Teacher suspended for discussing racial epithet in class

[DavidDvorkin]

A white public school teacher in Chicago has filed suit against the city’s board of education after he was suspended for using a racial epithet during an in-class discussion about offensive language.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/18/teacher-suspended-for-discussing-racial-epithet-in-class/

When I looked at the page, the story was printed twice. Perhaps Raw Story has fixed that.

[earthside]

1. More teacher bashing.

Basically that is what is going on as described in the report.

[Wait Wut]

2. Good grief.

From what was reported, it sounds like the teacher was doing his best to teach his students to be more responsible with their language. Using the actual word and not "n-word" is more effective. It shocks the students hearing it from their obviously tolerant teacher. It's like hearing the word "fuck" from a nun. You can hear it all day from everyone you know and it never bothers you. You hear it from a nun and you're suddenly aware that the word is "still" offensive. You might even refrain from using it as often...that day.

There was one comment stating that maybe the principal had it out for the teacher. I'm wondering the same thing. I'd like to hear from the students.

[Justice wanted]

3. So let me get this straight The teacher is suppended for teaching his students why

using such language is hurtful and harmful to other people?





Sounds like the school boards are really okay with the ideas of being racists and rude to one another.


I hate this country.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. I suppose it's possible that the principal happened to hear a completely non-representative

part of the discussion and leaped to the wrong conclusion.

I'm just trying to be fair and balanced. So to speak.

I'd like to know if the principal often dropped in on teachers for a few minutes and then left, or if this was unusual.

[Igel]

5. More is going on than most understand.

You can make claims about perceived oppression and linguistic power plays.

There was a NYT op/ed (I think it was the NYT, can't find it on their site) that pointed out differences in words. I'd like to see nmri studies done with them, to be honest.

(On an aside, I saw a psycholing conference paper that pointed out that inferencing from texture vs color adjectives in real-time tasks differed. Let's say you have 4 glasses/cups in front of you, one red plastic and opaque, one green plastic and opaque, one glass and clear, and one blue and made of clay. "Pick up the green cup" should let you choose the green one before you hear "cup" because it's a unique object. You won't. Hear "Pick up the clay cup" and you start moving for the clay cup before the word "clay" ends. A recent nMRI study shows that texture words behave different from color words and activate different portions of the brain.)

The NYT op/ed piece looked at words like "fuck", "cunt," "cock" and "shit" versus racial epithets that the writer knew not to name. A linguist or teacher can easily say those words--perhaps not "cunt"--just as words, as tokens of the things you could say. You can quote others saying them. "You cannot say 'fuck' in class" is fine; "Debbie said 'Fuck you' and shouldn't" is also okay. Most of the time.

The op/ed's point was that you can *never* say n****r. It's not a word you can say as a word: "It's not permitted to say ...". You can't quote others saying it: "David Duke called so-and-so a ....". Any use of the word is taken to be offensive and to be used as a racial epithet against members of that group among the listeners. Assuming they've been trained to to think of it as a racial epithet and term of abuse.

"Cunt" is a special case because some women find it to be primarily an epithet referring to women. Some think of it as a foul word for a body part. They will react differently, depending how they've been trained.

No less odd is that the offensiveness depends on who's speaking. If you think of the speaker as "one of you" then it's not an epithet. But if a white man whose reliability and purity isn't known for sure even quotes a black man using the n-word he's easily accused of using the n-word himself. Reported speech isn't. Background doesn't matter in many cases. If you're a Northerner and use a word that only has a neutral meaning in your speech community but in one part of the US it's used as a racial slur, it's assumed you can only intend for it to be a racial slur.

It's hard to study these words. It's like they're taken as having inherent meaning by the listeners, who often think of them as having this kind of meaning even though the use they think must be intended hasn't been current for 50 years and is utterly unknown to the child using them with a different meaning. (It's like the SS post from last week. Words and symbols have an agreed upon meaning or none. In this, one side asserts absolute supremacy in dictating meaning and intent.)

Still, they're fascinating.

[RZM]

6. Interesting that the teacher apparently brought up Mark Twain, which is the first thing I thought of

Apparently some people think that some words cannot be used even in an obviously anti-racist context. That's going way too far, IMO. It's not like he just decided to write a lesson about this. Apparently students were passing around a note with rap lyrics that used the word and he attempted to turn it into a 'teachable moment,' as it were.

Also interesting is that the teacher's last name is Brown and he's taken legal action, so the case is 'Brown vs. Board of Education'

[DavidDvorkin]

7. That's an amusing observation.