A world divided: Racism and racial slurs

A woman holds a sign at the Unity March Against Racism in Chicago, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2020. AP

By Scott Shepherd

Racial tensions in America are worse now than at any point in my lifetime. The country just seems to be tearing itself apart. The news is full of protesters shooting each other dead on the street and black men dying at the hands of white police officers, not to mention politicians of all persuasions exploiting these tensions to shore up their support in an election year. And added to this already toxic mix is, of course, the coronavirus, which seems to threaten the very structures of modern society. Things, in short, are tough.

Responsible Americans on both sides of the divide are trying to calm the situation. If you look hard enough, there are heart-warming stories of love and hope, of peace and gentleness amid the violence.

But then Professor Greg Patton, a privileged, white male academic at the University of Southern California had the gall to use the N-word in his online MBA class on the power of communication. And not just once: he uttered it four times. Unsurprisingly, students complained; he was taken off the course and put under investigation, and he soon offered a long apology.

The one complicating factor in the affair, however, is that he didn't actually use the N-word. The clip is easily available online, and if you haven't already seen it then it's well worth a watch. In his class, he was referring to filler words ― words such as “um” or “like” ― and at this point he repeated a Mandarin word which, unfortunately for Patton, does indeed sound like the N-word.

So was he being offensive?

Many of this column's readers will know that the Korean words 내가 (I) and 네가 (you) are both pronounced in a way that resembles the N-word. These words are ubiquitous in everyday speech here.

And there is no problem with these words. Obviously not. They're not racist, they're not offensive, they're not “micro-aggressions.” The suggestion that there is some kind of inherent problem with them can only be based either on ignorance or on the kind of linguistic imperialism that not even the most extreme anglophone supremacists would espouse.

The problem goes back to the very basics of linguistic theory. The sound made by uttering the word “cat”, for example, has no innate meaning that links it to the concept that the word expresses ― in this case “that thing that chases mice and squirrels.”

The relationship between the sound of the word and its meaning is arbitrary. We create the relationship between the noise and the meaning; and it is only because we associate the sound to the meaning behind the word that it means anything at all. If everyone decided tomorrow that the sound of the word “cat” meant “the thing we drive on the road,” then it really would mean that.

In a very basic sense, sounds mean nothing in and of themselves. Rather, their meaning is dependent on context. Some would say that in an American context, as this was, the noise Patton made really did contain all of the poison that the N-word signifies. But watch the video yourself. He clearly situates it within the context of Chinese speakers, and he made it clear in his apology that he simply didn't make the connection between his example and the N-word. We are surely not to believe that he is sneakily using the word as part of some kind of cunning plot to offend his students.

Some may see the fact that he wrote a long letter of apology as evidence that he really had done something wrong. I doubt many who actually work in a university ― particularly those who work in the lower ranks of a university ― would think so: the sort of pressure he was under must have been overwhelming. I'm sure I would have done the same in his situation.

Perhaps the most egregious part of this sorry affair, however, comes in the students' anonymous complaint that “our mental health has been affected.” This vague, passive sentence raises a lot of questions.

To begin with, I find it hard to believe that Patton's choice of example really did have a negative impact on his students' mental health. We should always take claims of suffering ― mental or physical ― seriously, but the complaint itself identified no specific harm and provided no proof for such a substantial claim.

There's no way of proving it either way, but if the complaining students didn't actually suffer mental distress as a result, then this would be an awful lie. Racism and mental health are both enormous problems that America needs to address. And they must be taken seriously. If these MBA students cynically used these very real problems to try to punish a professor for speaking Mandarin, it would be a gross insult to every real sufferer of mental health difficulties and to every victim of real racism.

And even if the students really were mentally harmed by the use of this word, what's the solution? Do we tell 1.1 billion-odd speakers of Mandarin that they can no longer use filler words? Do we tell 75 million speakers of Korean to stop saying “I” or “you”?

Why stop there? Why not search through all the words in all the world's languages so that we can eliminate everything resembling a harmful English word?

What Patton said was both factually accurate and relevant to his class. Yes, the word he used does sound like the N-word. Yes, there are hundreds of other languages he could have chosen to take his example from. But he wasn't seeking to offend ― and more importantly, he was telling the truth. What's at stake here is much bigger than just this one spat; it's the fundamental principle of academic freedom. A university should be a bastion of truth and freedom. If today American professors are banned from teaching students how to say “um” in Chinese, what will it be tomorrow?

Racism is awful. It's a real, serious problem, and I want to see it ended. But this knee-jerk censorship, this self-congratulatory fury that is so easy and so common now, will just make the world more divided. In this difficult year more than ever, we need to work together. So let's try to be more caring and more understanding, but let's also not take professors off courses for choosing unfortunate examples of filler words.

Dr. Scott Shepherd is Assistant Professor of English at Chongshin University, Seoul. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.