Ethnic slurs in literature can be used for teaching

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 8, 2000

So what, really, is in a name?

How upset should American Indians and a Pinellas County mother be that the word "squaw," which nearly all Indians find to be pejorative, appeared in a novel her child had read in school?

Actually the mother herself proposed, and school officials adopted, a "suggestion" to teachers that demonstrates the right way to deal with the problem.

We're never going to be able to weed all of the ethnic references that some find objectionable out of every piece of literature in existence.

I say, with no humorous intent, that we can't rename books and characters so that we have titles like Black Seaman of the Narcissus or characters named Former Slave of African Descent Jim. Nor can we make Shylock a Presbyterian.

Literature, for better or worse, often reflects life as it is or was, and the absolute worst thing we can do is to sanitize it. If it jars on the ears and soul, then it is good to explore why it does now and didn't then.

I am frequently invited, mostly because I enjoy it and work cheap, to read or recite poetry, and to talk about it, with schoolchildren.

One of my favorite poems for that purpose is Down and Out by Clarence Leonard Hay, but I noticed early on that there was a line that could cause anguish to African-American students:

Running a war in Salvador, with a black-faced barefooted mob;

I was General Santiago Hicks at the head of a grand revolt.

"Black-faced?" I wondered if I should just pitch the poem and go back to Casey at the Bat and The Owl Critic for younger audiences and the epilogue to Houseman's Shropshire Lad for older ones.

So I began to explore.

Black-faced can mean having black skin, or, as might be expected in a revolution, it can mean having your face blackened by soot, or even for camouflage purposes.

"Salvador" is Spanish for "savior," so a whole lot of places named by Spanish explorers are called Salvador. Some of them are now inhabited by Indians and mestizos of mixed Spanish and Indian descent; some, depending on the vagaries of the slave trade, are inhabited by blacks; and some, as in Brazil, are inhabited by persons of Portuguese, African or Indian, or all three, descent.

So I tell kids all of this and I tell them that Hay, who died in 1969 at the age of 85, did most of his writing during a time when most white writers (which he was) didn't think much about the sensitivities of black readers. We talk about that and how things have changed. I tell them that I first heard the poem in 1951, when my hometown still had segregated schools, buses, bathrooms and drinking fountains. I heard it recited again, by a dying man, when I was in Vietnam in 1966, when some of that had started to change. And I admit that I didn't realize the possible impact of the words until the mid-1980s.

We almost always wind up in a discussion about slavery, geography, history, segregation, Vietnam, progress or lack thereof in racial relations, and then poetry.

By doing so we have turned what might have been an opportunity for censorship and repression into one for education and exchange of ideas.

The objectionable word "squaw" can serve the same purpose. It comes from a Mohawk word for female genitalia, and, guys, if you think that's not pejorative, try using the English equivalent, any equivalent, to describe a female co-worker some time and see how soon you wind up with either your necktie stapled to your forehead or spending the rest of your life in deposition hell.

But with a little help, the word can be used as a springboard for elementary sensitivity training, discussions of the cultural and lingual differences and similarities between Indian languages, how Indians came to be called Indians, who Christopher Columbus was, how he and others deduced the spherical nature of the Earth and a dozen other subjects.

Objectionable words don't need to be discarded. They just need to be recycled to better use.

And, by the way, those of us from poor white backgrounds aren't that thrilled with Erskine Caldwell and John Steinbeck either.

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