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X-Sender: Saillant@vms.cc.wmich.edu To: john.saillant@wmich.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3 Original-recipient: rfc822;john.saillant@wmich.edu As moderator of H-OIEAHC I can see that email leads to some miscues and misunderstandings that probably wouldn't occur were people speaking face to face. Recently Bradley Skelcher noted that departments are hiring unqualified part-timers. I don't believe he intended to imply that all part-timers are unqualified, but there was then some commentary that assumed that that's what he meant. Email doesn't allow the visual cues we sometimes give to indicate that we mean something absolute ("all") or something moderate ("some"). Words should suffice, but they don't always. Something similar seems to be going on with our use of loaded words like "cracker" & "nigger" in the classroom. No one in H-OIEAHC has asked about or defended the use of such words as anything other than an exemplification of prejudices of the past, but I'm not sure that we've all realized that. There's also the added complication that our students live in a slightly different language world than most of us of teaching age. I teach African American courses, including the survey, in addition to early American courses, & many of my students defend the use of the word "nigger," although I refuse to use it in class. Yet when some of our material puts me in a position of explaining the origin of a word like "shine" (important, for example, in understanding Johnson's <<Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man>>), my students are mortified that such a word is being spoken in class. And there are other words they'll use that I won't as well as words that appear in our readings that are offensive to them yet seem to me not different in kind from the words they accept. John Saillant Western Michigan University
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