Is *Canadian* The New *N-Word?*

In congratulating a junior prosecutor with winning manslaughter convictions against an intoxicated driver, Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo:

"He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing."

The strange part is, there were no Canadian's on the jury. As a matter of fact, this case took place in Texas.

Trent claims he didn't know that the term *Canadian* is actually used in certain parts of the south as a derogatory word for blacks. Trent claims he originally heard the term from the prosecutor on the case, Rob Freyer.

Maybe someone is making much ado about nothing. Or maybe not:

An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a "masked replacement" for black.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn't understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else," the blogger wrote.

"After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian' was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]"

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.'"

Amazing. I guess when I travel to the States I'll have to tell people I'm from Sweden.

My buddy and I talked about this today and he thought that changing the word to Canadian from any other deregoatory word is certainly less offensive and doesn't mean the same thing any more. I think my buddy is wrong. I think that if you change a word around but in your mind it means the same thing, that word is no less offensive than the original nasty term.

For instance, if people start calling blacks *Canadian's* instead of any other nasty term, what if in 100 years the word *Canadian* means and has the same impact as a word like nigger or coon does in this day and age?

I suppose what I'm saying is this: Let's take the blacks as example. If you call a black person *spearmint*, but in the back of your mind you really want to call them the n-word, then spearmint really does mean the n-word, doesn't it?

Am I making any sense?

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