COLLEGE SORRY FOR ACADEMIC USE OF WORD ‘NEGRO’
LECTURERS in the UK were forced to apologise after students attending a class on race complained about quotations from renowned black writers which included the word ‘negro’.
Undergraduates at the University of York said they had been left ‘distressed’ after an academic read out passages which included the word from works by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an African-American sociologist and civil rights activist, and Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and anti-colonialist – both black academics.
‘Negro’ was the official and accepted term of self-identification for AfricanAmericans in the early 20th Century, and Du Bois’s study is called The Philadelphia Negro. The first chapter in Black Skin, White Masks, one of Fanon’s works, is entitled The Negro And Language.
Despite the clear academic context in which the word was used, the students complained to Helen Smith, head of the English department. In response, Ms
Smith wrote a letter of apology saying she recognised that reading it out had caused ‘considerable distress’.
‘I am extremely sorry this happened, and I have written to all staff in the department to make it clear that they should not pronounce racial slurs as part of their teaching and that if those words appear in texts or on PowerPoint slides, they should be prefaced with an appropriate content warning,’ she wrote.
In an email to lecturers, she suggested if academics were quoting racial words, they could be prefixed with the statement: ‘I am going to be using quotations which feature racial slurs, in an attempt to fully explore the topic, and in no way to condone the use of such words in other contexts by those who are not members of the specific racial groups who have chosen to reclaim these terms.’
But academics last night compared ‘snowflake’ students to employees of the Ministry of Truth in the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Professor Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University, said: ‘The obsession with the policing of language has become a caricature of itself. The word negro, which was used by pan-Africanists to refer to themselves, is now rebranded as a source of distress by students who do not have a clue about what racism means.’ Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: ‘It comes to something when even black writers and anti-colonialists are being censored. York University should be providing these snowflake students with support and counselling to get over their phobias about language.’
A University of York spokesman said: ‘We recognise that certain terms can be upsetting, even in an academic context.’