10171: That’s So Not Derogatory.

From The New York Times…

Gay or Stupid? One’s Still an Insult

By Ginia Bellafante

Not too long ago, Lee Stern, a music educator, was accompanying his 11-year-old nephew in an elevator in his Chelsea apartment building. Mr. Stern is gay, and so is his brother, who adopted the boy with his partner and lives down the hall.

A man got in the elevator, and after he left, the boy proclaimed, “He is so gay.” Mr. Stern inquired after the response, and his nephew explained that he’d reached his assumption based on a potent whiff of cologne. Mr. Stern responded that cologne had nothing to do with sexual orientation. After all, he and the boy’s fathers didn’t wear any, and they are gay. Then the child said: “No. I mean he is gay,” Mr. Stern recounted. “He was talking about the muscles, the shorts. He was Chelsea,” Mr. Stern said, laughing.

If the man were, in fact, just Jersey Shore, would the child’s initial conclusion have been an affront?

Not according to an appellate court in Albany, which last week issued a ruling that in its judicial effect stripped the word “gay” of any derogatory connotation. It is now no longer considered slanderous in the State of New York to falsely call someone gay. Gay has, in the eyes of the court, as it has in the minds of sane people, lost currency as an accusation. Say I chose to live my life as a telenovela and decided to break up my best friend’s wedding by announcing in a rehearsal dinner toast that her husband was gay. That husband would now have as little ground for a lawsuit against me as if I had described him as blond, pigeon-toed, happy or merely mediocre at Texas Hold ’Em.

In arriving at its decision, the court erased decades of rulings that treated inaccurate descriptions of sexual orientation as defamation. “These appellate division decisions are inconsistent with current public policy and should no longer be followed,” the unanimous decision, written by Justice Thomas Mercure, stated.

What took so long?

While the decision clearly reflects the ideas and opinions of an increasingly enlightened citizenry, it might also be said to speak to the evolving etymology of the term gay itself. During the past two decades, American adolescent vernacular has broadened the definition far beyond implications of sexual orientation. In a circle of 13-year-olds, “That’s so gay!” might translate to: “Only ding-dongs go to the movies on Saturday when anyone who is anyone goes to the movies on Wednesdays.” It might be gay to wear Pumas in a place where Converse high-tops are the rage, or gay of a teacher to assign a 10-page essay on “Buddenbrooks” three days before Christmas.

Ten years ago, on an e-mail list dedicated to issues of linguistics, an extensive conversation got going over whether the word gay had morphed specifically into meaning “stupid.” The cumulative answer was, yes, it seemed so, and this was happening around the world, including in the United States.

But in New York, where teenagers who have grown up with gay parents, friends, aunts and cousins are perhaps thicker on the ground than most places, perhaps we’ve entered a new phase, where gay has simply reverted to meaning homosexual, a term so unremarkable it is delivered with the easiest neutrality. Some unscientifically gathered evidence suggests that we might have.

Last week, Emily Kerins, 14, a student at the Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Astoria, Queens, told my colleague Juliet Linderman that she’d grown offended by the indiscriminate use of the term gay. “If I were gay and someone used that word in a negative context, of course I’d be insulted,” she said. “I hear it all the time, every single day in class. The other day I raised my hand and answered a question wrong, and someone said, ‘You’re so gay.’ What does answering a question wrong have to do with my sexuality? It’s damaging to gay people to use the word like that. People don’t want to go through life being insulted and discriminated against. It’s wrong. I’d much rather call someone a loser. I used to say it when I was younger, but I stopped.”

Outside St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights on Friday, I encountered a similar sense of backlash. “A lot of kids say, ‘You’re really gay’ because they think that’s what an adult would do,” Agnes Guillo, a seventh grader, explained to me. “They think it’s an insult, and they think the insult will give them power.”

A boy named Eden Stern-Rodriguez, 16, was there with a group of high school friends, all of whom stood adamantly against any extrapolated uses of the term gay whatsoever. “There are people who live in my house who are gay,” Eden told me, explaining that his mother’s best friend lived with his family and that if he ever referred to anyone as gay, it would be because they were, in fact, homosexual.

Perhaps there’s a new synonym for lame and the older ones among us don’t yet know about it. And maybe it’s just “lame.”

10140: Quit Using ‘Oaxaquita.’

From The Los Angeles Times…

Epithet that divides Mexicans is banned by Oxnard school district

‘Oaxaquita’ (little Oaxacan) is used by other Mexicans to demean their indigenous compatriots — who are estimated to make up 30% of California’s farmworkers.

By Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times

Rolando Zaragoza, 21, was 15 years old when he came to the United States, enrolled in an Oxnard school and first heard the term “Oaxaquita.” Little Oaxacan, it means — and it was not used kindly.

“Sometimes I didn’t want to go to school,” he said. “Sometimes I stayed to fight.”

“It kind of seemed that being from Oaxaca was something bad,” said Israel Vasquez, 23, who shared the same mocking, “just the way people use ‘Oaxaquita’ to refer to anyone who is short and has dark skin.”

Years later, indigenous leaders are fighting back against an epithet that lingers among immigrants from Mexico, directed at their own compatriots. Earlier this month the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard launched the “No me llames Oaxaquita” campaign. “Don’t call me little Oaxacan” aims to persuade local school districts to prohibit the words “Oaxaquita” and “indito” (little Indian) from being used on school property, to form committees to combat bullying and to encourage lessons about indigenous Mexican culture and history.

Indigenous Mexicans have come to the U.S. in increasing numbers in the last two decades. Some estimates now put them at 30% of California’s farmworkers. In Ventura County, there are about 20,000 indigenous Mexicans, most of whom are Mixtec from the states of Oaxaca and Guerrero who work in the strawberry industry, according to local organizers.

Many speak little or no Spanish and are frequently subjected to derision and ridicule from other Mexicans. The treatment follows a legacy of discrimination toward indigenous people in Mexico, said William Perez, a professor of education at Claremont Graduate University who has interviewed and surveyed numerous indigenous Mexican students.

“One of the main themes is the discrimination, bullying, teasing and verbal abuse that they receive from other Mexican immigrant classmates who are not indigenous,” he said. The abuse, which often goes unnoticed or is minimized by teachers and administrators, has left some of the indigenous students too embarrassed to speak their native languages, he said.

Educators and others in the U.S. often don’t recognize diversity within the Mexican community, said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who has written extensively about indigenous Mexican migration.

“We forget that it’s a multilingual, multiethnic community,” he said. “We forget about the fact that 62 indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico.”

The organizing project’s campaign, Rivera-Salgado said, “is a really interesting way to confront, very directly, something that the Mexican nation and the Mexican immigrant community sometimes sweeps under the rug, and that’s the prevalence of racism and discrimination that indigenous people have to endure in Mexico and that is reproduced here in the United States.”

Elvia Pacheco, a Mixtec mother who lives in Oxnard, said her U.S.-born son’s middle school teacher poked fun at him for his Oaxacan heritage. Pacheco is from Oaxaca; the boy’s father is from the central state of Guanajuato.

One day her son came home and threatened to kill himself if she made him go to school again.

When she asked what was wrong, “He said, ‘You embarrass me.’”

“It’s the worst thing a mother can hear from her son — to be renounced because of who you are,” she said.

Since then, they have taken classes about Mixtec history and culture and participated in the project’s organizing efforts. It has made a world of difference, she said.

Denis O’Leary, a member of the Oxnard School District’s Board of Trustees, was at an event to launch the campaign.

“I’m very proud of the students and the parents that stood up on this issue,” he said. “We need to now learn from this and do better.”

On Wednesday the school district unanimously passed the resolution originally proposed by the organizing project prohibiting the derogatory terms and creating an anti-bullying committee, O’Leary said.

Though the district had existing policies prohibiting bullying and taunting, “This resolution is going to let teachers know, and administrators know, that this group, that nobody really thought of, has suffered. And we need to pay attention,” he said.