Blog Archives

Some thoughts about policing and race in the United States

Dear facebook friend, It saddens me to say that I find your views concerning recent police killings of Black men and not unrelated anti-police violence to be racist. Sorry to use the r-word on you. I know how much being accused of racism angers you. I

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Posted in Language and race

Click here if you’d like your latent racist beliefs “proved” by “science”

Yesterday, I had the misfortune of reading a blog post presenting an analysis of popular music lyrics using language related metrics. Earlier today, I was cringing as the post and the Complex article about it popped up repeatedly as friends and

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Posted in Language and race, Technology and language

Covering Baltimore: Protest or riot?

The death of Freddie Gray, a young Black man, while in police custody on April 19 sent residents of Baltimore, Maryland into the streets. Many have been actively calling for justice to be carried out, for the police officers responsible to be held

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Posted in Language and race, Media discourse and media bias

Expats and immigrants: How we talk about human migration

On Friday, the Guardian published an article by Mawuna Remarque Koutonin arguing that the word expat (short for “expatriate”) is a label “reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad”. According to Koutonin, the word immigrant is set aside for everyone else —

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Posted in Language and race, Language and social class

Racism and the n-word are not the same thing.

The video above features Joe Scarborough and others making the claim that hip hop artists bear some responsibility for a bunch of University of Oklahoma fraternity members’ racist chant (surprisingly this show aired on MSNBC, the US’s allegedly left-leaning network). My

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Posted in Language and race

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