(no subject)

[muckefuck]

Obviously, yesterday's entry won't make much sense unless you've participated in spookyfruit's Greyhawk campaign or read the Very Secret Diaries of Cassandra Claire, of which this is but the palest imitation. (If you haven't read these, well, where have you been? As the Regalar Guy would say, "Get off your high horse and join the culcher!") I'd've locked it away from interlopers' eyes, but then not all the players would be able to read it. Excuses, excuses. I know I'm not shaking the Mr Vain label anytime soon.

Minor revelation in the shower this morning. Remember that silly case in D.C. some years back (January, 1999) where a mayoral aide was forced to resign because he used the word "niggardly" in front of a black staffer? At the time, it was viewed as a clear case of ignorance uniting with political correctness to defeat common sense. Being a word person, that was basically my reaction. Nevertheless, it isn't simply ludicrous that an "innocent" word could be used in an abusive way. Imagine if it had been part of a pattern of passive-aggressiveness that included sprinkling one's speech with similar terms like "black eye" or "denigration" whenever one was in the presence of an African-American.

As it was, that wasn't the case. The aide had been in place less than a month and there was no such history. Queer activists asserted that he had been so readily let go since he was gay, which a conservative friend of mine pooh-poohed as yet more political correctness gone amok. But was it? The vocal antipathy of many African-Americans toward homosexuality is not exactly a secret--or, rather, it's an open secret, one that many activists play down since they are trying to build bridges between minority communities. Again, it's not simply ludicrous that members of a religiously conservative African-American community would resent having a gay male in a position of power and would set out to provoke his downfall. Would the aide have been abandoned so quickly if he had been a heterosexual Pentacostal Hispanic woman? One wonders.

Of course, the real "truth" of the incident can never be known. This was just another reminder to myself that there's always more to stories like these (which are the meat and starch of News of the Weird and other sound-bite features) than meets the eye

Comments

[welcomerain.livejournal.com]

http://www.newsobserver.com/nc24hour/ncnews/story/1699649p-1717688c.html

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

What serendipity! First I heard of this story; I was reminded of the D.C. case by an enitrely unrelated train of thought. Interesting to hear that the mayor rehired the aide, given how he refused to stand by him at the time. Wonder what office politics went on there--just as I wonder what went on in the N.C. The brief article suggests that the principal and this teacher do not have a particularly chummy relationship and who can say exactly why that would be.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Rrgh. I'm torn over this one. "She was offended by the word because it sounded like another word" sounds so pathetic and weak. On the other hand, since when do fourth-graders get archaic vocabulary words like "niggardly"? My mom's a fourth-grade teacher, and I can tell you, that does not sound like a fourth-grader kind of word. Did they run across it in a book, or what? On the other other hand, what a ridiculous reaction. Would the rest of the parents even have known about the situation if the teacher hadn't had to apologize to everyone involved?

Annoyed with world now.