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Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

> "Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that I am deeply sorry. It is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students. We must and we will do better."

It's unbelievable that this "understandably" caused pain to anyone. There is a linked recording of him using the term. Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.

The dean and faculty should stand behind the professor and educate whoever got upset about this that you can not expect punishment for obvious misunderstandings.

Also, it might be really helpful to add (nà ge) to the title as it's impossible to make out the essence of the article for anyone who doesn't know the logographics.

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I think that microaggressions are real, that language really has import, and I've been noticing those kinds of things more and more on a daily basis. But this is entirely unwarranted and a gross overreaction.

Having said that, I also understand the terror that this kind of issue generates in organisations. Imagine you're the dean of an institution in an environment where people only read the headlines in their Facebook news feeds. I can easily imagine the headline "Marshall School of Business refuses to discipline lecturer who repeatedly said the n-word in class" followed by a dissembling write-up of angry students and vague mentions of the fact it wasn't intentional. This kind of thing can turn into a reputational firestorm and do real long-term damage to student recruitment.

Deans of educational institutions are between a rock and a hard place. If they were in charge of the narrative, it would be possible to be reasonable and say "This wasn't something to be upset about, and here's why". But they rarely are in charge of the narrative and want to shut these issues down as quickly as possible.

I can imagine a reasonable way forward might be to get the students and lecturer together to talk over the issues, and have a nuanced discussion about differing languages, much like what's happening in some of the comments here. But by the time you've organised that the firestorm is well underway and the damage is already done.

This seems like a perfect example of why micro-aggressions are bullshit. Any right-thinking person can see that those taking offence to this are wrong, while the theory of micro-aggressions posits that because they are offended their feelings are valid and the professor must be in the wrong.

That's not the way I understand microaggressions, which aren't to do with whether someone is offended or not. The idea is that if, for example, you're black, and day in, day out, there are lots of little things that on their own aren't worth being upset about (for example, people not holding the door for you, pushing in front of you in line, crossing the road rather than walk past you, assume you're low-level staff rather than a manager) it's the cumulative effects of those small - micro - things that really adds up. The whole idea is that they don't matter on their own, and if they were the exception rather than the rule then they'd be easy to ignore.

In terms of what you're saying about this particularly case it's pretty simple - what happened here is not a micro-aggression because it's not aggressive at all, so the use of the term here by the dean is simply wrong.

From Wikipedia:

> Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal or behavioural indignities, whether intentional or unintentional

It’s the unintentional part that I take issue with, which means that it’s not on you to understand the context of my statement, it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.

I agree that your definition makes perfect sense but I don’t think the sort of people who spend a lot of time worrying about micro-aggressions agree that the intention of the “aggressor” matters, as is perfectly evinced by this situation:

> “We would rather not take his course than to endure the emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcome environment for us Black students.”

I think at some level this comes down to the age old argument of Ignorance vs the Common Good.

An extreme but relevant example: If a person is ignorant of the harmfulness of bleach, and injects their children with it with intent to cure an ailment, are they guilty of a crime? If so, is it the crime of being ignorant?

So from that lens, can a person act aggressively without intending to? In a technical sense, I think not. Aggression is, by definition, a state of intent. When we say "act aggressively", we likely mean "act in a way that suggests an aggressive intent". It's our interpretation of intent based on action.

An important note here is that it's our interpretation of someone else's intent.

I don't think emotional offence should be treated exactly like physical harm. Different people may take offence from different actions, and it's not fair to require everyone to judge accurately what is and what is not offensive to all the other people they're going to interact with, especially in a society that is aiming for diversity. In East Asia, where most people think alike, it's easier to guess people's reaction, but it's definitely not so in other parts of the world.

For physical harm, however, ignorance should not be an excuse. It may reduce the responsibility, but it should not completely remove it. Not knowing something can kill doesn't change the fact that one had actually killed.

I don't know where you get the impression that in East Asia most people think alike, though I won't call it microaggression but rather self-centered cluelessness. Agree with your other points though.

You’re right and that’s the crux of it really: intent. That’s why framing someone as being in the wrong regardless of intent is dangerous.

If you don't understand micro-agressions, then you don't understand bullying. Because that's all micro-agressions are. Unintentional bullying.

Intentionality is not relevant with micro-agressions. Parse the nomenclature all you like, but people unintentionally cause harm all the time.

The issue is when as a society, those things are so commonplace that they repeat over and over in a constant loop.

For example, if someone accidentally bumps into you while passing you on the sidewalk, it's no big deal, they apologize and both people move on. Now imagine that everywhere you go, people keep bumping into you and apologizing all day long, multiple times a day.

You know no one means anything by it, but the aggregate of all that bumping is terribly frustrating and you can't even take it out on any individual person because you know they didn't mean it.

That's what many minorities deal with. And white people are completely clueless to what they are doing.

No one is talking about punishing the micro-agressors. Just educating them so we can minimize the distributed bullying campaign that we have been subjecting people to and give them some breathing room.

That’s worth thinking about, thank you.

> It’s the unintentional part that I take issue with, which means that it’s not on you to understand the context of my statement, it’s on me to imagine the infinite variety of ways you might interpret my statement and vet them for possible insensitivity before making it, which is obviously impossible.

I don't know that that is the only way to interpret how to behave.

Another way to think about it is simply to be aware that a colleague or friend from the non-dominant group (e.g. a woman, a Romani person in Germany, a Spanish speaker in the USA) experience many things every day that makes them feel less worthy, less welcome, on the outs so to speak, not because of the content of their mind and heart, but because of the group they were born into (I can give countless examples I've heard from friends & colleagues, if you're curious).

Now that you and I have that awareness, we can decide whether and how we can be supportive and add to that load. It could even be as simple as acknowledging when I see it.

Maybe if you can imagine that this is your significant other or child - what would you want for them?

>I agree that your definition makes perfect sense but I don’t think the sort of people who spend a lot of time worrying about micro-aggressions agree that the intention of the “aggressor” matters, as is perfectly evinced by this situation:

Let's not paint everyone with the same brush.

Lots of people are going to be upset by a lifetime of daily microaggressions - and rightfully so! - that are not going to be upset that a different language that has a word that sounds vaguely like a slur.

Some people will. I won't say they're wrong to have a gut reaction to hearing a word and misunderstanding it as something else. But I do think that they do need to understand that the word they heard isn't the word they thought they heard, and work from there.

But I don't think it's fair to say that everyone concerned with microaggressions in general will also fail to understand that 那个 is not the slur that it somewhat sounds like.

But that kind of controversy is supposed to be a good thing for universities! I'm not saying you're wrong as a matter of organizational dynamics, but it reads to me like an explanation of why a liquor store owner might prefer to only sell soft drinks. What's the point of a university where ideas can't be freely discussed?

Frankly, the point of the university today is to provide a service for paying customers. When you see a job posting that says that a bachelor's degree in such-and-such field is required, the employer is hardly asking to get candidates who have spent four years freely discussing ideas like they're one of the figures in The School of Athens; they're asking to get candidates who know certain things and have experience doing a bit more self-directed work than they would in high school. (That's also why the university degree can be reduced to a GPA instead of a dissertation or set of publications.)

Now, it's definitely a problem for society that people who want to spend their lives engaging in academic debate, which is a thing we should encourage, can rarely find a job that supports them in doing so, and the closest they can find is providing vocational training to 20-year-olds who are ready to leave the academy once they've received the service they've paid for. But it doesn't really help either the professor or the student to pretend that the modern undergraduate classroom is anything else.

(Slight correction, this is an MBA class, not undergrad.)

This decision doesn't even make sense from the perspective of vocational training. Being able to hear 那个 without great pain and upset is a directly job-applicable communication tool - there are many jobs working with Mandarin speakers that students won't be able to handle if the word traumatizes them.

It almost makes more sense as an MBA class: How to respond to accusations of racial insensitivy 101.

Teacher got an F in this case?

If they are really worried about such headlines, I can tell you the next escalation level: geography lecturer dismissed because of using an N word (northpol)

Yup, this "excuse letter" looks exactly like what a victim of a sham trial would write under Stalin or Mao. This is frightening.

> this "excuse letter" looks exactly like what a victim of a sham trial would write

As far as I see the letter behind the link was written by the "judge" in this "trial": "Geoff Garrett, Dean" -- it's he who wrote:

"Professor Greg Patton repeated several times a Chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in English. Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students."

Sounds very similar! Say no more!

Depending on the Mandarin dialect, it can sound almost exactly the same (as many Chinese people had discovered in English-speaking countries). I guess that what’s happened. We Russians are usually told to never say the Russian word for “book” while in the US, or there will be consequences :)

Seems like you would be okay as long as you emphasized the strong K sound at the front.

This is hardly surprising. We used to have lots of civil social discourse. Media, elites, and intellectuals would engage in such discourse and would present sometimes opposing thoughts. Only with such discourse will there be no room for radicals. And look what's been happening, moderates of a few years ago would be considered far-right today. Anyone with different opinions, now matter what reasons they offer, will be labeled with the usual: bigot, racist, fascist, and xenophobia. Media like WaPo and NYT and CNN published all kinds of articles that argue XXX is racism, like milk, like maths, like interior design.

It's a matter of time we got into this hysteria.

I think you're making your own counterargument: if you prioritize civil discourse, you necessarily exclude radicals - you've limited the space of discourse by insisting that the only acceptable propositions are those that people can reliably be civil about. Fewer people were making extreme claims, but many of those extreme claims could have been debated rationally, were people interested in doing so. It is a Potemkin discourse: it looks very peaceful and respectable, but it looks that way because it's artificially removed from actually discussing the state of our society.

So, I am happy to engage you in debate, and I'll even do your job for you by trying to precisely name the propositions that you think are so obviously incorrect.

Most of the hits I see for "milk is racist" is about the alt-right using milk drinking as essentially an aesthetic symbol, which seems like a) a factual observation b) not a claim about milk itself being racist, but about its adoption as a racist symbol.

I see a 2016 CNN article called "math is racist," which, if you read it, is clearly arguing that mathematical models are being used in ways that reinforce racism, not that the brute facts of mathematics are themselves racist, either. This argument is generally widely accepted, so I'm curious if you disagree with it.

I can't find any articles about interior design being racist, but I do see articles about the interior design industry confronting race problems. This doesn't sound surprising or extreme either - I'd expect that most industries have race problems of some sort.

You'll note that I have not called you bigot, racist, fascist, nor xenophobia [sic], and I'd appreciate if you returned the favor and engaged my arguments on the merits.

Radical ideas can be presented just as civilly as conservative ideas. Noam Chomsky does a perfectly fine job of being civil.

Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.

(The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)

> Sure, and I think they are being presented civilly - the "math is racist" CNN article is quite mild in tone https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-.... - but that doesn't help much when your interlocutors think that certain ideas are inherently uncivil.

I don't think anyone thinks the "math is racist" article is uncivil. I think they think it's stupid. And the title "math is racist" is pretty undeniably laughable.

The content of the article "Sometimes mathematical tools are used to reinforce aspects of racial inequality" is much more reasonable. But people dislike this because it's a motte and bailey argument - the headline "math is racist" is a ridiculous proposition that is totally unsupported by the content of the article.

> (The problem in some sense is the opposite of what the interlocutors say - "racist" is a well-defined term, and one can debate whether a thing is racist or not, but they're not willing to engage with any argument that something is racist, and they respond to it by shutting down debate and saying their opponents are unreasonable.)

There is no serious argument that 'math' is racist. There are serious arguments that mathematical tools have been and are used to reinforce racial inequality. That is nowhere near the same thing as "math is racist".

It's a completely clickbait headline (like most things you'll find on sensationalist outlets like CNN). If you read the full article, there's not anything like a claim that "math is racist".

My only takeaway from this is just another point to deduct from CNN's credibility, rather than that this author is saying "math is racist".

There's also the moving goalposts of what's considered "extremist", especially where it's reduced around extremely small confines of acceptability, and invoking long-tail assumptions as direct accusations of intent against people.

>Understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students

Why, aren't they adults? (Over 17 will do in most countries to consider them so).

There's a common strain of thought in the US that it's actually a sign of maturity to be pained and upset by words. Immature people, the theory goes, don't have enough empathy to understand why a common word in a foreign language could be so hurtful.

That's not maturity, that's soapiness.

Or rather, to tell it as it is, it is a mix of the fragility of spoiled brats and feigned offense to be used to advance one's self...

For all we know, this could be a disaffected student seeing an easy way to get revenge for not being given the grade they want.

Seems like their current system makes that all too easy.

Also, sounds very open to potential blackmailing of people. :(

To have Prof. Patton suspend for this, I'd argue this has cause great pain to Chinese speaker to see a legitimate phrase, correctly used and taught (by a foreigner no less), be deemed racially inflammatory, with the Prof. suspended.

I'm not gonna lie, my blood boiled over this one.

Acts like these set precedent for future actions by colleges across the spectrum.

The Coddling of the American Mind is good deep dive on this and helps explain the phenomenon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076NVFT5P/

> Not only does this barely resemble the racial slur, it is indistinguishably used in a context where it's implicitly clear and even explicitly stated that it's a term from another language.

In the linked video it sounds exactly like the slur, To a surprising extent.

It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!

I’d be surprised just to hear a word sounding like “fuck” in the middle of a chinese class, although it’s probably not considered as offensive.

It doesnt surprise me at all that some people were upset and it seems very unwise on the part of the professor, who would surely know that this would provoke a reaction. A suspension from teaching his one class for a term will defuse the situation and perhaps he can return to teaching after.

>It was introduced with no warning and I’m not surprised people were shocked if this was the same context as the class - although we don’t know the full details!

What possible other details could there be? We literally have the recording of what happened before. He explains that there is a filler word in chinese, gives the english translation and then the chinese word. Do you really think it's reasonable to expect an additional warning? Should every philosophy lecture come with a short preface that the word 'Kant' may come up and is not intended to cause any harm? (mind you, the dean's letter is actually way more strict: it literally straight up says that these words are 'unacceptable', no qualification about a warning or anything).

Hell, how far do you think this should go? If a student has a potentially offensive sounding name, do they have to give a warning before they introduce themselves? Or should they have to anglicize their name?

In the video it was clearly preceded by "in Chinese". And he was talking the whole time about filler worlds. Clearly, context has been established. And the audience of a communications class at university level can be expected to understand that other languages contain words that might sound offensive to English native speakers. Do people really think Prof. Patton intended to insult people of color, in an online class? Are people really getting offended when Chinese use 那个, or when they overhear Russians discuss кни́ги? Will I get censored for merely mentioning these words and not child-proofing my post with "warning: words in this post might be considered offensive"?

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