[Ads-l] The NY Times prints "nigger" ...

[Joel Berson]

and "wetback" and "chink" also.  Today, in "A [Racially ] Charged Title. A Canceled Show. Now a Cal State Official Resigns."  [Bracketed "Racially" on paper, but not in electrons.]  By Andrew R. Chow.  Page C5/1 in New England edition.

"Michele Roberge, the director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University, Long Beach, resigned last week after the university told her to cancel a campus performance of a racially charged show."

"The play, “N*W*C,” whose full title is three racial slurs, stars three actors of African-American, Asian and Latino descent [not in that order!] as they reflect on their conflicted experience with race in America. The slurs are used in an attempt to deflate them, according to a 2007 New York Times interview with the show’s creators. The performance was scheduled for Sept. 29."...

"The play, written by Allan Axibal, Rafael Agustín and Miles Gregley, had its debut in 2007. The three authors have been performing it steadily on campuses across the country, including a sold-out performance on the Long Beach campus last year. While the title of the show (the initials stand for 'nigger,' 'wetback' and 'chink') was initially criticized by the Long Beach branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Ms. Roberge said there were no live protests before or after the performance."

(A more racially-offensive W than "wetback" would have been "wop," although I suppose that might have required dating the play 100 years earlier.  As a side note, however, the OED dates "wop" to 1919 and "wetback" to only 10 years later -- the latter perhaps an outlier, since the next quotation is 1972.)

Joel




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