From San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, June 24, 2002

SLURRING THEIR WORDS
Comedians, writers, entrepreneurs defang hateful language by 'flipping' it back and exploding some long-held stereotypes

James Sullivan, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic Monday, June 24, 2002

A comedian of Indonesian descent calls her show "Kate's Chink-O-Rama." A Vietnamese American college newspaper editor mocks himself in print as "editor-in-Chink." A Taiwanese American designer has a hot item on his Web site with his "chink" T-shirts.

Are long-discredited racial and ethnic slurs making a comeback?

In a small but significant way, the answer seems to be yes -- in the mouths of the traditionally aggrieved identity groups themselves. For years African Americans have been reclaiming the word "nigger," using it with such nonchalant frequency that many believe the word has been stripped of its potential for cruelty. Now, other groups are following suit, most notably Asian Americans.

Comedian Kate Rigg calls the phenomenon "linguistic reoccupation." Harvard law Professor Randall Kennedy, author of the recent best-seller "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word," calls it "flipping."

However it's described, says Edward Finegan, University of Southern California professor of sociolinguistics, it's a growing trend.

"I think what people have seen is that you can co-opt these words and defang them," he said.

Various minority groups seem to be taking a cue from the largely African American world of hip-hop, which in the past decade has made the once fiercely forbidden word "nigger" a casual staple of American pop culture. A modern Jewish lifestyle magazine recently hit the newsstands called Heeb. Comic actor John Leguizamo titled a one-man show "Spic-O-Rama."

For groups such as Asian and Jewish Americans, Finegan said, the phenomenon may seem newer "in part because those groups have not had the literary visibility -- and by that I mean in the broad sense, like hip-hop -- where you really have a vehicle in the public forum."

And he notes that it isn't just racial and ethnic groups: Gays and lesbians have successfully reclaimed onetime insults such as "queer," "fag" and "dyke" for themselves.

Rigg, a New York comic of Australian and Indonesian heritage whose show had a recent run at San Francisco's Brava Theater, adopted her kitschy title from Leguizamo's monologue and an Australian show called "Wog-O-Rama." (In Australia, she said, a "wog" is meant to disparage dark-skinned immigrants from Greece, Italy and Turkey -- "anyone with a monobrow.")

"My whole show is about exploding stereotypes," she said. "I'm not making fun of Asian people. I'm making fun of the people who make fun of them."

SOME SLURS FIZZLE OUT
Fitz Vo, the University of California at Davis editor who found himself in hot water last week for a parody issue the campus newspaper staff produced and that some found offensive, said his use of the word "chink" "was meant to be an ironic, self-effacing thing rather than a derogatory statement. It seems like if a word is used so many times, it loses its original meaning."

That has long been the case, said Kennedy. "Someone wrote to me and told me that 'Yankee Doodle' was initially a derogatory term," he said. "If that's true, that's a very interesting turnaround."

Comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor helped pave the way for the diminishment of the "N-word," he said. Bruce did a routine in which President John F. Kennedy used the word repeatedly in an attempt to strip the word of its power. Pryor brought the word to his mixed-race audiences.

In hip-hop, as the author Kennedy notes in his book, the word "nigger" -- the grandaddy of all slurs -- has become a term of endearment. Ice-T, Ice Cube,

Public Enemy and Jay-Z are just a small sampling of rap stars who have claimed the word for themselves. The late Tupac Shakur said "nigga" stood for Never Ignorant, Gets Goals Accomplished.

The N-word "is so charged, so notorious that the fact it could be flipped may very well have provided the space for others to participate in this sort of flipping," Kennedy said. In a "mobile, rather transparent" society such as ours, he said, "cultural idioms seep into different groups quickly. It wouldn't surprise me."

In some ways, members of cultural identity groups are attempting to expose the absurdity of name-calling bigotry much as Norman Lear intended to with his groundbreaking 1970s TV series "All In the Family." At the time, CBS was nervous enough about the concept to run a disclaimer before the debut episode: The show, it said, "seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices, and concerns. By making them a source of laughter we hope to show - - in a mature fashion -- just how absurd they are."

In Vancouver, a city with a large Asian population, 26-year-old Taiwanese American designer Albert Liao recently created a subversive line of T-shirts that feature the word "chink." The shirts were available online, with little or no marketing.

"I kind of like it being underground," he said. "I want (customers) to find it on their own, to let them be curious about it, to come up with their own ideas about it.

"I've gotten a lot of support from Asians and non-Asians saying this is a courageous, powerful thing to do. But I've also had a lot of Asians angry at me." For now, he has taken the shirts off his Web site.

By poking fun at the word "chink" in her show title, Rigg said, she hopes "people will see what a nonsense word it is -- 'chink' comes from the racist and reductionary assumption that all Asian people are Chinese." She is not.

SLURS COME AND GO
There is plenty of evidence that efforts to expose the hurtfulness of such words have been a tremendous success. For someone as young as Vo, who is 20, certain insults that were Archie Bunker favorites just a few decades ago are today only vaguely familiar.

A Vietnamese American whose parents immigrated two years before his birth, Vo said he hadn't heard the word "gook" until last year. He remembers being called a "chink" just once, he said, at age 10. "I didn't know the intentions, but it felt very mean-spirited," he said.

Vo grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood in San Jose where, he claims, his race was never an issue. "I was kind of sheltered that way," he said.

Finegan, the USC professor, expressed some concern that the "defanging" of ethnic slurs could lead to the creation of others. "What it does is create a vacuum," he said. "Once those terms lose their bite, new terms will need to arise. Somebody will find another term that will put the bite back into it."

Of course, examples of stereotyping in popular culture remain as unforgivable as ever when the perception is that the intentions are less than pure. Rigg, explaining how she has been addressing in her act the recent Abercrombie & Fitch scandal involving slogans that perpetuate Asian stereotypes, accidentally called the company "Abercrombie & Chink."

"See, I can't even say it," she said with a laugh.

She has one joke, she said, that she doesn't always feel comfortable telling. Discussing the "whitey-white" nature of a People magazine's annual 50 Most Beautiful People list, she'll say, "It makes me feel like some kind of slanty-eyed nigger."

Then she'll acknowledge the inevitable gasps by saying, "Oh my God -- that chink just said nigger!"

And finally: "Oh my God -- that chink just said chink!"