What the F
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But this demonstration probably just confirms what you already know. People find slurs offensive. For some slurs, this is nothing new: they were built to offend from the outset. It’s their reason for being. As far as we can tell, Ching-Chong is and always was a term of offense. Same with wetback, sand-nigger, camel-fucker, and so on. And just as there are typical sources from which profanity in general draws, particular semantic pathways lead to slurs.8 A common one is physical characteristics believed to identify members of these groups. Sometimes these terms identify stereotyped skin color, like yellow or Redskin. Slurs can also identify body features, like snipdick, slant, slope, or thick-lips. They can identify ways people in a group are believed to sound (like Ching-Chong). They can come from animal words, like coon or bitch, and from stereotypical occupations, activities, clothing, or foods, like cotton-picker, towel-head, breeder, carpet-muncher, or cracker. Using words associated with stereotypical appearance or behavior is an effective way to dehumanize members of a group.
In other cases, otherwise neutral words have grown into slurs, not necessarily from original intent but due to the social contexts of their use. Even nigger wasn’t always the linguistic powder keg it now is. Nor were Chinaman or cripple. In the long history of these words, they’ve gone through changes, just as our attitudes toward language and toward members of minority groups have evolved. And they’ve followed a similar trajectory. It’s worth expanding on that a bit to see how words evolve into slurs.
Nigger originally derives from the Latin root nigr-, which just means “black.” Before the 1900s, it was the default way to refer to Americans who would come, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to be referred to as colored, then black and African American. For example, nigger shows up in Mark Twain’s most lauded contribution to American literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884. In case your memory is rusty, narrator Huck Finn recounts his escape from an abusive father in Missouri. Along the way, he befriends an escaped slave, Jim, and together they head for freedom in the North. Over the course of their adventure, the word nigger appears more than two hundred times—not as a slur but as a generic reference term.
Of course, even if the word itself was largely neutral in the nineteenth century, the context of its use (both in the book and in real life) was anything but. It accompanied people through centuries of enslavement and subjugation. As a consequence, for many people, it remains tainted by that legacy. As social attitudes changed, by the twentieth century nigger had started to gain a strong negative connotation.9 It soon gave way to colored and then black, Afro-American, and African American.
The stories of Chinaman and cripple are similar. Both originally referred to people neutrally. Chinaman was as benign as Englishman or Frenchman, which are still used without negative connotation. In fact, through much of the nineteenth century, Chinese Americans used it in positive contexts. For instance, in a letter about immigration policy to then California governor John Bigler, a Chinese American San Francisco restaurant owner proudly wrote, “Sir: I am a Chinaman, a republican, and a lover of free institutions.”10 Chinaman started to develop a negative connotation only around the turn of the twentieth century. And cripple, a noun used at least since the tenth century, yielded its place as the default term as late as the twentieth century, when handicapped, disabled, and their successors came into preferred use.
Again, just like nigger, Chinaman and cripple were default words for a time, but during that period people of Chinese descent and people with disabilities were in many cases treated as second-class humans. And the connotations that terms pick up over centuries of use are not easily shed. For example, the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization that promotes diversity in the NFL, has argued, “Whatever arguments people want to make about the ‘N-Word’ being benign, it reeks of hatred and oppression, and no matter the generation or the context, it simply cannot be cleansed of its taint.”11 It’s easy to find similar objections to Chinaman or cripple.
The different paths that slurs have taken don’t matter quite so much as what the words are now. And as we’ve seen, they’re offensive. So it makes sense that when they show up in public domains, like in professional sports, the response from the media, viewers, and league officials is stronger than for other, less offensive types of profanity. This offensiveness itself might be enough for leagues to implement slur bans. Professional sports survive off of the lifeblood of broadcasting contracts: if viewers are offended by what they see, they’ll tune out and take advertisers and lucrative television deals in their wake. And the leagues might not have dug any deeper than this.
But the argument for slur bans is actually even stronger. Although I doubt anyone in the league offices in question has read this research, there’s also some evidence, as we’ll see in a moment, that exposure to slurs causes psychological and social harm. Now, it turns out that the effects of slurs actually differ depending on whether the person exposed to them is a member of the slurred group or not (if you’re heterosexual, for example, the word faggot affects you differently than if you’re homosexual). But let’s wade into the reeds here a bit.
We know the most about how slurs affect people who are not members of the defamed group. Suppose you overhear slurs like nigger or faggot, and those terms do not refer to you. How does that change your feelings about the people those words refer to? Several studies have examined this question. One conducted in Italy had heterosexual participants perform a free-association task. Presented with a list of words, like the Italian equivalents of sun, American, and lion, participants had to come up with three related words for each. And the key manipulation was that the last prompt word on the list was either gay or faggot (since the study was conducted with Italian participants, the word wasn’t actually faggot but the Italian equivalent, frocio).12 After finishing this free-association task, participants performed a totally different task: they made a recommendation about how the city should spend money. They were told that the city council was deciding how to allocate funding to two distinct programs—one working toward AIDS-HIV prevention for “high-risk groups” and the other working on fertility issues in young couples. Their job was to decide how much of a fixed amount of money the city council should dedicate to each. The logic was that if gay and faggot had different effects on how the participants thought about themselves in relation to homosexual people, then this should affect their decisions to allocate funding toward a program more likely to help homosexuals (AIDS-HIV prevention for high-risk groups) or to one more obviously oriented toward heterosexuals (fertility). And that’s what they found. People originally given the word faggot to free-associate from were far less likely to allocate resources to the AIDS-HIV prevention program than those who free-associated on gay. In other words, exposure to a slur can bias people against sharing resources with members of the defamed group.
Exposure to a slur also affects how nonmembers of the defamed group think about members of the defamed group. One study again presented heterosexuals with neutral or derogatory group labels, gay or faggot, and then afterward asked them to select from a list words they associated with homosexuals and other words they associated with heterosexuals.13 The study was again conducted in Italy, and the list of words participants had to choose from included Italian words describing humans (like person, citizen, and hand) and others describing animals (like animal, instinct, and paw). And when the researchers tallied the results, they found that people picked more animal-related terms for the homosexual group and more human-related terms for the heterosexual group, but only after hearing the slur faggot and not the neutral group label gay. To make sure this was really about a slur directed at that group and not about derogatory terms in general, they included another condition in which people performed the same task after hearing the Italian equivalent of asshole, which is coglione. Unlike faggot, asshole did not lead to different apportionment of animal or human terms between the two groups. So this suggests that there’s something literally
dehumanizing about slurs—something that makes outsiders think about defamed group members as though they have fewer human attributes.
Exposure to slurs even affects how you physically interact with members of the defamed group. A study at the University of Queensland in Australia14 subliminally presented one of three words to people by flashing it on a computer screen. It appeared forty times but much too briefly for the participants to consciously apprehend it. The three words were gay, faggot, and asshole, and each participant saw just one of them. Then they went into another room for a putative discussion with a student, Mark, about the situation of homosexuals at the university. Mark, they were told, was homosexual. Participants were directed to enter the room to wait for Mark and to prepare for the interview by setting up chairs for the two of them. But the researchers were less interested in the interview than where the participants placed the chairs—more specifically, the distance between them. Participants placed the chairs about four inches farther apart when they had been subliminally primed with faggot as compared with gay or asshole. A slur drove people to keep themselves physically farther away from members of the defamed group.
So there’s some evidence that exposure to slurs about others leads to biases against those people—financial, psychological, and physical. But what about the direct effects on the people that the slurs are about? What does faggot do to you if you’re homosexual? This is a more complicated story. The literature reveals that there’s been almost no work on this question. And that’s probably for ethical reasons. If you think that exposing people to slurs directed toward their group could cause them harm, then it’s hard to justify a study like that unless there’s substantial benefit to the participants or to society. There might well be; it’s just not the easiest case to make. So we know very little. And what little we do know shows that the effects of slurs on members of the defamed group don’t track with their impact on outsiders.
We can see this from another Italian study that used a “lexical decision” task. Lexical decision is a type of experiment in which you have to decide whether a string of letters that appears on a computer screen makes up a word in your language or not.15 The length of time it takes you to decide in the affirmative reveals the current state of various mental operations. For instance, people are known to respond faster to a word like dog when it follows a related word like puppy, which tells us that thinking about puppies activates thoughts about dogs and perhaps the word dog itself. In the study in question, some of the words participants saw were adjectives that describe culturally relevant, positive perceived aspects of homosexual males (like elegant and artistic); others described perceived negative aspects (like effeminate and emotional). The trick was that before each word, a neutral term like gay or a slur like faggot blinked on the screen so quickly (for only fifteen milliseconds) that the participant would only process it subliminally.
The researchers found that people’s speed in deciding whether a string was a word in Italian or not was influenced by whether they had unconsciously been exposed to the neutral term gay or the slur faggot. But whether the participants identified as homosexual or not determined how they were affected. When heterosexual participants subliminally saw faggot rather than gay, they were slower to decide that positive attributes of homosexuals like elegant and artistic were words of their language. This makes sense if you think that slurs, even processed subconsciously, bring up negative attributes and suppress positive attributes of the targeted group. You see faggot unconsciously, and then you see a positive attribute of homosexuals, and it takes you a little longer to read and understand that word because it’s inconsistent with the subconscious framing of homosexuals induced by faggot.
But homosexual participants were affected in a totally different way. Seeing faggot rather than gay slowed their recognition of the negative attributes, like effeminate and emotional. Indeed, by comparison, faggot made them think faster about positive aspects of their own group. This might seem surprising to you. It was to me when I read it. But here’s a possible explanation. When threatened by an external source, some people have a tendency to retrench within their group identity. And perhaps that was happening here. Subliminal exposure to a slur might have gotten homosexual participants’ backs up, leading them to feel stronger identification with their defamed group. They would thus evince more positive feelings about themselves and their membership in that particular group. That in turn would lead to faster reactions to positive adjectives describing homosexuals. But this is just one of several possible explanations. For instance, perhaps homosexual Italians have reappropriated the word frocio (“fag”), which has even developed a positive connotation. More on that later.
It’s important to be clear about what these data do and don’t mean. Subliminally presenting slurs to members of defamed groups might lead them to process positive in-group attributes faster. But that doesn’t mean that calling people by slurs is good for them. Homosexual people (like heterosexual people) deem slurs highly offensive. Remember that Janschewitz’s data has nigger, fag, and cunt at the very top of the list, and other studies find the same thing.16
Moreover, a single word presented in isolation may not have the same impact it can in context. There’s some circumstantial evidence that unlike other types of profanity, slurs, when deployed as part of bullying, may actually cause harm.17 A study in the Journal of Early Adolescence asked middle schoolers about their mental health and school experience twice—in seventh grade and then again in eighth grade. Researchers were interested in whether being called by slurs during that year correlated with changes in students’ well-being. So in eighth grade, they also asked the children how often they were called by homosexual slurs, such as homo, gay, and lesbo. The researchers found that the boys (interestingly, not the girls) who reported being subjected more frequently to homosexual slurs were also more likely to exhibit an increase between seventh and eighth grade in anxiety, depression, and personal distress, as well as a decrease in their sense of school belonging. We have to be careful how we interpret this correlational study (see the preceding chapter!), but at the very least, this result doesn’t suggest that slurs are good for children.
Finally, it’s possible that slurs could negatively affect in-group members in another way, known in the social psychology literature as “stereotype threat.” Members of particular groups are socially stereotyped as bad at certain things—for instance, there exist in the United States stereotypes about females and certain ethnic minorities being less proficient at math and science than their male or Caucasian peers.18 And in fact, educational psychologists have observed that members of these stereotyped groups do in fact perform worse on average in those particular areas, but only under certain conditions. When exposed beforehand to negative stereotype information about their gender or ethnic group—for instance, after being reminded that “women do not perform as well on this test as men do”—they perform significantly worse than when they hear positive information about their social group, like “women tend to be creative, and success on this exam depends on creativity.”19 While I don’t know of any direct evidence addressing the question, it’s reasonable to hypothesize that hearing a slur directed at you (bitch, nigger, wetback, and so on) creates a threatening environment that leads to poorer performance in those enterprises that your group is stereotyped as bad at.
So in a nutshell, not only are slurs judged offensive, but they also have demonstrable negative effects on how outsiders treat members of defamed groups. It’s not as clear that just hearing the words has direct negative effects on members of those same groups, even if it seems likely that they would. That’s more complicated.
And so, a preponderance of evidence shows that slurs offend people, evoke dehumanizing and discriminatory behavior toward members of defamed groups, and either were designed or evolved to insult and oppress. Considering these facts, it makes sense that people would call for an end to such words’ use. The Fritz Pollard Alliance writes, “While we und
erstand and respect that different generations have different means of communicating, we cannot condone on any level the use of the ‘N’ word. . . . Simply put, from this day forward please choose to not use the ‘N’ word. Period!”20 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a similar call, even held an elaborate funeral ceremony for the word in Detroit in 2007. A coffin with the word nigger printed on it was buried. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was in attendance, declared, “Good riddance. Die, N-word. We don’t want to see you around here no more.”21
With all the trouble that words like nigger and faggot cause, fining a millionaire athlete for using them probably doesn’t seem like the worst decision in the world.
# $ % !
But here’s the problem. People don’t use these words in just one way. Yes, the terms serve to defame and insult, but they have other lives as well. There’s been more linguistic analysis of nigger than any other English slur, so let’s focus on it. The first clue that the word has different manifestations comes from the fact that it’s spelled variably: as either nigger or nigga. What’s the difference? There’s no question that nigger is a slur. But when it’s spelled nigga, a certain group of people use it differently. These people are mostly native speakers of a particular variety of English often called African American English (AAE). Speakers of this variety of English, most but not all of whom are African American, have adopted the word and run with it in ways that have largely (but arguably not entirely) liberated it from its defamatory connotations. As rapper Tupac Shakur explained to MTV reporter Tabitha Soren, “Niggers was the ones on the rope, hanging off the thing; niggas is the ones with gold ropes, hanging out at clubs.”22 Not every speaker of AAE would agree with this characterization, but it reflects the sense that there are two words here—one used to defame and suppress and another that’s an in-group term of positive self-identification.