Student suspended for asking whether 'alien' on vocabulary list means 'space aliens' or 'illegal aliens'
Correct, now go to the principal's office
North Carolina high school student Christian McGhee was suspended for asking his teacher which of two possible meanings was intended by the word “alien” included on a vocabulary list the class was instructed to learn. Law Enforcement Today recorded the teen's question, as relayed by his mother:
Christian McGhee’s teacher assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word "alien." According to his mother, Leah McGhee, Christian responded to his teacher, asking, “Like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?” [Emphasis added].
Threaten fellow student - get him suspended
The teacher might have been expected to be impressed with the 16-year-old student, as he demonstrated a familiarity with both possibilities for the word's definition. Perhaps the teacher would have been, had it not been for another student who “took offense to the question and threatened physical violence against Christian.”
At that point, one might assume that the teacher would refer the student who threatened Christian for administrative action. But it was Christian who, after being sent to the assistant principal, received a three-day suspension, prompting concern from his mother that he may lose out on college scholarship opportunities with an infraction for racist language now on his record.
It's OK when the government does it
Christian argued that he did not anticipate his question being objectionable since, “‘illegal alien’ is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.” X users bolstered his argument, noting that the federal government refers to migrants from foreign nations as "aliens,” and suggested that he file a lawsuit that would get him at least as much as a scholarship would offer.
Let's get political
Education is a hot issue with voters and Christian's punishment for using vocabulary accurately could make it easy for politicians to score points in an election year. One presidential candidate appears to have weighed in already on the controversy:
Been there
Christian is not the first to suffer censorship and punishment for perfectly appropriate use of language. In 1999, David Howard, an aide to the then mayor of Washington, D.C., was pressured to resign when other city employees were offended that he “used the word ‘niggardly’ in describing how he would have to manage a fund's tight budget.” [Emphasis added].
The word has caused a problems for others as well, despite both its meaning and its use having nothing to do with race. The word is thought to have developed in northern Europe in a homogeneous racial environment with reference only to the use of money.
And in 2002, an elementary school teacher from the same state as Christian wound up with a reprimand and mandatory retraining after a parent complained about her use of the word to describe a literary character:
Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, has been reprimanded for using that word in a classroom discussion about literary characters. A parent, one Akwana Walker, declared herself offended by the usage. Ms. Bell has been hustled off to “sensitivity training”… [Emphasis added].
Pushback
Not all such “infractions” have ended in punishment, however. A University of Wisconsin professor guilty of using the same word in 1999 escaped punitive action and even inspired resistance to the attempt to censor him:
A junior enrolled in Professor Standish Henning’s class on English literature, [Amelia] Rideau came to the Faculty Senate to complain of his use of the word “niggardly” — which means stingy or miserly — in a classroom discussion about Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval classic, “The Canterbury Tales…
Rather than chalk it up as a lesson in mistaken homophony (also not an offensive term, by the way), Rideau took the classroom incident to another level. She brought three black friends to her next class with Henning for “support,” and then cited her experience to the Faculty Senate … [Emphasis added].
A backlash ensued that included editorials in local papers supporting the professor:
“So, what other words are to be purged from our vocabulary because they sound like words that may offend?” wrote history professor John Sharpless in a Wisconsin State Journal “guest column” a few days later. “Thespian? Philatelist? Tips? Peanuts? Homogenous?”
You knew, and you're still offended?
It didn't help Rideau's case that she informed the Faculty Senate that she knew what the word meant.
But wait, it got better: Rideau said she knew what niggardly means but was upset that too many people associate that word with the slur. She did not claim ignorance as a defense. Rather, she was upset that some classmates spelled the word as “niggerly” in their notes. In the real world outside the Madison campus, this produced a curious reaction.
Shouldn’t taxpayers be upset that students in a fairly sophisticated UW-Madison class on English literature have never heard the word “niggardly” or, at least, cannot spell it? … [Emphasis added].
Victory
Rideau had hoped to use the incident to make the university's existing faculty speech code more stringent so that it would cover even unintentional offenses. Instead, the university cancelled the speech code altogether:
In a matter of days, protectors of the code were in a retreat that would lead to its virtual repeal within a month. The same university that had been the first in the nation to adopt a faculty speech code in 1981 would soon become the first to abandon it — a remarkable step away from the “politics of identity” that threatens to ruin some of America’s finest colleges and universities.
Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found. [Emphasis added].
