During a Zoom lesson, a business professor at USC came under fire and was placed on leave after Black students claimed he used a word in Chinese that sounded similar to the n-word.
The Marshall School of Business professor—Greg Patton, who is white, gave a lesson in his “Communication for Management” class on August 20 when he started talking about the use of filler words like “er” and “um” during the conversation. From there, the professor used a word in Mandarin as an example, saying, “Like in China the common word is ‘that’ — ‘that, that, that, that.’ So in China, it might be ‘nèi ge’ — ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’ So there’s different words that you’ll hear in different countries, but they’re vocal disfluencies.”
The Mandarin word used by the professor is pronounced “néi ge” or NAY-guh, which Black students in the class said sounded like the n-word in English as he repeated pronounced it. As a result, a group of Black students in the Master’s candidate class of 2022 wrote a letter Geoffrey Garrett, the Marshall Dean.
The letter called out the professor, claiming he intentionally used the word to try and sound like the n-word and also found the students saying, “Our mental health has been affected.” They went on to say, “It is an uneasy feeling allowing him to have power over our grades.”
source: LA Times