A waspish niggardly slur...

- BY JOHN LEO of US News, May 99

The nonimpeachment story of the last week of January was the controversy over the word "niggardly." David Howard, a white mayoral aide in Washington, D.C., used the word in conversation with a black official, who took offense because he felt that niggardly, which means miserly or cheap, was a racist term. Howard offered his resignation, which was accepted by Mayor Anthony Williams. The mayor explained that although Howard didn't say "anything that was in itself racist," using a word that could be misunderstood was like "getting caught smoking in a refinery with a resulting explosion."

The resignation of Howard was, of course, a shock and a tragedy but it had a good result too. It sensitized us all to the hidden and hurtful ethnic slurs that darken–oops, sorry–that afflict American life and allow the wily perpetrators to get off scot free–er, without any punishment at all.

That's why in February and March of 1999, America's alert press corps turned up a staggering number of coded insults. For example, at a fancy dinner in Washington, the British ambassador called the Japanese ambassador a "jolly good chap," exactly the kind of sly detraction that no one would have noticed before the consciousness-raising Howard case. Luckily, a savvy columnist pointed out that "chap" is unmistakably close to the insulting word "Jap," so the British ambassador was recalled and is now serving as second assistant to the operations director of the Liverpool sewage works.

A similar verbal crisis arose in Chicago. While presenting a bill to a Jewish patient, a dentist said, "Don't be afraid of chewing down on it." At his two-day hearing before the city's human-rights committee, the dentist lamely kept trying to argue that he was talking about his patient's new filling, not about a bargaining trait often attributed to Jewish people by their detractors.

Disguised as art. In Manhattan, irate Polish-Americans rallied outside the Museum of Modern Art, convincing most fair-minded onlookers that the museum's current show on Jackson Pollock was intended as a punning attempt to revive the demeaning term "Polack."

Religious controversy exploded in Lincoln, Neb., when a diet instructor said to her class, "I think some of you are natural snackers." Catholics in the group caught on immediately, identifying this apparently innocent remark as a coy version of "mackerel snappers." A fair-minded local priest spoke out. Although "natural snackers" is not literally an anti-Catholic slur, he declared, the plain fact is that mentioning natural snackers in the presence of mackerel snappers was like "hurling a grenade into a munitions dump."

In Cincinnati, the manager of an art theater was fired for showing the old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, The Gay Divorcee. The manager pretended to be bewildered, but an astute activist explained that the screening was a subtle homophobic slur insinuating that any gay or lesbian marriages were bound to end in divorce.

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans joined the debate. They held a low-key rally in Bangor, Maine, to express controlled but sincere grievance over such hurtful language as the scotching of rumors, welshing on bets, the use of "waspish" as a negative word, and the inexplicable refusal of most musicians to remove the word "honky" from honky-tonk music.

The most serious of the covert slurs stirred emotions in Utica, N.Y. Italian-Americans rioted for three days after a local disk jockey blithely played a song containing the phrase "as each day goes by." "I can't believe they're calling us dagos again," said Giuseppe Abondanza, president of the Italian-American Alliance Against Hate, Discourtesy, and Ambiguous but Perfectly Actionable Affronts. Labeling the incident "just another musical hate crime," he managed to get the slur-prone disk jockey fired. Then Abondanza rushed off to North Bergen, N.J., where other members of his anti-hate group were protesting Burger King's insensitive decision to sell a large burger called "the Whopper" right in the middle of a proud Italian-American community. "Next they'll be starting a radio station with the call letters WOP, or suggesting that Italian-Americans refresh themselves with a vacation in New Guinea," quipped Abondanza.

By April, every ethnic group in America was in full cry. German-Americans wanted the term "kraut" removed from the word "sauerkraut." Asian-Americans resented the bigoted word "slope" in the name of Park Slope, Brooklyn. Hispanic activists shredded thousands of copies of a newspaper that had dared to use the toxic phrase "spick-and-span." Some also demanded that the offensive title of Sigourney Weaver's movie Alien be changed to Undocumented Worker.

But in May, everything began calming down. A columnist who specializes in ethnic bias said, "Maybe we're finding bigotry where it doesn't actually exist." Shocking at first, this novel idea caught on. By June, angry discoverers of artfully hidden bias were out of fashion. People went back to the impeachment trial. The crisis was over.

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