What Should the Community Do When Students Use Offensive Language?
October 23, 2017
*Disclaimer: This piece is based off of observations made by the writer about the issues discussed. The intended use of this piece is to present another perspective to whoever decides to read it. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the Wildezine staff or the school as a whole.
As everybody in the upper school knows by now, a former student created a video using the N-word and singing a racist song commonly known as “Alabama N*****.” As a person who is half African American, the phrases and terms in this video really upset me. It was a song that I had heard before and that I would have preferred to never listen to again. It’s a reminder that prejudice, racism, and discrimination continue to coexist with positivity and equality. As I processed this event, I realized two things. First, the video showed me that no matter where you go, if you wait long enough, you will find negativity. Second, conversations around the video allowed me to further analyze people’s reactions and, at times, idiosyncratic rebuttals.
I’ve heard two main perspectives concerning whether the school should have expelled this student. On the one hand, it would have been incredibly rough for the student to come back and reintegrate socially. What he did was terrible and it would be hard for him to find sympathetic ears or forgiveness. On the other hand, one of the school’s stated values is helping others who are in need. For all we knew, this video was his attempt to express some deep issue he was navigating and bring attention to himself. For the school to turn away from what may have been a desperate call out to others did not help him with the situation; it only made it worse. What did the school teach him by sending him away from the premises?
During a meeting for worship, a student made a statement about how to combat racism. The student said that we should take the time to explain to the people making these social offenses why what they did was wrong. In this instance, that did not happen. Rather, we became so entangled in our rage that we refuse to explain or truly engage him in conversation.
I have continued to think about the severity of the student’s mistake and punishment. In my life, I have said many things that I regret. Everybody has said at least one offensive thing to someone that they regret. Many people in this very school have done so towards me, yet I do not reject those people as fellow mistake-making human beings. There are many students who attend this school who are going through very rough times and are crying out for help. So why would all of us turn this one student away?
As I continue to develop my own my stance on this dilemma, I also feel the need to acknowledge hurtful comments of another nature made by members of our student body. When I asked a peer of mine what he thought about the video and the ensuing expulsion, he told me it was “completely retarded” that the student in question would even come to this school thinking that they could get away with what they said. I had to sit down for a moment after hearing that.
I have heard a large portion of the student body use the word “retard” in an offensive manner. The reason why I harp on the word “retard” is because my brother has autism. It has made it harder for him to grow as an individual when there are people who would call him a retard and discriminate against him. I do not think it is acceptable to use any word to belittle an individual or a group of people for some mental or physical characteristic that is central to their identity and different from your own.
When I made this point at our school, another student actually tried to defend the use of the word “retard” by telling me that it is an acceptable definition for a certain category of people. The truth is that this word is not appropriate to use. Though it is never okay to call a black person the n-word, people still do it; similarly, it is never okay to call a person with autism retarded. Clearly, people still do it.
Last month, our school took a stance on what language was unacceptable for members of our community. This choice left me wondering: How do we decide which terms are expulsion worthy? Should we be expelling people who use “retard” as an insult? While I understand the different historical contexts that are attached to each word, I am left wondering how our community decides between re-education and expulsion, what that might show about which terms we find most offensive, and whether we’re okay making those value judgements.
William Savich • Oct 26, 2017 at 12:03 am
A couple notes:
It’s late at night and I’m not on any of my medicine so that means it’s time for hardthink and rambling, I apologize in advance for my aimless comments.
While I’ll try to generalize my comment, much of it is written with the dynamic between black and non-black students and the general cultural acceptance of the use of the n-word at the forefront of these ideas.
READ THE ENTIRE THING IF YOU’RE GOING TO READ IT AT ALL. I can’t stress this enough: I’m not writing this with malicious intent and consider myself to be relatively in-tune with issues of social justice. However, my thinking and my writing is often very tangential in nature and thus I may begin a controversial thought very early and then finally come full-circle to clarify it at the complete end.
If you take issue with what I say and believe it’s offensive enough to warrant punitive action, just come talk to me first. I’ve got a lot of thoughts but am too lazy to possibly cover them all in something typically as short as a comment on an article. I promise I’m a fairly reasonable person, I just have poor articulation skills.
What’s in a word? As a person who, much like all the other upper school students, has reached my stage of critical mental development during a time where social justice is at the core of most topical discussions, I’ve pondered the weight and value of any given word. Even now, while collecting my thoughts regarding a very controversial matter, I find myself spending a minute searching for a correct word to use almost every other press of the spacebar. Trying to formulate a proper response makes me realize how enigmatic in the scope of human culture the concept of a word and its value is. How can vibrations in the air be so impactful to people? In eighth grade, I associated with bad people and it made me, in my eyes, a bad person. I had fun using insensitive language to upset other people, subsequently talking about how “calling someone a fag is actually a good thing because it desensitizes people to its use”. I should say now that, while I certainly don’t mean to champion that incredibly naive line of thought, I do think it has some value in the conversation of the power that language has. Although I’m probably going to get some flak for what I’m about to say, I also believe that the idea of completely disallowing the use of any given word is also stupid.
Practically speaking, I believe indisputably banning a word serves to do little but actually separate groups of people. Typing that, many instances come to mind where I’ll be bouncing from conversation to conversation in the Beestro or in the library and I’ll notice that the various circles of friends are monoethnic more often than not. Why is this? While it is true that there are cultural divides that happen to coincide with the boundaries of the various ethnic groups, I believe that another part of the issue is the idea of the right to use words based on skin color, religion, or any other category along those lines. Even sitting in some of my classes I’ll notice that black students tend to gravitate toward other black students, same with international (namely Asian) students. In these small groups, the regular vernacular changes from, say, in class discussions. Not only in the sense of the baseline level of formality in serious discussion is different from that of small talk, but the use of the n-word to punctuate/emphasize certain statements or speaking in a separate language. Whether or not people consciously recognize it, these cultural quirks that most “categories of people” have form an invisible barrier that deters external people from joining in these exchanges. While one may also see the participation of external groups of people in these mostly-monoethnic discussions, I can confidently say that it does not come with a level of discomfort to “foreign cultures”.
Despite that thought, however, this comment isn’t me saying that we as a community should let all white people use the n-word casually in conversation. Hell, I doubt that this comment even has a general “thesis” to it. As a white person who also happens to associate with some rather insensitive individuals, I don’t even believe what I’m saying has any value as an end-all-be-all statement on race relations simply because of the fact that there is undoubtedly an emotional piece to the use of words and the dynamic between different ethnicities that I simply can’t comment on because of the fact that ignoring these aspects of life, for me as a white, upper-class boy, isn’t necessarily going to ruin my life. My point is simply that either extreme regarding word usage (use it as commonly as punctuation versus never using certain words at all) won’t serve to assist in racial equality because it highlights the race of every person present whenever a word as potentially-weighty as the n-word is used. Anyway, I’m getting tired and kind of wanna go play some games or something before I go to sleep. I love this kind of discourse so if anybody is ever in the mood to talk about race relations, gender, sexuality, religion, or whatever other social justice dynamic there is, don’t hesitate to talk to me. I may add to this comment at a later date, who knows.
Note: I’ve got a cool five dollars waiting for anybody who can remind me what the fictional race that speaks using words like “hardthink” or “fastwalk” or whatever. The fact that I can’t remember what race it is is seriously making me want to bash my head through my door.