Ethnic Slurs Are Part Of Student Language

Educators Concerned That Casual Profanity Shows Race Ignorance

July 4, 2009|By Akilah Johnson Staff Writer

South Plantation High School graduate Melissa Jomsky answers the phone while gathered with friends. After a brief conversation, she puts down the receiver and screams "Asian!" to summon Lisa Tran.

Tran, who is 17 and Vietnamese, isn't offended when her mostly white friends call her that.

"Everyone thought I was Chinese, or they thought I was Korean, so they just gave me the nickname 'Asian' because they got sick and tired of guessing what my ethnicity was," said Tran, who calls her friends Jew Bagel and Juban. "It's not trying to be offensive."

While the use of insults as terms of affection is not new, nowadays it is no longer kept within the same group. Instead, it crosses racial and ethnic boundaries as classrooms become more diverse, websites visited by students routinely feature profanities and teens dismiss overt prejudice as a thing of the past.

For educators, the challenge is twofold: getting students to realize that some words cannot be used in the hallway, while trying to teach them the painful history of degradation associated with certain slurs.

Geoff McKee, principal of Boca Raton High School, said students are inundated by cyber-sources that make it difficult for them to differentiate between locker-room humor and polite conversation.

"There are so many sources and ways in which they can become very literate in profanity," McKee said. "More kids are comfortable using profanity. It used to just be the quote 'bad kids.' "

He hears students say alarming things daily - white teens referring to blacks teens as 'boy,' girls greeting each other with "what's up, slut" - and pulls them aside to determine if the words were meant as an insult. Most often, he said, they're not.

I use the word beaner on my show a lot. I started to say Hispanic, and people were saying things, like, 'I'm not Hispanic. Hispanic is a word created by the Nixon administration.' Chicano? 'Well, I'm from El Salvador and Chicano means Mexican, but a Mexican that was born here.' How about I use Latino? 'I don't speak Latin. I speak Spanish, and I don't even speak Spanish that well.' Um, what about beaner? Nobody? Fine.

That is comedian Carlos Mencia explaining on National Public Radio why he uses an ethnic slur in much the same way Chris Rock uses the N-word in stand-up routines.

South Florida teens, like these comedians, are doing what linguists call "melioration" - reclaiming a word meant to sting by removing its barb.

"It's a generational thing," said Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics at University of California, Berkeley. "Younger people don't feel or experience the same barriers between people that older people have been brought up to assume. And that, of course, would be reflected in language."

While students "like to present themselves as a so-called post-racial generation," tensions still exist, said Jean Muteba Rahier, director of African and African-Diaspora Studies at Florida International University. "All racial slurs are not equal."

Daniel Forbes, 20, a black Jamaican-American who grew up in Delray Beach and attends Lynn University in Boca Raton, said he doesn't have a problem with the N-word but draws the line at being called Haitian.

He equates the Haitian community with poverty and the N-word with mainstream music and kinship, no different from the saying "hey, that's my dawg."

Jordon Wilson, a black 17-year-old senior at Coral Glades High School in Coral Springs, said the use of the N-word is not all that black and white.

He says his white friends can use it only at parties, yet words such as chico, ese and mami are always acceptable in his crowd.

Alexander Adams has his limits, too. The 17-year-old senior at Deerfield Beach High School said he'll walk up to one of his female friends and say: "Hey, bitch." But he said he would never call a gay friend a fag, which "is more offensive than racial slurs."

Educators say teens don't understand the history of hate speech because bigotry has become more subtle and overt intolerance is often met with public outrage.

Rahier says that's why they must be taught about the volatile racial past because "now it's very easy, particularly for white students, to say: 'What the heck are you talking about when you say racism in this country. Look who is the president.' "

When you say "that's so gay," do you realize what you say? Knock it off.

That's the punchline of three commercials by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network and the Ad Council. Celebrities lecture teens to keep them from saying something's gay when they mean it's a bad thing.

Slur-speaking teens, however, reason that because their generation is far removed from the equal rights, civil rights and women's rights movements, the epithets aren't insults because they are not used with fear or anger.

Paul Battaglia, 18, former president of Cypress Bay High School's Gay Straight Alliance, said a classmate's use of the word gay in casual conversation didn't bother him because it wasn't said in a nasty way.

"We just tolerate it ... because most of the time they say it by accident," said Battaglia, who graduated recently. "If we did acknowledge it, it would just be a joke like 'that's so straight.' But it's nothing worth fighting for."


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