The word “Canadian” is now being used as crypto-racist slang, not necessarily against Canadians, but as a veiled slur against blacks.

I first discovered the reference on the Language Log under the post entitled: “No Dogs or Canadians”. The Language Log interprets it as a term emerging from the apparent incongruity: Canada is viewed as the Great White North full of white people of Northern European origin.

A lawyer in Texas blogged about a prosecutor who wrote an email saying there were 3 Canadians on a jury. Obviously Canadians can’t serve on a US jury and it was later discovered that the jury in question had three black people. Here is a snippet from the post entitled O Canada.

The email went out about winning the trial even though they had 3 “Canadians” on the jury. A black prosecutor who was offended and hurt by this email blast, went to the court where the case was tried the next day and pulled the jury list to confirm his suspicion that [the prosecutor] was using “canadian” as a code word for N****r. [The prosecutor] tried to stop the clerk from giving the prosecutor the list, but the clerk, who was black, gave it to him anyway. The 3 jurors referred to by [the prosecutor] were confirmed as being black (ie., Canadians, N****rs, etc). The blk prosecutor confronted [the prosecutor] right then and there man-to-man in private. As [the prosecutor] told his version of the story to people in power, this blk prosecutor was black-balled and is receiving “threats” right now so I cannot disclose his name. Eventually, Joe Owmby [a black senior prosecutor] did some email research on the use of this phrase — that Canadian is the racist code word for N*****, like Australian is the code word for gays — and presented it to Lyn McClellan [a white more-senior prosecutor] to stop the rift. This prosecutor was hurt and alienated by the powers that be in the office and had to quit to find a peaceful work environment.

CincyBlurg, a Canadian in Cincinnati, also blogged on this and attracted comments confirming the use. The term also appears on something called the Racial Slur Data Base which defines Canadian as “Blacks – Used as a masked replacement for ‘N*****.’”

We know that racism is alive and well, but now, apparently, it hides under the cover of otherwise respectable words. Veiled racist slang is not only hurtful and representative of the bigger problem of bigotry and prejudice, it is also slippery and harder to identify.

While Canadians should be offended their name is being used to propagate racism, they should recognize that the slur seems to be racial, not nationalistic. As for those it is directed towards, it represents a new challenge in the ugly battle of racism.

I have avoided writing out the “N-word” so as not to get picked up by Google for all the wrong reasons.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:11 am and is filed under Canada, words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.