Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona), “How Slurs Enact Norms, and How to Retract Them”
Synthese, 2024
You may not have followed the case if you don’t follow football (‘soccer’, for US readers). In a 2020 game, a Uruguayan footballer called Edinson Cavani, who played for Manchester United at the time, scored the goals that guaranteed the team’s victory. A Uruguayan friend congratulated him on Instagram saying, “Así te quiero, matador!” (something like “Way to go, you killer!”). Cavani thanked the message, in typical Río de la Plata Spanish, with “Gracias, negrito”, followed by a handshake emoji. If you’re a Uruguayan or an Argentinian from the Río de Plata region, you would not bat an eyelid at this exchange. Not so in the anglophone world.
The reaction of the FA (the English Football Association), and a media storm in the British and English-speaking international press, was a sign that some serious miscommunication had occurred. Cavani was eventually suspended for three games, fined £100,000 and required to complete face-to-face education, despite insisting that he meant and intended no harm.
The Urugayan football association said in a letter that the FA committed a discriminatory act against the culture and way of life of Uruguayans. The Uruguyan National Academy of Letters published a response where it rejected the sanction and warned about the “poverty of cultural and linguistic knowledge” that the FA demonstrates. After all, in Spanish, ‘negro’ or ‘negrito’ just mean black, without any of the ugly derogatory connotation of the English N-word. However, in Río de la Plata’s Spanish, the phrase is equivalent to the English ‘dude’, ‘mate’, or ‘bro’. So, why didn’t the FA accept the correction, and why did Cavani comply, retract and apologize?
In my recent Synthese paper, I discuss this and other cases of cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic misunderstanding and miscommunication involving words that are not slurs but that seem to be so to English speakers, and in particular cases where speakers end up apologising and retracting although they did no wrong.
The examples have important differences from other cases of misunderstanding or miscommunication. For instance, imagine a native English speaker, Adam, who hears Spanish speaking Beatriz say, “María está embarazada” and misunderstands this as meaning that María is embarrassed. Adam proceeds to try to tell Beatriz that María is not embarrassed at all. The misunderstanding ends when Beatriz corrects Adam’s mistake: “embarazada” means “pregnant”. Beatriz does not have to retract anything.
Slurs are different. They have derogatory force. Their force nonetheless appears to have something to do with their meaning. If a child doesn’t know that the word she uses is a slur, she has to be taught and told that she shouldn’t use it. Also, a slur does not stop being a slur if one does not have the intention to offend. Its use is derogatory even if the speaker has no injurious intentions.
Slurs somehow carry an additional level of meaning that is affectively loaded, unlike “embarazada”. One possibility is that this loaded content is presupposed or implicated, like “it was John who finished all the biscuits” presupposes that someone finished the biscuits. Denying this, “it was not John who finished all the biscuits”, still carries the same presupposition. Slurs seem to be behave in a similar way. A slur that occurs in a negated sentence still “projects” or “scopes-out” of negation. To compare, contrast the sentences “Edinson Cavani is not British” and “Edison Cavani is not an S” (and insert some slur in the place of S). That’s a reason to think that the derogatory meaning of slurs is presupposed (or perhaps conventionally implicated).
But we can think that there’s something more going on in the case of slurs that is not just about presupposed propositional content. People who disagree about another language’s word meaning can recognize their confusion or ignorance. But when people are offended by words in another language they don’t speak, they sometimes resist being corrected, even though they know they’re talking of another language. After all, they still feel offended.
Slurs are normally used to offend. People react to hearing slurs in different ways. What they normally don’t do is say (only): “that’s not true!”. Slur use is, to borrow a phrase, morally loaded. It is common for hearers to react with outrage, and to demand a retraction or an apology. If slur use is injurious, reacting outraged is an apt response.
Some authors point to the limitations of standard semantic theories, broadly understood, to deal with cases like this and others. By standard semantic theories of slurs people mean those that try to explain derogation as part of truth-conditional content, or as presupposed or conventionally implicated propositional contents. In those socio-pragmatic theories, the offensiveness of slurs depends instead on pragmatic associations and effects that audiences perceive.
I don’t think that these kinds of socio-pragmatic theories fully explain slur use, because I don’t think that they explain why people are justified in having the affective reactions they have when they hear real slurs used in the first place. And I think that the kind of misperception that gives rise to disputes, as the Cavani case, resemble other cases of misperception or illusions.
When we look at an example of the Müller-Lyer illusion, the two arrows appear to have different legnths. We can measure the size of the internal lines of the arrows, and come to know that they are the same lenght. Nonetheless, we still see them as having different lenghts. In cases of Batesian mimecry in nature, members of one species benefit from looking like members of another poisonous or unpallatable species. Potential predators are afraid of the poisonous species and as a result avoid members of both. And someone who is afraid of spiders will be afraid of the poisonous and non-poisonous alike.
This is relevant for the case of slurs: one can have a fitting reaction of outrage when one hears a slur (just as one can have a fitting reaction of fear towards a poisonous spider). One can demand that the speaker retract and apologise for using a slur. But one can have the same reaction of outrage when one misperceives a word that sounds like that slur, a reaction which in this latter case would be unfitting – just as fear of spiders that are in no way dangerous is unfitting, but can be nonetheless paralising.
The reaction of outrage in the audience can be an effect of hearing nonslur words, and so the speaker can be asked to retract and to apologise, even if these demands are unwarranted since no wrong was done. Speakers will sometimes comply, either for having caused offense, or for other instrumental reasons, such as being allowed to continue playing in the FA League.
Teresa’s paper, “How slurs enact norms, and how to retract them” is open access and can be downloaded from Synthese’s page, here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04595-y