Columnist Susan Snyder: No offense meant, but offense taken

Sunday, July 30, 2000 | 9:59 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

Carlos Garcia is an educated man.

The new Clark County School District superintendent has been a superintendent in two California districts and worked as a school principal and teacher throughout that state.

We are lucky to have him. This is a guy who says he is fortunate to be paid for standing up for children. He calls his job "fun." When bucking for it earlier this year he said, "I would give my life to it."

But in the time it took to put his foot in his mouth, Garcia has human rights activists casting a wary eye because of a comment he made during a recent interview on KCEP 88.1-FM.

He said the "n-word." And whatever else he was trying to say was lost.

Lost, because that six-letter word stops people like a stone wall. It rolls off few tongues easily. It sounds ugly. It hurts, even if its utterance is not meant to.

Webster's New World College Dictionary says the word is a dialectal variation of the word, "Negro." We all know where it came from and how it was intended to hurt.

In today's usage, Webster's says the word is "regarded as virtually taboo because of the legacy of racial hatred that underlies the history of its use among whites, and its continuing use among a minority of speakers as a viciously hostile epithet."

Most words in the dictionary have more than one meaning. This one does, too, Garcia says. He used it to describe people of all races who lack respect for themselves and others.

But this word has something many others don't: baggage. Baggage so heavy it simply cannot be lightly carried from one use to another.

The Civil War ended 135 years ago, but many people are still fighting. And two of the most recognizable and hurtful reminders of the conflict's aftermath remain with us in the Confederate flag and the "n-word."

No number of bronze plaques or 19th-century headstones can elicit the immediate and visceral response brought by a flag and a single word.

After a long, arduous battle in which words were the weapons, South Carolina lawmakers earlier this year finally removed the Confederate flag from the dome of the state capitol building.

The flag remains elsewhere on the statehouse grounds in a historical context. It has not been retired, but it's relegated to the background. It's a start.

And so we have Garcia, uttering that most unspeakable of words in a context that -- given his philosophy of seeing people's characters rather than the color of their skins -- seemed perfectly acceptable.

But it's not acceptable to scores of people whose surnames come from white slave owners, either because their ancestors held the chains or were held by them. It's not acceptable to people who remember separate schools, drinking fountains and restaurants. It offends. Every time.

Regardless of how Garcia sees the world, there are many who still see colors and the lines dividing them. Tossing that word into regular speech is not the best, first step toward fixing that problem.

Garcia was justified in an academic sense. He is, after all, an educated man.

He just wasn't a very smart one.