Dick Durbin would like to have a word with the professoriate. It seems that the phrase “chain migration”—a technical term used for decades by university-based demographers to describe family-based migration patterns—is in fact racist. The Illinois senator suggested as much last month, after President Trump used the term in a meeting about immigration.
“When it came to the issue of, quote, ‘chain migration,’ I said to the president, do you realize how painful that term is to so many people?” Durbin said. “African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally.”
Durbin’s claim was of course ludicrous on its face: “Chain migration” is a metaphor, conjuring an image of each member of a family as a link in a chain, and has nothing to do with slavery. (Something
he apparently knew back in 2010, when Durbin used the term on the Senate floor.) “Chain migration” no more refers to slavery than do “chain restaurants” or “supply chains.” But this wasn’t the first time that the use of a homonym or homophone was willfully misinterpreted to accuse another person of racism. (Of course, the other possibility is that Trump said it, so it had to be racist.)
The ur-case of homophone racism is the use of word niggardly, which sounds uncomfortably similar to the most offensive term in the English language—even though it bears no etymological relation to it. Back in 1999, an aide to the then-mayor of Washington, D.C. was
forced out of his job for using the word in a budget discussion. (It means “stingy,” after all.) Similar events have subsequently transpired in California, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. (It’s probably best to be … uh, what’s the word, parsimonious… in the use of that word at this point.)
In the past couple of years, with the rise of social media and galloping censoriousness, cases of homonym racism have mushroomed. Last summer, an Atlanta woman
took to social media to bemoan the presence of a “KKK” sign in the outfield at a Braves’ game. Not much of a baseball fan was she—“K” is the marker for strikeouts in baseball scoring, and fans for decades have tallied up strikeouts with “K” signs while at games. (“KKK” simply indicated that three batters had struck out that far in the game.) Even when she learned that this was a case of homonym, rather an actual, racism, she was undeterred: “They should figure out a different way to record it (because) that’s offensive . . . Just because it happens everywhere doesn’t make it right . . . I don’t want to look up and see that. Period.”
A graver injustice was visited up on Doug Adler, a long-time tennis commentator. While announcing the Australian Open last year, Adler referred to Venus Williams’ “guerilla method” of play. Some viewers though he had said “gorilla” however, and after a Twitter onslaught, ESPN fired him. This was ridiculous on its face: For one, would Adler, a respected tennis commentator , really be so stupid as to refer to Venus Williams as a “gorilla” on national television? And second, “gorilla method” doesn’t even make sense, whereas “guerilla” is an established way to describe a method of aggressive play. But the homophone did him in: Adler hasn’t worked a tennis tournament since (though he has, I’m glad to report, sued ESPN).
Even homo-names, to coin a phrase, can get one in trouble. ESPN pulled a Korean-American broadcaster named Robert Lee from an assignment calling a football game in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the race riots there in August.
This is a noxious trend, one based an extraordinary lack of charity (maybe, just maybe, we should take Adler at his word), and a general climate of moral righteousness. It’s also a genuinely frightening one. We all know we have to watch what we say. But now we have to watch what we don’t say as well.
