Eric Wolarsky

The Interactive Dictionary of Racial Language was born in the summer of 2001; a joint creation of Prof. Kim Pearson and her graduate students at The College of New Jersey. It is a web site that seeks to provide a different kind of dictionary from others available in print or online – a dictionary that aspires to reflect the complexity of language. If language is an unstable landscape, like the shifting sands of the Gobi Desert, then how can a fixed collection of set definitions, no matter how broadminded, seek to explicate it, capture it, define it?

Dictionaries have traditionally been of two varieties, prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive dictionaries seek to provide the lexicon of a given language as it ought to be – in the eyes of some arbiters of manners, taste, proper usage, etc. Since the rise of postructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and so forth, even the most conservative lexicographers hesitate to presume so much as to undertake a prescriptive dictionary. Descriptive dictionaries make up the bulk of those we find in our book stores, libraries, and online these days. Such dictionaries attempt not to tell us what our words ought to mean, but rather to offer a variety of definitions reflecting all the myriad ways in which our words are actually used; regardless of whether these usages come from college professors, famous politicians, hip hop lyricists, ignorant ballplayers, or what-have-you. Unlike prescriptive dictionaries, descriptive dictionaries are not afraid to include slang, vulgar terms, or racially divisive language, as these words are a part of our every day parlance whether we like it or not.

Although descriptive dictionaries are fairly successful at meeting their assigned goals, they are ultimately mute witnesses to the changes in language and lexicon; updated periodically at the whim of the publisher (or as commercial demands suggest). The traditional dictionary does not entertain a narrative telling of the history of words. Etymological dictionaries do precisely that. The most famous such work is the indispensable Oxford English Dictionary, the acknowledged authority for English language etymology. Now available online, the OED has, over the years, become increasingly descriptive, and includes many of the same words you will find in the Interactive Dictionary of Racial Language. The OED offers exhaustive alternate definitions, traces the changes in a word's meaning over time, and, perhaps most usefully of all, lists significant examples of the word’s usage in literature and journalism throughout the years. The amazing work of scholarship represented by the OED should not be overlooked, given the complexity of the English language. Etymological dictionaries of Romance languages, for example, exist, but they are rather rudimentary and brief compared to the OED. The English language is a pastiche, a quilt, not an unmuddied descendant from a single source, such as Latin. Although technically considered a Germanic language (and our syntax bears this out), our lexicon has been enriched by the introduction of Romance-language words after the Battle of Hastings, it has absorbed Native American words, Yiddish words, words from numerous African languages, and so forth. And it continues to grow year by year.

Still, the tremendous success of the Oxford English Dictionary does not preclude efforts to trace the English language in other ways. The Interactive Dictionary of Racial Language provides one such alternative. Examining only one small, but contentious, wedge of our lexicon, that is, words pertaining to race and discrimination, the Interactive Dictionary attempts to offer what the OED can’t, to go farther than the OED’s mission will allow. This dictionary traces the racial, political, and social implications of language, through the research done by student-authors. Smaller shifts in meaning than can be found in the OED, shifts along regional lines, racial lines, can be found in the Interactive Dictionary. When a word takes the spotlight for a brief period of time, such as Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 "Hymietown" gaff, the Interactive Dictionary will tell its story. And, if The Dictionary is able to fulfill its mission, it will also trace the political and ideological motivations that lie beneath the surface of racial language.

When this dictionary project was begun several years ago, few parameters were placed upon the first crop of student-authors, other than that their entries must explore a word connected to ideas of race. Their liberal interpretation of this assignment is now documented here. From the obvious (nigger, cracker) to words only associated to race on an historical level (jazz), they revealed an omni-directional, personal approach that defines the limits of racial language more fully than any narrow-minded thesis could hope to achieve. Undergraduates in a class called "Topics in Journalism-- Race, Gender and the News" added surprising entries such as dog, pig, sisterhood, and ghetto; a collection that displays the breadth of racial language.

Some words featured as entries in The Interactive Dictionary have racial connotations some of the time, while remaining racially neutral at others. Heather Altz's entry on greaser, for instance shows how this epithet has been applied at different times in the last century to Mexicans, Italians, Puerto Ricans, and so forth. However, it is just as commonly used to describe "A tough young man, especially one from a white working-class background who is much involved with motorcycles or cars." Sharine Newby has examined the word bitch through the lens of hip hop culture, illuminating its use in African American culture. Newby has thereby demonstrated that racial language is a two-way street, or better yet, the intersection of numerous streets, like the Place D'Etoile in Paris. Racial language can be the words used by a dominant culture to demean an immigrant or subjugated class, it can be the words used by those subjugated to refer to their oppressors, it can be language used within a small cultural group only to refer to themselves (like the Pineys of New Jersey's Pine Barrens), or it can be a word that has a specific definition only within the confines of a specific region, neighborhood, or city block.

Meghan Belz has written an entry for the word canuck, provocatively reminding us that racial language need not necessarily always have a strong negative connotation, or be used by people of one skin color towards another. Like many of the terms found here, Canuck can be a positive way for one person to identify another as their brethren, but used by those outside that inner circle, it can have a bite to it. As Eric Wolarsky's investigations into racial slurs specific to the Jews has revealed, many terms once felt to be painful are now used amongst younger Jewish in a joking fashion (yid, for example). This may exasperate the Anti-Defamation League, but similar reappropriations of hurtful language are going on in nearly every ethnic group in America. The troublesome popularity of the word nigger has bedeviled the champions of political correctness. While the novel Huck Finn continues to endure attempted bannings in school districts around the United States due to its use of that troublesome word several hundred times, popular culture is producing albums and movies that are desensitizing us to the word's use. Is yid still hurtful? Is nigger? Were they not, would these arguments still continue? These are some of the questions raised by the articles found here.

Since the birth of online reference works such as Microsoft Encarta, the idea of using hypertext links to offer a new method for navigating a large body of information has become commonplace. A generation of students is now maturing who will have grown up more comfortable with the stream-of-consciousness hypertext clicking method of navigating a dictionary than the alphabetical-tab-page-flipping method. Is this hypertext method more intuitive, more streamlined, and generally superior to the traditional method? Encyclopedias have arbitrarily been organized in an alphabetical fashion dating all the way back to Diderot, so does the Encarta revolution offer the first great alternative in reference work organization?

Oddly, this seemingly superior navigational system could be considered a regression. After all, the editors of Encarta and its competitors have preselected the appropriate links to any given entry for you. This invisible, but inescapable network of links is often likened metaphorically to a spider’s web, with nodal points of interconnectivity, and the possibility to stretch outward in concentric waves infinitely. In fact, the hyperlinks provided by the editors are more akin to an undertow, pulling each subsequent reader towards the same set of links, and creating a narrative that did not exist in traditional, alphabetical dictionaries. Notice, for instance, that the trailblazing postructuralist author Roland Barthes organized his books, composed mostly of fragments, using an arbitrary, alphabetical system. Barthes’ method, medium and message are one: language is arbitrary, as Saussure has so convincingly shown.

The Interactive Dictionary of Racial Language will be both alphabetical and hypertextual, much like its many competitors. But it aspires to be much more. By linking liberally to a wide range of online material that demonstrates, refutes, problematizes, and illustrates its many entries, The Dictionary will be more descriptive, in the technical sense, than any dictionary before it. It will offer a postmodern model that is neither spider’s web nor undertow: it will be a palimpsest. Transparently marking the exchange of language and ideas across the world wide web, online journals, email, and so forth, The Dictionary of Racial Language will transcribe the shifting sands in a way that previous dictionaries have been powerless to accomplish.

The Dictionary will be interactive in another sense too: its readers may interact with it, both by offering replies to what is written here, or by submitting new entries of their own. Thus The Dictionary will grow organically, tracing the interests, queries, and opinions of those who will interact with it. Racial language is contentious, and The Dictionary may become a nexus of dis-content, a meeting place of contrary opinions. Already this direction is emerging. Not long after The Dictionary went online, its curator began receiving feedback, both positive and negative, from across the globe. By linking these participatory reactions to the entries they reference, this project will eschew the problem of editorial imperialism, and instead be a reference work that not only answers its critics, but absorbs them.

Although already two years old at the time of this writing, The Dictionary is still in its infancy. It will be many years before it encompasses even one percent of the entries dealing with racial language that one could find today in any good, print dictionary of contemporary slang. Furthermore, the entries found here are student work, not the work of professional lexicographers. If you find them insufficient -- or inaccurate -- you may tell us so. The entries that are now online represent the interests of their authors, each of whom brings to the table a unique set of values, assumptions, educational experiences, and life experiences. Racial language is personal, and so these entries represent personal journeys into identity, history, and culture. They have the power to open wounds, but are just as likely to ameliorate preexisting wounds. As Freud suggested a century ago, there may be no "cure" for some psychic traumas other than catharsis.

It might be argued very convincingly that the salad days of racial language are over, having reached its peak in the great waves of immigration witnessed in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Racial language is at its most powerful and prolific when people of different ethnic groups clash, and there is truly something at stake (like a piece of the pie in the blue-collar employment sector). But this does not mean that racial language is in decline. It continues to evolve before our eyes in the headlines of our newspapers, in the movies and on television, and in the content of the internet sites of hate groups.

Conflicts such as those in Iraq give a face to a perceived enemy, and a term like towelhead is suddenly popularized. A recent search for towelhead on Yahoo.com yielded 1520 hits. Among the sites found are legitimate examples of hatemongering, tongue-in-cheek satire, newspaper reports, endless fan chat about a rock group by that name, and so forth. Once a term such as towelhead emerges, it immediately takes on a life of its own. Protestors insist upon its banning from the English lexicon. Hate groups seize upon it. Comedians riff upon it. Cynical high school students of Arab descent ironically refer to themselves by it. Of course, towelhead is not a new slur, it is already decades old, if it does not date back to the nineteenth century. In time, it will fall out of possible usage, lying dormant for years, or decades, until it will be revived by some new conflict. If it follows the pattern of a word such as greaser, it might not be applied to Arabs when it is revived, but rather some totally unrelated group.