But Isn’t That, Like, Chinese?: A Selection from John McWhorter’s Woke Racism (2021)

“For all of the attention that modern English speakers’ usage of the word like as a hedging term attracts, all languages have a way of hedging in that way. The only question is what word or expression they use. In Mandarin, one hedges by saying ‘that, that, that . . . ,’ as if grasping for what the thing or concept is called. It happens that the expression for that in Mandarin is pronounced ‘nay-guh.’

Here and there, black Americans have purported a certain worry as to just what Chinese people are saying when they say ‘nay-guh,’ but this has always been a kind of joke. Yet it was only a matter of time before somebody decided it wasn’t a joke anymore, and it is no accident that it finally happened in 2020.

Professor Greg Patton was teaching a class on business communication to students at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and was discussing hedging terms in different languages. He in passing mentioned that in Mandarin people say ‘nay-guh, nay-guh, nay-guh.’ This offended a group of black students in the class, who reported Patton to the dean of the business school, claiming that ‘we were made to feel less than.’ The students claimed, ‘We are burdened to fight with our existence in society, in the workplace, and in America. We should not be made to fight for our sense of peace and mental well-being at Marshall.’

Patton was, of course, suspended from teaching the class for the rest of the semester. But the problem is that these students were pretending. That sounds rash, but black students taking Chinese have been hearing ‘nay-guh’ nationwide for decades without feeling discriminated against. A group of black residents in China even wrote to USC objecting that they had never experienced any injury from hearing the word. Worldwide, people observed that if these black USC students expected to be able to do business in China, they certainly couldn’t expect Chinese people to censor themselves and not use the word around them. Overall, these students were extending their sense of Elect linguistic prosecution to another language, which made no blessed sense whatsoever—to such an extent that they must have known.

To pretend they did not is to insult their intelligence, which they themselves sadly accomplished repeatedly in their complaint. They claimed that in spoken Chinese ‘nay-guh’ is said with a pause between the two words, an absurdity. Do English speakers say not ‘you know’ but ‘you . . . know’? And never mind that ‘nay-guh’ is not a ‘synonym’ of the N-word, as they stated, but a homophone (and even there, only somewhat). For the dean to give in to these students’ demands that Patton be dismissed from the course was an insult to black people. A black student who feels that hearing a Mandarin hedge word that happens to sound kind of like the N-word deprives him of his ‘peace and mental well-being’ urgently needs psychiatric counseling, a state of mind unlikely to apply to the number of students who decided to use Patton as the latest pawn in their drive to fashion their lives as passion plays of noble victimhood. These students were, in a word, acting.”—John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021)