This story out of Brandeis University reminds me of something that happened some years ago when my wife was working at a Raleigh elementary school.
One of the teachers was teaching some Spanish vocabulary (and this was long before the Hispanic population had boomed in the Triangle) and she had written the word negro on the board. She had also written blanco, azul and lots of other Spanish words for different colors. But that didn’t stop one teacher, who happened to see the word negro written on the blackboard, from bringing a complaint against the teacher.
The teacher’s stupendous ignorance was highlighted by the fact that, first, she had no idea negro is a word for a color in Spanish. Nothing more. But second, that she considered negro to be a slur. Outmoded and maybe not preferred, but a slur? Negro replaced a slur many years ago, and was then replaced by black, Afro-American, African-American, and now “person of color.”
Now we have a professor at Brandeis who, according to all but one offended student, used the word “wetback” in the context of informing his students that this was a slur by some in the past to describe people who came across the border from Mexico illegally. He has been disciplined by Brandeis, even though the evidence is overwhelming that he used the term in an explanatory sense.
It’s unfortunate that the administrators at Brandeis didn’t tell the offended student what my wife’s principal told the complaining teacher at her school: That’s ridiculous; don’t waste my time. Of course, that was nearly 20 years ago. Today it might result in a show trial.
