“I’ve read a lot of truly ugly thoughts that read like they were being spoken by a colonial slave owner,” Chew wrote one day. He often singled out extreme, ignorant, and sometimes blatantly racist comments, prompting calls for their writers to be named or even banned. After circulating his survey to NASPA members and the broader public, Chew periodically summarized the comments on his personal Facebook page, not NASPA’s. Much of the ire in the Scrabble community has been about a process that was tilted toward expurgation. I’m simply saying you do have an added responsibility.” Indeed, a number of Scrabble players suggested creating a warning that slurs might be seen during club or tournament games or when matches are streamed or reported online. “If you’re gonna use it, do be aware that you’re taking on something,” Kennedy said. He also said it’s healthy to question the use of words in the current climate around social justice-but not at the expense of other values.Īs for the narrow case of Scrabble, Kennedy said that slurs might make a player or their opponent nervous or anxious-and should-because such words “scare.” Instead of expurgation, though, he suggested that Scrabble create a guidebook explaining the history and power of individual words. He told me it’s understandably reasonable to be concerned that any deployment of a slur gives the word legitimation. Kennedy, who is Black, is the author of the 2002 book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. I asked Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy about the Scrabble debate. All of that is true, which is why this was such a potent topic. And that removing a tiny set of words would have minimal practical impact on the game-apart from a few short words, slurs come down infrequently-and could represent a positive gesture in a time of turmoil and reflection. And that we should strive as a society to eliminate any use of hurtful language in any setting. Still, it’s also correct to argue, as some players did, that the act of forming the word LEZ or COLOREDS or worse on a Scrabble board could be hurtful to someone who has to look at it for the duration of a game. Ok scrabble word code#There may be momentary discomfort-in the last few weeks, players have told stories about games in which CUNT and JIGABOO hit the board-but I have never played or heard of anyone playing a word with intent beyond a strategic one, and doing so could in fact violate NASPA’s code of conduct. By laying down letters, they are affirming that a word is a word, and nothing more. They don’t even, in any common understanding of the word, constitute “ speech.” Merriam-Webster defines “hate speech” as “speech expressing hatred of a particular group of people.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as speech “inciting … hatred or intolerance.” Scrabble players do no such thing. Words on a Scrabble board don’t constitute “hate speech” in a dictionary or legal sense. Like many players, I didn’t agree with those arguments. He told one reporter that playing a slur in Scrabble constituted “hate speech” and that “the right to use hate speech” was “a very popular opinion among Scrabble players.” He assembled a list of proposed deletions-from ABO to YIDS-and stated that leaving such words in the game amounted to “contributing divisively to the world’s problems.” He theorized that competitive players for decades assented to the words because “they have been told” that words are devoid of meaning when played in the game. “At the moment, all the fun is being sucked out of Scrabble,” said Nicky Deco, a player from Kent, England, who runs a Scrabble page on Facebook and watched the debate over the words spill overseas, “and the divisions are growing deeper by the day.”Ĭhew was adamant that the slurs be banished. The result was a clumsy decision to purge more than 200 words that alienated players both for and against expurgation-and satisfied almost no one. As a result, the drive to expurgate them has prompted more contentiousness than I’ve witnessed in my 20-plus years embedded in the game, filled with accusations of factual distortion and bad-faith management by the Scrabble association, not to mention ominous invocations of Fahrenheit 4. Unlike those unmistakably racist totems, however, slurs have-with respect to their use in Scrabble-a broad coalition of defenders, crossing lines of race, gender, sexual identity, and religion. As Confederate flags and statues, processed syrup logos, and sports team names face their fates, Hasbro couldn’t be seen as passively endorsing the right of a small group of word nuts to spell JEW or SPIC on a plastic grid.
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