In the ~0:30 second clip that is shown, he actually does do a pretty great job at explaining the context of his utterances. He runs through the ways that “various countries” put pauses in speech, including the use of “uhh, uhh, uhh” in English and throws out how Mandarin Chinese speakers do it. All within less than 30 seconds. The clip is severely truncated but it’s clear he didn’t just throw those Mandarin words out there with 0 context.
Here is a direct link to the clip:
I’ll have to listen to the video when I get home, but it does seem as though he had a choice as to what language and what words to use in that language in order to make his point, and that he had a choice in how to present it.
When the presentation ends up coming out “nega, nega, nega”, I am dubious as to the idea that a communication’s professor would not know how that sounds.
I am reminded of grade school, when the kids would learn words in other languages that sounded like curse words in English. Gracias (grassy ass) was a popular one, and we had a girl from Romania who used a word that sounded like “fuck wood”, and that went the rounds for months.
When called out on it, they’d try to give plausible deniability that they were just using a different language.
I don’t think that the professor meant to be racist, I think he meant to be funny. But he wasn’t. And he got called out on it.
A suspension is almost certainly an over reaction, but we also do not know what other disciplinary actions or complaints he also had against him.
Ok, I’ll concede that. But there are college students, and he had a right to expect some capacity for reason. His burden of responsibility for the “misunderstanding” is commensurate with maybe a one sentence apology for his lack of foresight for his students’ parochial stupidity at the beginning of his next lecture, which should have resumed immediately after a 5 minute investigation by the Dean clarified what happened and told the students who complained to stop embarrassing themselves.
Because you code-switch. The mapping of phonemes to semantics is different when you switch to another language. The existence of the loose resemblance of phonemes is one language to those in another language is just not part of the way your brain works when you speak both languages. It’s much more apparent when you don’t speak a language.
And to clarify, the similarity is only loose. The first vowel sound is completely different, the pronunciation is like “nay” in English.
I don’t get any sense from his manner or facial expression that he thought he was being funny. I think he was careless, perhaps because he was so familiar with the word that it no longer sounded like the racial slur to him. If it had been me, I hope I would have given more context, and only used it once, pronouncing it carefully perhaps with a screen shot of the chinese characters and the transliteration (I might have even made a remark like “sorry that this sounds like a racial slur, it’s not”). Or I might have chosen another language (Japanese speakers often use “sa” which I don’t think means anything) but maybe he is very familiar with Chinese idioms and picked what he is familiar with.
So, to repeat, I think he was careless in a very sensitive area, and being a communications professor he should have known better. And that is the message that should have gone out to everyone, rather than to virtually agree that he used a racial slur.
I mean, just look at the guy. It was only a matter of time before he said the real thing.
I don’t understand this at all.
Well, you better report it then.
And I could get that if he were a bilingual who just happened to refer to something, or to use filler words himself.
I certainly would not hold a native Mandarin speaker who referred to an object that way to account, as in Velocity’s example. That is a chance for people to learn a new word, not a time to hold the Mandarin speaker accountable for how they sound to naive ears.
But he’s a communications professor, and he chose this lesson, he chose this language and he chose those words.
It’s one of those times where an excuse of ignorance just doesn’t fly for me. If he was ignorant of how that would sound, then he’s not really someone who should be teaching other people how to effectively communicate.
Now, I could see how, if he were specifically talking about words that sound like slurs in English, then it could be appropriate.
“You may be talking to someone who speaks Mandarin, and they may point to their car, and say, ‘Nega < car >’, and so you know, that doesn’t mean what you might at first think it means.”
But that was not the lesson, to the best of my knowledge.
I don’t see anything wrong with doing that. Clarify beforehand that’s it’s similar sounding to another word and to be careful.
It reminds me of when I was in Mexico and we were going on a ‘jeep excursion’. At one point the guide pointed at the big “PUNTA SUR” sign and said if you get lost, tell people you’re trying to get to Punta Sur and then continued, in what I assume was a joke he used every time, “make sure to say the N, it’s puNta”.
This is an absolutely TERRIFYING case of political correctness gone mad. This is the beginning of a new McCarthyism. This is a real threat to American democracy. And it is one reason for which I was proudly planning to vote for Trump, if Bernie Sanders had become the Dem. nominee.
(mild hyperbole,…read on, there’s an explanation in my final paragraph)
The professor was giving examples of the one ethical value that university students are supposed to worship: diversity.
He was giving a lesson which is perfectly appropriate for those MBA students, who should expect in their careers to meet many managers from many different cultures: a lesson on how people of different cultures speak differently, and how we should accept that .China is a major economy in the world, and these MBA students should expect to work with Chinese businessmen.
But his students were utterly bigoted and racist. The university should have reacted very,very differently. Instead of apologizing, the university should deny them their diploma until they attend a course in diversity training, to learn how NOT to be racist and bigoted against Chinese speakers, whose culture includes the word “nega”.
And now for the explanation promised above:
The Bernie bros and progressives will eventually become the heart of the Democratic party,maybe 20 years from now.And when that happens, the McCarthyism I mentioned earlier will become a real issue, not just the irrelevant, FoxNews boogey-man which it is today.
Someday in 2040 or 2050, the government will establish a new House Committee on unAmerican Activities. The committee will be responsible for finding and uncovering racism everywhere: in classrooms, in kindergartens, in movies and comic books, and under your bed.
Anyone who ever wore a MAGA hat may be summoned to testify in front of a sneering latter-day Joe McCarthy. And then they will be not only blacklisted like in the 1950’s, they will be officially declared as a registered racist, similar to today’s registered sex-offender list. And once on the list, you will be an outcast for the rest of your life. No appeals allowed. You will be prohibited from many jobs, prohibited from renting certain apartments, and possibly prohibited from voting…
All in the name of protecting freedom and democracy, of course, so it’s okay.
RT has done its job.
I mean, you got all the facts wrong except for its being in Washington, D.C., and involving the word “niggardly,” so … 
100% agree.
Don’t Chinese speakers/people have rights, too, just like black listeners in an audience? This seems to be a one-way street.
If there were some African language in which the pronunciation for the common word for “that” happened to sound like “chink” or “gook,” for instance, I highly doubt we’d see USC trying to censor such African vocabulary.
Sure they do. And they should not be censored, just as Mandarin speakers are not censored.
However, if a professor was giving a lecture, and he started throwing out words in an African language that sounded like slurs for Chinese people, then he too should be held responsible for the actions that he chose to do.
This is another one of those, “You must be a hypocrite, because I can imagine a situation where I think that you would act hypocritically” fallacies.
No, the burden should then lie on those Chinese listeners to learn something and discover that, no, it was not in fact a racial slur.
We shouldn’t put the burden on the people who are misunderstood, rather than on the people who are doing the misunderstanding.
Finally an idea I can get behind.
Unless the person who is misunderstood is someone who is teaching a class on how to be better understood.
You ever watch “Scrubs”?
there was an episode where the Janitor asks JD for a 5 letter word, “A blank in the armor.”
Just as JD answers, the Janitor moves away, so that instead, JD responds to a different person, who may not as much appreciate the word.
That is a misunderstanding.
When you write up a lesson plan, and you job is to teach people to effectively communicate, then such things are not misunderstandings on the listener’s part.
The proper response from the administration to this complaint should have been, “Stop wasting our time and yours. Especially since you appear to need the extra time to learn Mandarin properly.”
If a public letter was required, it should have said something like,
"A complaint was made that a professor teaching Mandarin used the common word ‘Nei ga’, and it sounded too much like the N word. This is a word in the Mandarin language, in common use. The professor would have been remiss to NOT teach it.
Furthermore, you are all now adults attending college. College is for teaching facts, exposing you to ideas and words you are not used to, and broadening your mind. It is not a place for knee-jerk reactions when confronted with something you don’t like.
If your mind can’t handle the opinions of others or words in other languages when they don’t conform to what you want to believe, there is always a future for you in construction or retail, as you may not be college material."