Regardless of intent
Intent doesn’t matter?
Use/mention distinction.
Also…
Maybe there’s more to it.
The Daily Beast is patting itself on the back for being the source:
The New York Times on Friday announced the ouster of science and health reporter Donald McNeil Jr., who The Daily Beast reported had allegedly used racist language while on a 2019 trip with students to Peru.
McNeil, formerly the paper of record’s top reporter on COVID-19, leaves amid fallout from an incident that occurred during a Times-sponsored educational trip to Peru when he used the “n-word” and made other racist comments, according to complaints first reported by The Daily Beast. At least six students or their parents claimed McNeil had made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip.
…
McNeil’s departure comes just days after Times staffers wrote a letter to the paper’s top brass expressing outrage over the allegations that McNeil had used racial slurs, and over the response from Times leadership, which the letter’s signers suggested was wholly insufficient.
Times executive editor Dean Baquet had previously said McNeil should be “given another chance” because his comments were not “hateful or malicious” in intent, but in a message to staff on Friday, the top editor wrote, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”
See above. The word appeared in the paper just this week. Reporting on the word is not using the word.
Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there isn’t.
There’s a significant mismatch between the accusations and the apology.
McNeil says that he used one racial slur one time in discussing the use of the slur. But the accusations are that he made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip. Which, if true, also undermines the credibility of his claim that the one mention he admitted to was not ill-intended.
Just because McNeil is only admitting to the one thing doesn’t mean that’s what he was fired over.
Interesting that he was making racist and sexist remarks, but we hear he is only fired over the racist remarks.
Yeah… Either there’s more to his offense (ie, he did more than he admitted to), or there’s more to his firing (ie, the editors and accusers were gunning for him). Problem, of course, is knowing which way it tips.
Intent apparently only matters to white people:
https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1357936660625977344
I agree with the post generally.
First, if all McNeil did was mention the word in the context of discussing the word, that seems a minor offense if it’s an offense at all. Personally I have gone back and forth on this issue over the years. I used to think that it was silly to have to use euphemisms like “n-word.” Then I came to agree with the position that you just shouldn’t use the word at all except where absolutely necessary (news reports, testimony, etc.). These days my thinking is that while there are times when it might be justifiable to repeat a slur in conversations discussing it, it’s a gray area, and as a matter of discretion and consideration, I would prefer not to have people wondering if I just repeated that word out of “principled” reasons, or if I’m just an asshole who enjoys having an “excuse” to use it.
Second, the statement from the Times is sloppy at best, hypocritical at worst, as evidenced by the Times’s use of the word.
But I disagree that intent is really dispositive here, or even terribly relevant. I think for purposes of determining what is acceptable workplace behavior, the question is not whether or not the speaker’s intentions are noble and pure, but how a reasonable reader/listener would interpret them. No, we don’t want to fire someone just because some oversensitive co-worker took offense at something innocuous. But conversely, we don’t want to shrug off behavior that is reasonably considered offensive just because the offender doesn’t mean to offend. There are lots of people out there who genuinely don’t see their bad behavior as offensive — they just want to have a nice conversation about where their nonwhite coworkers are “really” from, about how they read about different races having different IQs, how they really like Asian women because they’re so polite and deferential, etc. etc. Yeah, some of them know they’re being assholes and are just trying to get plausible deniability, but some of them really do think these are perfectly fine workplace conversations and intend no offense. You might take their intent into account in deciding the punishment for a first offense, but that’s about as much deference as I would give to subjective intent.
Anyway, other than the title and the first sentence, I agree with the analysis in the post, but I view it as a question of “what is reasonably considered offensive” and not “what did the speaker intend.”
Or Handforth Parish Council…
https://youtu.be/xsBBGVi2MCw
I was having a discussion on this with one of my writing groups, about whether it is okay to put that word in the mouth of a white supremacist, not-nice character. The consensus appeared to be if you want your play produced, you better find out some other way to point out what he thinks. I’m not sure I agree, since the moment you water it down, you change the character into someone he isn’t. But it’s a tough call.
OB@6,
I must be missing some context on that. It seemed to me that Jackie Weaver decided to just start kicking people out of the Zoom conference or muting them, starting with the chairman, based on no authority other than that she was the host of the call and could do it. Then she ignored the (to me) reasonable assertion of the vice-chair that, assuming the chair’s removal was legitimate, he — not Weaver or some other person — would preside. Certainly not everyone was completely polite, but from what I can tell, Weaver was 100% in the wrong, and she made no effort to explain why she had authority to expel the chair unilaterally and ignore the vice-chair.
iknklast@7,
Yeah, I suspect that’s a specific case of a general dilemma in drama, isn’t it? Like, how graphic should a scene of violence be — at what point do you go from trying to show the brutality of what is being done to a character to being just violence porn? Or how do you depict a rape in a way that drives home the horror but isn’t excessively disturbing or arguably titillating to some?
I listened to her on Woman’s Hour yesterday, and she explained her role. It was her call and she was in charge of it. She’s some kind of regional supervisor of parish councils, if I remember correctly, so no, they weren’t the boss of her.
And…I don’t know, maybe you have to be female to get this. I would have hoped not, but maybe so. Quite a few social media women friends of mine weren’t at all amused by the video, but upset by it. Men screaming furiously at women isn’t just failing to be “completely polite.”
You don’t have to be female. I agree with you.
Whew. It seems so obvious!
It’s really not obvious to me. Just because there is a definite tendency for men to yell at women inappropriately doesn’t mean that every instance of men yelling at a woman is inappropriate. So the context does matter to me. If she’s acting inappropriately to usurp authority over a government meeting, that’s going to result in some yelling. (If your position is that nobody should ever raise your voice to another person, well, I’m just going to have to disagree with you.)
I’m not sure I’m willing to take Jackie Weaver’s word for it on what Jackie Weaver’s authority was or wasn’t. I will note that this article reports that in their interview, “[s]he admitted she had no idea who was actually in charge of the meeting.” But that’s not a direct quote, so I can’t tell if that conflicts with your recollection of the Women’s Hour interview.
Unfortunately, it was frustratingly hard to find any actual detailed explanation of the rights and wrongs here. Most of the news articles just discuss how the thing went viral, and mention some of the points of contention and behavior, but don’t attempt any serious examination of it, they just chuckle over what a spectacle it was.
The best explanation I found was this blog post which actually refers to the Local Government Act and (yes) those Standing Orders that were mentioned so vociferously. His conclusions are (1) the angry dudes were wrong that the meeting was called unlawfully; (2) disruptive council members can be ejected from a meeting (though there’s no provision for ejecting a disruptive chairperson); (3) Weaver probably technically didn’t have the authority to eject anyone from the meeting; and (4) but it’s probably immaterial because the remaining council members could have ratified the decision anyway.
I will note that the handful of news articles I read make it clear that this council’s meetings have been increasingly chaotic, so it seems that there are definitely some assholes involved here (not Weaver, who only got involved for this meeting I believe).
So on the whole I’m inclined to believe that Weaver was brought into a nasty situation and did a fairly good job of restoring order and achieving some rough justice, and it seems like the chair and his allies were largely in the wrong. But I don’t feel bad about myself for wanting to know the facts.
Well I know it’s not obvious to you, that’s why I said “I don’t know, maybe you have to be female to get this. I would have hoped not, but maybe so.” And you may be right that a definite tendency for men to yell at women inappropriately doesn’t mean that every instance of men yelling at a woman is inappropriate, but the tendency for men to yell at women inappropriately isn’t the only issue. It would be nice if “inappropriate” were all we had to fear.
The real issue is that when men yell at women it’s all too often a prelude to violence. The result is that when men yell at us – really yell, with obvious rage, the way those two were – it’s not just unpleasant or irritating or disappointing, it’s viscerally frightening. I felt it just watching that video, even though obviously I was in no danger.
Men really need to understand this.
@iknklast #7:
I’ve been watching a police procedural set in Toronto in the early 1900s (Murdoch Mysteries). In this production, Black people are politely referred to as “Negroes”, or “coloured”. When overtly racist language is portrayed, the offensive term of choice is usually “darkie”. I’m not sure if the N-word would be more historically accurate, but to me (admittedly a viewer, not an author), this seems to be a reasonable compromise.
Theo Bromine, actually one common term, at least in the US South, was “nigra”. I don’t know if that would be acceptable, either. I just know if my character uses politically correct language, it will be unrealistic; but sometimes realism must fall…I’m just not sure the changes always serve what they are supposed to do. Yeah, it’s bad and nasty, but if your character is bad and nasty, cleaning them up might lower the impact and make everyone feel things are better than they are.
By the way, one of the more common insults I hear in current plays is “cunt”. It appears the dictum against offensive words doesn’t apply to words that are nasty to women. But then, when has it ever?
So, yeah, it becomes a dilemma, just like when our local theatre was cleaning up their production of A Few Good Men to remove “fuck”, a word that appears on a high percentage of pages in the script. Some of the actors who found the suggestions the director was making egregiously silly went a step further: “Well, why don’t we just say “golly gee”?” Yeah. Tough-guy marines who aren’t allowed to swear because it might annoy someone.