Apparently Tiger Woods is in trouble for referring to himself as a spaz in a TV interview.
Social discourse, in this country and in the US, is undermined by people who take offence on behalf of an unknown other. This problem stems from laziness. We don't look at discrimination as something to be engaged with, or beaten; we instead formulate a set of rules - politically correct language being part of them - to insulate us from having to think about the reality of discrimination.
By similar thought-avoidance we end up with policies like "zero tolerance", where teachers are relieved of the burden of having to discipline or instill respect, and are simply forced to mete out a standard punishment for every shade of transgression.
There aren't simple answers to these problems. We actually do have to think.
An example of broken discourse leaps to mind. Some years back, I was reading a gay porn message board (as I am wont to do), and came across an entertaining exchange of messages. The board was, as is often the case on the internet, populated by people from a variety of cultures and countries; and as is also often the case, the lingua franca was English (oh the irony).
It so happened that an Italian man, whose English was reasonable but not perfect, was in the market for some pictures of black men. He wrote his request as best he could, using the Italian word "negro" (black) because he obviously didn't know the English.
As one might predict, up popped an outraged native English speaker who railed against this racist reference to "negroes". He was eventually placated. But what completed the picture neatly was the followup comment. "I think the phrase you're looking for is 'African American'".
There is the lack of thought which results in a misinterpretation of what was meant by the word "negro"; but there is also the result of learning by rote, which causes a person to believe that the language rules that his culture have decided upon in order to avoid dealing with discrimination are the universal solution. The rules that tell him instinctively that a black person = an African American, when in reality it's a black person, and if you want to classify him, you're going to have to engage with him and find out how he describes himself.
In Tiger Woods' case, you should probably call him a spaz.
