to be educated regarding the fact that out brains search for patterns whether they are to complex to sort out, or even nonexistent (like cinnamon buns that look like Mother Theresa).
We recognize things that aren’t really there all the time. We see constellations-- figures in stars, clouds “look like” this of that.
And a Mandarin stammer sounds like an American obscenity.
A more charitable reading is that it’s the students’ assumption that their professor is a racist that has so severely affected their mental health, not merely hearing certain syllables.
Your anus might be a puny planet, my anus is a freaking GOD! MUAHAHA! 
Lol what? Pretty sure giving people the finger is pretty offensive in Sweden, even if what you say about Swedish Sign Language is true (which I seriously doubt). At least once cite backs this up.
Ah. Well, it must have been relatively recently adopted in Sweden (it was in a lot of European countries) because it it definitely was a phoneme my Swedish roommate at Gallaudet used when she spoke in Swedish SL with someone else.
He meant to be funny? I see how you got that.
Good point.
(in a previous post of mine I meant to type “I don’t see how you got that”, not “I see how you got that.”)
The professor clearly said ‘nega nega nega’ and it sounded precisely like the first half of the word ‘negative’…which sounds nothing like an n-bomb.
But you know what? Racists are still to blame simply for giving us that goddamn word and using it as an accompaniment to their obscene acts. If not for them, we wouldn’t be having this absurd conversation. Don’t like all this ‘pc bullshit?’ Well, guess who brought us here.
This seems quite the overreaction here. Where would you get this idea? Why would you think this?
Is it just hyperbole for hyperbole’s sake, or do you actually “wonder” this.
There have been posters here who have demanded that they receive some sort of punishment, everything from condescendingly saying that requiring remedial classes before they can graduate, to saying that they should be publicly humiliated and their reputations tarnished.
Why on earth indeed.
I doubt that this,very much. Unless you are volunteering to lead such a mob.
Yes, a chilling effect of calling cops on people who are minding their own business.
Do you see that there is any difference at all between calling the cops on random people who are doing their own thing, and making a complaint against a person who has authority over you, who you are paying to teach you?
I see the situations as entirely separate, and the only similarity they have is that people will try to use one to justify the other.
So, you are for punishing the students as well?
How about a little ridicule for a communications professor who doesn’t know that a Chinese filler word sounds like an English slur?
That would be a very motivated rationalization on your part, not a charitable reading. I didn’t see the part where they called him a racist, could you point out the part that you have chosen to interpret that way?
An objective reading would say that, since this professor felt that throwing out this entendre was acceptable, then he may not also have reasonable judgement on other concerns relating to racial issues.
It is one thing to point out that a word in another language sounds like s slur. It is another to make light of it, to casually throw out a slur like that in an attempt to surprise the audience into paying attention.
For the same reason that I already posted upthread. A few times.
Humor can be found in anything subversive or unexpected. And throwing out a word that sounds very much like an English slur is both.
If he had done the same thing, but used a language in which the filler word in question sounded like “fuck” it would be exactly the same. Unexpected and subversive. But fuck is just a profanity, not a slur. That is something that could get attention, without demeaning the minority students in your class.
Something doesn’t have to have you ROFLMAO in order to be intended to be funny.
Do you not believe in the existence of puns? Is a pun only a joke if you get it?
There are many differences; I even wrote that the stakes are certainly lower in an emoyment situation. However, all cases I referenced (including the ones you edited out) involve harming and attempting to control others, who haven’t done anything wrong (or at least not very wrong, if the cookout was in fact illegal), by sicking the authorities of one type or another on them.
I have written nothing of the sort.
How about you make your own argument?
The “out to get them” part also looks to me like an overreaction or hyperbole, although of course with 350 million people in America there are bound to be some paranoiacs among them who do think that.
But of course some people think that all white people are inescapably racist - many of whom just have a bar so low that the term no longer serves as a useful differentiator.
My lesson from all this? As a professor who loved “getting a rise” out of students (and since half of them were half asleep, saying anything that’d surprise or even shock them)… I retired just in time, before I said something really stupid.
But in all of those cases it was the act of one person trying to exert their will over someone else that had nothing to do with them. (Including the ones that I “edited out” for brevity.)
In this case, it was students concerned about someone with whom the university had placed its trust and charged them with their education, someone they had had interactions with, and would continue to have interactions with, someone who had authority over them and their futures.
I don’t consider that a trivial difference, I think that is a massive difference that makes your examples completely irrelevant.
Ridicule is not punishment?
I have, in great detail. I am questioning your argument that these students should be ridiculed for bringing forth a good faith complaint to their administration that their teacher used potentially problematic language in class, but that the professor should be coddled against any sort of accusation that he would have known how what he said would sound.
Maybe a little normal human empathy on the part of the professor could be asked for?
while it is true that you could probably nutpick and find examples of what you speak, I don’t think that that has anything to do with anything in this thread.
OTOH, I do see people, when told that they have done something racially insensitive, personalize it and and accuse those who pointed it out of accusing them of racism, as if there is no difference between them.
Were you in any danger of letting some slurs slip out in order to get a rise out of your students?
As I said, if your presentation ends up being “fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” then that’ll get attention, maybe a chuckle, and probably not offend anyone but those with the most delicate of sensibilities, and fuck them.
But, if your presentation ends up sounding like repeating the most offensive word in the English language, maybe you should rethink your lesson plans a bit.
I saw the video and here is my guess. There are one or more college students with the video on … not really paying attention - they just have it on so it logs them as viewing it. All of the sudden (and without any context) they think they hear an old white guy saying “nigga nigga nigga”. Did they even go back to see what the context was before sending out what they thought they heard on social media? Probably not.
I’ll take that as a win at this point in my life. 