I heard a slip-up. I quite often get tongue-tangled myself, so it is absolutely feasible in my mind.
(there’s a hymn at my church that has a phrase “angles prostrate on the ground” and I tremble in fear as that phrase approaches, knowing I’m going to accidentally say “prostate”, and … I end up saying “prostate” out of nervousness…it’s good I’m the bass player and not the worship leader.)
In some media events, anaccidentally uttered phrase can have wide ranging consequences, and one can imagine being punished appropriately for whatever mayhem one causes.
This is not one of those.
It was merely one of those awful moments that we see so many of on YouTube where weather reporters say “Fire F***” instead of “Fire Truck” or other such mistakes.
Unless evidence comes forth that “that’s the kind of guy he is” it just doesn’t make sense that he would intentionally throw away his career in such a stupid manner.
Without solid evidence, as a society we opt for giving the benefit of the doubt. Did he have the intent? The mens rea? How could we know the answer to that with such a short clip?
Unfortunately, the mayor did not feel that way and she demanded his termination without any evidence one way or another.
God, has anyone spent 10 minuted watching news anchor blooper YouTube videos? People stumble in their words all the damn time. Especially on teleprompters. Unless they know something we don’t this firing is a disgrace.
Yeah, without any further evidence, this firing seems stupid to me.
And do people still really use the word “coon” these days? I’ve had a number of people in my friends and family use openly racist terms, but that word just sounds so “old-timey” to my ears.
Yeah, the combination of this is what makes me want to give this person another chance. Unlike some slurs, there aren’t a whole bunch of people who are itching for an excuse to say this. I’ve never personally seen it used in the wild in my lifetime, unlike those other more popular words.
The BBC has a weatherman, Tomasz Schafernaker, who got caught on camera giving the finger to one of the news presenters (they had been bantering and the weather guy was off camera…until they suddenly cut to him for the weather). He didn’t get fired but boy howdy did he get mocked. He subsequently was “removed” from BBC television four years later during cutbacks in the number of presenters they use but still works for the Met and does BBC radio broadcasts.
Schafernaker also had to leave the radio studio abruptly in the middle of the morning Shipping Forecast to puke back in 2016. The man’s had an interesting career, and is apparently the nation’s favourite weather presenter.
At a broader level, this incident sends a bad message to society at large. It basically says that even if you don’t have a racist bone in your body, you can be punished for an innocent, all-but-impossible-to-prevent slip of the tongue just as if you were a genuine real racist. It would be like accusing someone of sexual harassment for mispronouncing “checks” as “chicks” or “slats” as “sluts.”
An integral part of “wrongdoing must be punished” justice is the principle that *only *wrongdoing should be punished. If innocent mistakes are punished just like deliberate wrongdoing, that’s injustice.
You’d think so, but one trip to Youtube and you’ll find compilations of newscasters Spoonerizing and fucking up all sorts of phrases unintentionally on live TV. “Keep fucking that chicken” being perhaps the most well-known (though that one I don’t know to this day if it was supposed to be “plucking that chicken” and it came out wrong, or he just had a momentary loss of sense of place or what.)
I can’t say what was in his mind at the time. But I would like to point out that racists have for a very long time relied on “the benefit of the doubt” to make little digs at people they are prejudiced against, even “by accident.” Privileged people (including myself) may be unaware of it, but there’s a history of racist dog-whistles where someone makes a slip similar to this one and then issues an insincere “Sorry if I have offended anyone” disclaimer while any racists overhearing are chanting “One of us, one of us!” in their minds. In the past, society would give them a pass for this…while the insulted minorities knew exactly what was intended but could only seethe impotently because the rest of us could hide behind “doubt whether any harm was intended” to avoid taking a stand.
That doesn’t NECESSARILY mean this guy intended that. I am just saying that the people complaining are not doing so in a vacuum where this merely sounded like an insult. They are keenly aware of a long history of bad people doing this on purpose and smugly getting away with it.
