Why not just place hidden cameras in all of them, so that these he-said, she-said incidents can be submitted to arbitration by the High Court of Political Corrections?
A professor’s alleged remarks in September set off an investigation at Brandeis University that has left some faculty members skeptical, students divided and the class itself monitored  for the time being  by an administrator.
The incident recalls one this year at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where a law professor was accused of making anti-Hmong comments, and the details he later provided placed those comments in a very different context, one contested by some who brought the complaints in the first place. At Brandeis, a university named for a defender of freedom of expression, the episode took place in a class on Latin American politics, and the statements in question centered around a single word whose connotations have historically caused pain to Mexican Americans.
The word was “wetback,†an insult describing illegal immigrants from Mexico. But as is often the case with powerful words whose use has been intertwined with painful history, it could all boil down to the context of the professor’s utterance  and that context is in dispute.
According to the professor, Donald Hindley, who has taught in the politics department for almost 47 years at the university, the word came during a historical discussion about racism against immigrants. “When Mexicans come north as illegal immigrants, we call them wetbacks,†he told the Brandeis student newspaper, the Justice, in describing his comments. He says he wasn’t saying that’s what they should be called, but what many Americans do call them. (Inside Higher Ed spoke briefly with Hindley, but he did not return subsequent calls for clarification.)
Read the rest.
The funny thing about this is that the students who dropped the dime on the prof may not have understood that the word was intended sarcastically, i.e. to indict American society. If this is so, then the search for purity of thought and diction has evidently foreclosed that rhetorical option, unless it is foregrounded (e.g., by gesturing big old quotation marks as one says it, or writing “/sarc” on the chalkboard).
The other possibility is that the offended were actually offended by the implication regarding the state of Gringo society, and used the speech code violation in order to retaliate against the Caric professor. So perhaps that counts as a kind of sarcasm, or reintroduces the possibility of irony after all.
I could have this wrong, and in any case it’s somewhat besides the point, but wasn’t the term wetback first used as a means of humorous self-identification, rather than a racist slur used by others. If so, that could hardly be used as a way to indict American society.
Those that wish to change society for the ‘better’ have no humor, nor understanding of anything save sarcasm. Poke fun at them and they only wish to shut you up… humor is the best weapon to use against the straight-laced, PC, Nannystaters. They can’t stand it and they have no response save to act in an authoritarian manner, thus making their situation worse and their thin skin apparent.
… accused of making anti-Hmong comments …
Okay, I know I am not as bright as most of the folks around here (except for timmah and andy who I fucking know I am smarter than), but what in the hell is an “anti-Hmong” statement, and, why isn’t it included on the list of things that cannot be made fun of.
BTW, Professor Hindley, “we” do not call them wetbacks. Some people do, sure. We as a collective, do not.
Education guy,
No. “Wetback” has been used by native Anglos to diss the, ah, informal immigrants from Mexico for my entire lifetime and before that. The term is sometimes used indulgently or with amusement, and it’s not unusual for the people so designated to adopt the term for themselves — see “yankee doodle”, “dixie”, and similar examples — but it’s always deprecatory.
That does not excuse the students demanding that their religious obligation of Perpetual Offense be catered to, or the professoriat for indulging them. The term has been used for a long time in a lot of contexts, and in fact an examination of how it’s used could easily illuminate discussion of attitudes toward immigration as they have changed over the years. Discussing (and uttering) it in an academic context is perfectly valid if “freedom of scholarship” means anything; of course it doesn’t any more, as this case illustrates.
Regards,
Ric
I figured if anyone would know what an anti-Hmong statement was, it would be Ric Locke.
Dan, we’ve warned you before about this behavior. Simply striking out the slur will only get you painted as an exemplar-of-alternative-masculinity bigot.
h8r
Thanks Ric. I’m not sure where I got the idea that it was less derogatory.
Hmongs ate my dingo.
Careful with that gringo stuff. Where I live it is used to describe anyone not from here, including Latinos from other countries. Ticos use “Norte Americano” when referring to U.S. citizens. Mexicans use it like the “N” word.
The Hmongs have a website, http://www.hmongnet.org. They appear to be from a mountainous region in southern China. Apparently, they have not been treated well, but that is more a fact of life in China rather than singling the dastardly Hmongs out.
Now, since Asians are stereotypically successful, despite their actual minority status, the Left has no problem exploiting them, and not affording them protected status. The Hmongs, a minority amongst minorities, are extended the rights and privileges of the protected class. I guess being a minority of a minority affords special protections, especially when it comes to anti-Hmong rhetoric.
Dumb bastard professor should have just said “mojado”. That’s a loose spanish translation of wetback and since it’s in the language of the oppressed……it can’t be racist.
You gots to learn the rules if you wants to play the game.
Mojado-ist !! Hmong-ist !!
The Hmong are an interesting (well, to me) example of the sometimes intractable tensions between the pseudoLeft’s pronouncements and their actual behavior.
As mentioned above, the Hmong are a persecuted minority of Asians. Since the pLs are gravitating toward defining Asians as “white” on the ground of achievement and education, thereby depriving them of the minority status they don’t need but take delighted advantage of (like good cynical Capitalists), this would leave the Hmong as effectively “black” and therefore deserving.
The trouble is, back when the CIA was an American institution the Hmong were allies against the good, upstanding, virtuous North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. When the US bugged out of southeast Asia the Hmong were left holding the bag; that is, in fact, the best-defined inflection point in the change of CIA and State from boosters to opponents of American “hegemony” and/or “imperialism”. The pseudoLeft simply cannot bring itself to forget or ignore that, so as Tools of the Capitalist-Imperialist Plot Against the World they have to be despised. It’s a conundrum for the Leftish.
Regards,
Ric
I knew that Ric would not let us down !
Ric’s right, as usual, but Education Guy is kinda onto something. I wouldn’t think so, either, except that one of my high school friends, Roberto, a gangster-type from Guatemala, called himself and his crew of miscellaneous Central Americans “wetback” all the time, and they returned the favor, with no evident ironic anti-gringo-ness. It seemed like it was their idea of the English version of something that in Spanish wasn’t insulting.
I never asked, because until this moment, I never gave a shit.
I’ve also never heard an American say “wetback” outside rhetorical quotation marks, but I’ve never been to Texas, where it would be a sensible insult. So I can see where some non-Mexicans in California could get the idea that it wasn’t insulting, just by not being around people who use the term that way. Accidental “taking it back,” maybe. But they seemed to arrive in the U.S. with the word already in their vocabularies, just sitting there, benign and obvious.
So…nothing. I don’t know.
—
Anti-Hmong statement: STFU HMOOB
Pay attention to Gulermo.
“Wetback” is used in Texas for anything from deadly insult to good-natured mutual chaffering between friends, but it always contains an element of putdown at the least. Texans also have a tradition of insult-as-test; a Hispanic who gives as good as he gets is respected over one who gets angry at the insult:
Hey, wetback, watcha up to?
Hola, gringo, can’t chat, your wife is waiting…
The Mexicans of my experience use “gringo” much the same way. There is a fairly large element who can’t let go of Porfirio Diaz (Pobre México; tan lento del Señor, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos) and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that a large number of American tourists do, in fact, tend to be dismissive or contemptuous of them. “Wetback”/”Gringo” means something quite different between a rancher and his highly-trusted manager than it does between a cab driver in the DF and a thirtysomething American headed for the Zona Rosa.
Regards,
Ric
The incident concerning the Hmong took place at my law school. I’ve written a lot about it on my blog (under this tag). A lawprof trying to teach a Critical Race Theory lesson about the nonneutral effect of the law on members of minority groups said something that the students heard as saying that Hmong men know only how to kill.