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December 27, 2005
Question No. 2
A reader from Franklin called to ask: Why did you allow a writer to use the word “rag-head” in a letter to the editor?
To refresh your memory, the letter was headlined “Bent on self-destruction.” Its writer described what he saw as a serious flaw in an
editorial cartoon by Mike Marland. The cartoon depicted a man walking past a sign consisting of the contoured letters of the National Security Agency, NSA. Both the sign and the man cast long shadows. With a worried expression, the man was looking over his shoulder at his.
The letter writer thought the man in the cartoon should have been different – not a white male but “a rag-head, Islamic, Muslim terrorist (or, as the liberal media portray them, an ‘insurgent’).”
“Rag-head,” with or without the hyphen, is an ethnic slur, the caller from Franklin said. Would you allow a letter writer to use the n-word? Just what are the rules?
This is a tough one. In deciding what to publish in letters to the editor, we do our best not to cross the line into censorship. We do edit for taste, and we eliminate gratuitous personal slams. But the public is best served when letter writers are allowed the widest possible latitude to express their views.
When it comes to epithets and stereotypes, context is the key. We might publish the n-word as part of the public debate about the use of the word but in no other context that I can think of.
A better analogy in the case of the “rag-head” letter is the wide berth we have allowed anti-gay rights letter writers in recent months and years. Some have described homosexuality as a perverse choice and gay people as immoral, for example. I happen to find this an ignorant and mistaken view. I think it is a modern-day cousin to the stereotyping of African Americans as mentally inferior or women as too delicate to operate in a man’s world. But I also think that in the current debate, the public’s opinions of gay people and their rights need as open a forum as possible. I even prefer to have negative views out in the open, where people who think otherwise can do as I have just done and express an opposing viewpoint.
In the letter at hand, had the writer said, “All Arabs are dirty rag-heads,” I would have edited it out as a gratuitous ethnic stereotype. Maybe some readers saw it as such a stereotype anyway, but I didn’t. It seemed to me that the writer used “rag-head” both to describe how he thought the man in Marland’s cartoon should have looked and to characterize terrorists. The word also conveyed the strong feeling behind the reader’s opinion.
Given this context, and given the public debate about secrecy in government in which Marland’s cartoon made a pointed comment, the letter writer’s use of “rag-head” fell just within the bounds of public discourse.
Posted by Mike Pride at December 27, 2005 12:39 PM