2/3 of the class were African-Americans.
One of the stories was set in British West Africa. The white colonialists were referred to indirectly. They never did or said anything in the story, nor interacted with people. Things were moved, set, arranged by them. The only "things" that actively did anything were the villagers and indigenous fauna, and even then nature was more active than the villagers. That was one big point of this writer. Events and environment shape human civilization over the long haul, whatever we may think. The masses of humanity shape human history ultimately more than things like temporary imperialist occupiers. (You may think this is a crock or not, but I wasn't teaching "Truth", just Russian literature from 1300 AD to 2000.)
The story was written in the late 1910s, in Russian. It was translated into English by an Englishwoman in the 1920s. It used the word "coloreds," as good as any at the time and better than most for Russian "chernysh". Which was the euphemism of choice in the US at the time. In Britain, it continued in use even later without the racial baggage of the US revolving-door of politically acceptable terms that hit in the '50s and '60s. It was the only time that story had every been translated and I wasn't going to produce another one.
So first we had to deal with the idea that it was a 90-year-old translation into a non-American variety of English. "Colored" in South African English, for example, refers not to blacks but to Asians (by which they mean specifically *South* Asians, not East Asians). The African-Americans had trouble believing this and went to great ends to try to believe that every brown-skinned non-black in South Africa was mixed race black/white. (This, of course, included Mahatma Gandhi.)
I used the word "blacks" to describe the natives. And ran into the same buzz-saw: They had to be "African-Americans." And my black American students insisted on calling anonymous fictional pre-Nigerians, probably Igbo, living in British West African "African-Americans." The use of the proper word to describe people like my students was a symbol. To fail to use "African-American" for Igbos in Africa was to disrespect my students in a personal way.
When everything's so racialized and radicalized that correct usage is viewed as intentional personal slurs, idiocy is a way of life and becomes a virtue. Mistakes are then obviously intentional personal slurs. A slur against our totems is a slur against our persons.
And if mistakes can only be intentional personal slurs, what, then, to make of mockery of symbols--whether Muhammed and Jesus, Gandhi and King, or even the totems that DUers hold dear as symbols of their own persons?
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