That Woman in Minnesota

 

A woman was lately videoed admitting she called a child “the n-word” at a Minesota playground. For what it is worth, she claims it was because she caught him rifling through her child’s diaper bag. She was doxxed online. The local police opened an investigation. The NAACP opened a GoFundMe and raised $340,000 for the black child and his family. 

Rather than apologize, the woman opened a GiveSendGo and appealed for donations to help her and her family relocate to safety. She has raised, at this report, $750,000.

The situation is insane, and a measure of how bad racial tensions have become in the US. Let’s try to restore some perspective.

“The n-word” is not inherently an insult. It is an insult only because we have arbitrarily decided so. It simply means the colour “black” in French or Spanish, a bit distorted by an English tongue. If it is an insult, this implies that there is something gravely wrong with having dark skin. Do we want to concede this?

Further, those of African ancestry commonly use “the n-word” among themselves, to refer to themselves. To say that a given act is fine for one racial group, but wrong for another, is an obvious example of racial discrimination. This should not be acceptable.

It is also now wrong to refer to East Asians as “yellow,” or to Native Americans as ‘redskins”—if apparently much less so—but there is nothing wrong with referring to anyone with fair skin as “white.” This again is obviously discriminatory. If it is wrong to refer to someone by their skin colour, it is wrong for everyone, or you are a racist.

Finally, free speech is free speech. Even granted that this was legitimately an insult—surely in this case an insult was intended—anything more than a verbal punishment, as was administered immediately on site without video being required—is clearly disproportionate.

All the tumult is madness. But at least let’s hope that the fact that the woman actually seems to have profited in the end for her small transgression, rather than having her life ruined, as intended, may go some distance in restoring balance.