Canadian: derogatory?

According to an article in the National Post. “Canadian” is being used by some Southern Americans as synonym for “black” or “nigger.” A way for people to be racist, covertly.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote.”After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]“

Stefan Dollinger, a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics at University of British Columbia and director of the university’s Canadian English lab, speculated that the slur reflects a sense of Canadians as the other.

“This ‘code’ word, is the replacement of a no-longer tolerated label for one outsider group, with, from the U.S. view, another outsider group: Canadians. It could have been terms for Mexicans, Latinos etc. but this would have been too obvious,” he said. “What’s left? Right, the guys to the north.”

Weird.