In a recent post I discussed Erin O’Connor’s impressive coverage of a controversy at Emory over a professor’s use of the “N-word.” (Links on my earlier post, so I’ll not repeat them here.) Now a controversy has erupted at UVa that is eerily similar.
Some black employees of the UVa Medical Center complained that their supervisor, in a conversation with them, referred to the Washington Redskins as “red n—–s.” The employees were displeased, the controversy erupted, and the matter quickly reached the desk of the head of the Medical Center and then John Casteen, the UVa president. R. Edward Howell, top executive of the medical center, investigated personally, speaking to the supervisor and each employee who was present. A rather different picture emerged from his investigation.
According to Howell, the supervisor’s remark was more along the lines of: “I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called N—–s would be to blacks.”
Though Howell said no staff members said they were personally offended by the remark, they said they would have preferred if the word had not been used.
“They also reported no previous indication that the individual’s language or behavior to suggest racial insensitivity,” but rather that the comment was “an unfortunate, one-time use of language,” Howell said in his report
(Of course, “Indians” has also become offensive to some Native Americans.) From there, the response followed same trajectory as the Emory mea culpas so well tracked in Erin’s posts.
UVa president Casteen issued a statement noting that the supervisor had intended nothing derogatory, but “[n]eedless to say,” he added needlessly if predictably, “the usage remains offensive even in the original context, and I am sad to see it used in the workplace. Reasonable people will differ as to the intent of the situation.”
Casteen’s statement also included the following attempt to calm the racially roiled waters:
“The University expects all members of the University community to be alert to the rights and dignity of all our people and also alert to racial and other insults,” he said, adding that all members of the community should feel comfortable in reporting any “demeaning” incidents.
“We share and ought to welcome the responsibility for making the University community a welcoming environment for everyone,” he said.
It didn’t work; racially roiled waters are hard to calm. Thus the Cavalier Daily reported:
In an e-mail sent to a black faculty e-mail list, History Prof. Julian Bond, national chair of the NAACP, called for the employee to make a public apology and take sensitivity training.
“My first impulse is that this should be a dismissible infraction — but free speech protections I hold dear tell me that shouldn’t be so,” Bond wrote, adding that the administration “ought to disavow such language.”
And Jan Cornell, spokesperson for the union that represents the offended medical center workers, was quick to fire off the I-word, as the Richmond Times Dispatchreported:
Cornell said in light of other racially tinged incidents on campus in the past year, including an alleged racially motivated attack on a black student running for campus office, employees feel the manager showed insensitivity to the employees.
“There should be some discipline,” Cornell said. “She should not be managing an African-American work force.”
The stain of Daisy Lundy’s alleged assault thus continues to soil race relations at Uva.
In may respects similar to the Emory episode, here we have a university employee using the n-word in a context where it was clear (if Howell’s report to the president is accurate), even to the employees who were offended, that she intended no disrespect to them, or anyone else. Indeed, quite the opposite. The supervisor’s “insensitive” crime did not inhere in her intent or even in the word she uttered, but in the fact that she, a white person, uttered it. If one of the black employees had used the same expression (which one can easily imagine, given the point the supervisor was making), there would have been no issue. And the employees who were present did not feel “disrespected.” The problem is the same one that Erin described at Emory: the use of a word that in other circumstances could lead other observers to suspect that racism was afoot, even though no one suspected it here. Nevertheless, as a sacrifice to the currently sacrosanct god of Sensitivity, this particular person (the supervisor) should be disciplined — maybe fired, maybe removed from her position, and by all means subjected to “sensitivity training.”
It’s enough to give sensitivity a bad name.
UPDATE Andrew Connors, a UVa undergraduate, has a thoughtful discussion of this controversy on his web site.
UPDATE II – Cavalier Daily columnist Eric Wang has an excellent article on what he calls this “Medical Center McCarthyism” in the CD today (11/03).
I can do her sensitivity training right now, and get it over with.
Never say the “N-word”, never never never, under any circumstances.
Of course, “Indians” has also become offensive to some Native Americans.
When do they start to picket?
Am I the only one who cannot figure out why people get completely unhinged at a single use of this word while showing no reaction to the hundreds of times the n-word is used in much of the music that students are listening to nowadays?
Laura,
Well, that’s kind of dumb… It’s the kind of logic that gets The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn banned from school reading lists.
Brian, that seems a straw man argument. Aside from possible power-differential differences between the situations, an ordinary person can do a lot more about the former than about the latter.
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