Several weeks ago a good friend called me out for a flippant comment I made. I imagine most of us have heard people say things to us that were insulting but that were not intended as insults, and most of us have inadvertently insulted others while saying something we believed to be completely innocuous. We’ve heard people say, “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it, you shouldn’t be so sensitive.” And we’ve also heard people say, “You need to be more sensitive to the feelings of others before you speak.” In my case, my friend and I were talking about a bicycling training app that calculated speed based on the ratio of power to rider weight. The trainer connected to the app accurately measures power output, but it is up to the user to enter an honest weight. She said that her weight fluctuated by quite a bit, so that on any given day it might be off by 5 or 6%. I made some stupid remark that the same was true for me, but I could not blame it on a menstrual cycle. “That’s sexist!” she told me. I was surprised that she said so, and told her so as I apologized. She kindly let me know that she didn’t think I was sexist, but my remark would be insulting to a lot of women. As I thought about it I realized she did me a favor by pointing this out. I was lucky that she knew me well enough to not be offended, but if I had said something similar to someone I was just getting to know it could potentially create a bad first impression that would be very difficult to overcome.
It is common for those of us who unknowingly or inadvertently insult someone to try to make light of it by declaring that we meant nothing by it and were misunderstood. But, just like beauty is in the eye of the beholder, offense is in the mind of the one who perceives they have been offended. I am not saying that we as a culture are not too easily offended these days. I think we are, and I think too many of us take pride in being offended. But, it is not the role of the speaker of an offending remark to explain away the offense. The best possible response is to accept that what you have said was legitimately perceived as hurtful or insensitive, learn from it, and be grateful that the person who heard you chose to point it out. If you are good enough friends, the topic could be discussed objectively at a later date. That so many of us are so easy to take offense these days is more of a cultural phenomenon than a personal one. There are historical injustices that lie behind a lot of this, and they won’t be dealt with by telling each other not to be so sensitive.
Offense is in the mind of the one who perceives they have been offended, regardless of what the speaker says or thinks was intended. Ethnic slurs, as we know, represent a bond when spoken between and among those of a similar race and culture, but represent an act of hatred when hurled across those lines. And to those who might say this phenomenon is a modern affectation, I would disagree. My mother, born in 1929 and raised in rural, white protestant Pennsylvania, raised us to consider the typical curses having to due with bodily functions, sex, and the eternal consequences of a life of sin as crude and vulgar, but to her there was no greater profanity than an ethnic slur. We would be reprimanded for repeating any of the former, but physically punished for ever uttering the latter.
My father, born in 1922 and raised in a working class neighborhood not far from Philadelphia, would never outwardly disagree with my mother, but differed from her quite a bit in practice. He freely expressed himself with all the common four letter words except “fuck” (It’s curious how in the 1950s and early 1960s this was such a forbidden word, and now it’s used like a punctuation mark.) which I only heard him say a few times when he was drunk and I was already a teenager, but he also used slurs to “affectionately” refer to the eastern European and Italian kids he grew up with. I think he was proud of his neighborhood and the sports prowess of his high school, and often spoke admiringly his ethnic friends who played baseball and football with him and came by to visit our home when I was a kid growing up. Still, I wonder if they cringed when they were referred to as they were by my father as a teenager and their other WASP classmates? Surely they felt it was demeaning, and set them apart socially. And in a way, even if my father declared that he used these terms to honor their backgrounds and their cultures, wasn’t he really teasing them for being different, even if he didn’t think their being different was of any consequence? And if we’re being honest, we know in the 1930s and later being Catholic, and being Italian, and being eastern European had huge consequences in America.
I held a job in the Planning and Research Department of the Albuquerque Public Schools in the mid 1980s. Estimating the coming year’s student enrollment by school and by class was an important job, since the allocation of teachers and financial resources was based on it. I developed an experimental algorithm that I built into a computer program to help with this process. Since the program was experimental, and since guinea pigs used to be a slang term for subjects of experiments, when I saved the program I called it “guinea.” A graduate student of Italian descent was assigned to work with me on the enrollment projection project. We developed a pretty good rapport the first week of his assignment until I showed him my program. It took him several days to decide to confront me on the name of my algorithm, and I don’t think he ever completely accepted my explanation. I had to admit that I knew at one time the term “guinea” was used as a slur against Italians, but had not given it any thought when I named the program and secondarily was surprised to hear that Italian Americans still felt the lingering pangs, and perhaps continuing acute affects of persecution. I’m sure from that point on he wrote me off as just another prejudiced middle class white young man. Often these first impressions are difficult to reverse, and attempts to explain them away only deepen mistaken impressions.
A loosely related topic has to do with the comparison some are making between the popularity of Cardi B’s song WAP and the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease licensing and publishing six titles of Dr. Seuss books from among their collection of the fifty that were examined. Cardi B’s song celebrates female sexual pleasure in extremely descriptive detail, and was named the #1 song of 2020 by a panel of NPR music critics who said of it, “To no one’s surprise, a pair of women honoring their own ladyparts and the pleasures they dish out and expect returned in spades drew the ire of the insecure, of zealots and of moral grandstanders. The backlash, however inseparable from the song’s cultural narrative, only bolsters the argument for its politics of pleasure.” Some have claimed that WAP won several major music awards. I haven’t found this to be true, but it has been wildly popular and critically praised. Some have claimed that Dr. Seuss has been banned. This is absolutely not true. Dr. Seuss Enterprises decided to cease the licensing and publication of only six out of fifty titles due to derogatory characterizations of certain ethnicities in those books. This is a far cry from censorship. Having written what I did earlier in this article it would be hypocritical of me to question those who might be offended by Cardi B’s song. I hope they don’t get exposed to the song inadvertently. However, I personally seek out lots of different kinds of music but until today, when I intentionally looked online for WAP, I had never heard it. I doubt if many people who don’t want to hear it ever have either. While I think there have been more beautiful descriptions and portrayals of lovemaking and nudity in art and music than that created by Cardi B, I cannot condemn an open celebration of either nudity or lovemaking. Regarding the Dr. Seuss books, critics of the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises are creating the impression that The Cat In The Hat has been banned, which is an outright mistruth. In light of growing anti-sentiment against Asians and Asian Americans I believe it is wise to discontinue licensing and publishing the six books that misrepresent them, and it is totally within the authority of the organization that holds the rights to them to do so. Those who defend the Bill of Rights but condemn Cardi B, and those who defend free enterprise but condemn Dr. Seuss Enterprises, embody the very definition of hypocrisy.
Thoughtful, and thought-provoking!