Niggardly is in trouble again.The word means stingy, but when an elementary-school teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina, used it in class, a black parent complained it was "offensive."
It's offensive, we are told, because it sounds like a "racial slur," something any word can be these days, even one without any racial connotation.
This is where the speech police and race hustlers have taken us with their radical, and racial, agenda.
The Story
Niggardly's first encounter with the speech police occurred a few years ago in Washington, DC, when a white city bureaucrat landed in hot water for using the word in front of a black city bureaucrat.
Now, a teacher is in trouble "for not being aware of cultural differences," is forbidden from using the word, must apologize and attend "sensitivity training."
The proper thing to do is ignore the risible complaint, but alas, the race-hustlers rule.
The deputy superintendent, the Wilmington Star reports, "reiterated that Ms. Bell made a bad decision when she taught her students the word ‘niggardly.' It was an inappropriate word to teach children at that grade level, he said."
It gets worse. The panjandrum of the local NAACP said niggardly is OK, but only if used in a "nondiscriminatory" way. But "he could not be sure," the paper reported "of the teacher's intentions in this case."
Then by all means, "we have to be careful with what we're teaching," he warned.
And this, from the PTA president: "I would like to think that she did not mean for it to be offensive. Many of us know that it is offensive, and we choose not to use words that may offend other people."
Not surprisingly, normal people think the opposite. The vast majority of e-mails and letters to the paper, and an on-line poll, support the teacher.
The Real Problem
That's because normal people know niggardly is not "offensive" and can't be used in a "discriminatory" way because it is not racial.
The problem isn't a word or a teacher. The problem is ill-educated people with a shallow vocabulary and the linguistic re-education camp to which we all have been sentenced.
One can only imagine what would have happened if the teacher had used the noun, niggard, instead of the adjective, niggardly. Are the words niggle and niggling banned too? How about renege?
It could happen.
The race hustlers have pressed their agenda upon public schools and colleges. Racist outrages against whites are permitted, while innocent words or acts, in no way "offensive" to anyone, are punished with Stalinist severity.
Huckleberry Finn is "racist" because of the character, "Nigger Jim," but a professor at Harvard openly advocates abolishing the white race. A black professor says whites are "ice people" and blacks are "sun people," while still others claim the ancient Greeks and Romans "stole" their cultures and ideas from Africa.
The purpose? The unremitting surveillance of whites for "racism" to make them fear voicing opinions, to make them ashamed of their very whiteness, and ultimately, to control words, ideas and the culture.
Accusations Aplenty
You'd think that the farther these outrages go, the more they would propagate racism.
If everything is "offensive" or "racist," nothing is. But it doesn't seem to work that way. A mere accusation of racism proves guilt.
And with accusations, the race hustlers aren't niggardly.
R. Cort Kirkwood is a syndicated columnist and managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He can be contacted at kirkwood@shentel.net.
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Date Posted: September 9th, 2002
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