“The Sins of Name Calling”: Responses to Paula Deen’s Use of Ethnophaulisms

Abstract

Although many think, or wish to think, that racism in the United States is part of our peripheral past, contemporary discourses of racial and ethnic relations suggest otherwise. Discussions of ethnicity and race are still at the forefront of public discourse. The recent publication of news articles citing celebrity chef Paula Deen’s use of ethnophaulisms and prejudiced talk resulted in thousands of user-generated comments and responses. This article purports, then, to highlight the current discourses of racial and ethnic relations as revealed through online responses to one particular ethnophaulism used by celebrity chef Paula Deen. Important to this discussion, however, is the interesting finding that comments made by readers spoke to larger “meta” discourses of language use: Users commented about contemporary American race and racial relations and how we use (or do not use) language with specific purposes and power in mind, rather than the specific case of Paula Deen’s utterance.

Keywords:

• Dialogue
• Internet
• Intercultural Communication

Notes

[1] The parenthetical citation for each comment analyzed contains the particular news article from which it was written. Because the ideas expressed in the comments did not come from the article’s author, nor from the newspaper article itself, I did not cite each comment with the corresponding author of the article. Due to the large number of comments analyzed, I felt that providing pseudonyms for each comment would complicate and disorganize the flow of this article. However, all articles (and their comments) can be accessed using the bibliographic information listed in the Reference Section. Articles are listed under author name as noted in Table 1.

[2] It was common to see misspellings of the N-word used in comments in an attempt by users to evade the language blockers set up on the website which prohibit the use of derogatory and inflammatory language use.