"Just Sayin" Eliminated from ISU Daily

[agrabes]

I see the relation, but considering the actual meaning is harmless (squirrels/chipmunks), the real issue is that the complaining students/faculty assumed the real meaning was derogatory and took offense at it, causing this whole uproar.

So, it's not that students are racist towards Asians. It's that those students/faculty don't know/understand midwestern terms and can't live with them.

This is not a midwestern term or even an Iowa term. This is an extremely localized term that only a few people from the immediate Des Moines area know. I never heard it spoken even once when I was at ISU and I saw plenty of ground squirrels. The vast majority of ISU students don't know and could not logically associate that word with squirrels by thinking about it. You can't play the game of blaming the listeners, because there is no other logical way they could interpret "squinty." It's basically the equivalent of cracker = squirrel. The "racist" version might not be extremely bad or negative, but it's still the obvious interpretation and it is a racial term.

That said, I agree that if the person did mean to refer to squirrels (and we aren't sure they did) then they did not make a racist comment. However, I frequently heard the same kind of comments being made using a lot clearer language when I was still in school. There are a good number of people out there who do not like the recent influx of Chinese students at ISU (and Iowa for that mater) over the past few years.

 

[KFitzy87]

Think of it more as how everyone acts around cacaus when some people get offended when some national new's guy says Iowa sucks (I'm paraphrashing of course). You could probably search CF and find a few threads about this bothering people.

I get what you're trying to say, but saying "Iowa sucks" is completely different from saying "Iowa is a bunch of hicks"... In one you're blatantly calling out someone/something and in the other you're making a generalization (though it may not always be true)... I guess it's just my opinion that some people take comments wayyyy too personally and that leads to too much conflict sometimes

 

[MissouriCyclone]

In my physics recitation today there were about 2-3 girls that apparently didn't get the memo about the Just Sayin's gone. One girl explained that the word "squinty" was making fun of Asians and that it was stupid. They all laughed it off and kept talking about how dumb it was, even if they were talking about the Asian student population. I then noticed that 4 Asian male students sitting next to them not even caring about what they were saying. It was almost like it didn't even phase them. My neighbor is Asian-American and my room mate is Asian American and both of them don't even care. I understand it being a bad thing, but come on. I sometimes get offended by some opinion people on the ISD, but does that mean I'm going to ***** about it? Like many others have stated here, if that's the worst thing that's going to happen to you, I would love that life.

On another note I won't be picking up the ISD. Only reason I used to last semester was to light my charcoal for my tailgate at football games.

 

[Goothrey]

I don't know about you guys, but I call squirrels, squirrels.

I can easily see both sides. Are people casually offensive to asians here? Yes. Do people overreact to things? Yes. Do I really care? Eh, not really.

I still enjoy the random facts.

 

[bostrem00]

I just feel like anything that could be possibly said....someone could somehow spin it into something derogatory or racist....

 

[digZ]

Just a quick question.

If I'm referencing the movie Sandlot (a movie international students from Southeast Asia have probably never seen), and I talk about how much I love Squints (character from the movie almost every young American boy is probably familiar with), does that make it a racist comment because it could POSSIBLY be construed as racist towards those of Asian descent? Where do we draw the line here? International students are probably just as familiar with an obscure Iowan term for Squirrels as they are with an american movie character.

Again, this letter to the editor is absolutely fantastic.

Letter to the editor: Keep us readers away from offensiveness - Iowa State Daily: Opinion

 

[Aclone]

I don't get the interperatation of "squintey's" meaning squirrels? Could somebody elaborate one that one for me?

The individual who selected those for publication mistook the word for a central-Iowa colloquialism for ground squirrels — more popularly referred to as “squinny.â€￾ No one came in behind to catch the error in judgment.

Strange. I've lived in central Iowa for over twenty-five years, and never heard that before.

 

[Goothrey]

We should look back at our favorite Just Sayin's.

My favorite, "Getting up is only the second hardest thing in the morning".

 

[CYlent Bob]

OK people, here's the facts:

"Nine striped" ground squirrels (the long, skinny ones) are called "SQUINNIES".

Chipmunks are called "grinnies".

"Back in the Day" when I worked at Outdoor Recreation, we used to have long arguments during our shifts over whether squinnies & grinnies were different or the same thing. "Fish" was our resident FWB major, and his verdict was squinnies=ground squirrels and grinnies=chipmunks. This was people from Central Iowa, NE Iowa, NW Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and several other states.

Do I think that the kids (yeah, I'm old. GET OFF MY LAWN!!!) who put the comments in the Daily are racists? Beats the hell out of me. What kind of Madam Cleo-wannabe can tell if someone is racist or not by reading one quote from the Daily, unless that quote is "I hate blacks/Asians/Mexicans/the Dutch"?

 

[clone319]

Wikipedia knows...

Thirteen-lined ground squirrel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[CycloneNorth]

Wikipedia knows...

Thirteen-lined ground squirrel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The only name I call them by is leopard-spermophile.

 

[trigger1]

First 4 decades of life in Iowa - never heard the term squinty or squinney or any variation used for ground squirrels, pocket gophers or any of their obnoxious cousins. Moved to Ames 10 years ago and heard many folks use it, and yes the version I first heard was squinty. My spelling, don't know how anyone else spelled it.

First 50 some years on this planet and can't say I ever recall hearing the term squinty used as a derogatory term for people of Asian descent. Plenty of other words, but not that one.

Maybe I live on a completely different planet, but when I read the Daily that day, I immediately associated squinty with ground squirrels. Yeah, they'd win a stare down. And saw the next day an apology was issued in the Daily, saying the editor/writer thought the term was referring to ground squirrels. That should have been the end of the story.

Dropping Just Sayin' is a complete overreaction. Apologize again if you must, acknowledge a different interpretation is possible, but continue to assert the original interpretation was equally correct. Pledge to be more sensitive in the future and get on with business. Even a brief Google search turns up many references to squinty used for ground squirrels - they can't all be from Iowa. Of more amusement was the number of references to Renee Zellweger using squinty and chipmunk.

I think a whole lot of people need to get their undies unbundled on this one - Just Saying'

 

[Incyte]

So chipmunks and ground squirrels are different? They all look the same to me.

Now THAT'S racist.

 

[Psiclone]

It absolutely is the right call. If people are picking up the ISD solely for the Just Sayin's, they're picking it up for the wrong reasons, and that in of itself is a problem.

Agree totally.

 

[CycloneErik]

So chipmunks and ground squirrels are different? They all look the same to me.

Now THAT'S racist.

I agree. I view all squirrel-like creatures the same way, and I value them all. I don't divide them based on their stripes, dots, or other shallow features of their appearance. They are all wonderful in their own unique and special ways.

 

[Skyh13]

I can very easily see how this would be interpreted as racist. It's a term I've never heard of, either in the sense of squirrels or asians, but not having read this thread I NEVER would've guessed it was referring to squirrels.

I think the Daily is doing the right thing by suspending the Just Sayin segment, so that they can take some time to review their process of accepting submissions. However, I think it's way too extreme to get rid of it all together. Making sure that stuff like that doesn't end up in the paper is the job of the editors and others who work at the Daily, not the people (occasionally, very stupid people) who submit things. That's just the nature of user submitted content.

 

[wxman1]

I have lived in Iowa my whole life and have asked 5 friends who have as well and none of us have ever heard of squinnes or grinnies or anything else. It was a squirrel or a chipmunk.

That being said I can count on one hand the number of people I know that actually read the daily, the rest myself included either don't pick it up or if we do we read the just sayin. I don't care for people ******** back and forth telling me what to think. The other issue is I get my news elsewhere faster. That's not a daily issue that's a newspaper issue.

 

[jsmith86]

I know I'm probably a bit late to the game, but why not fire the editor? It is the editor's job to catch stuff like this, and clearly he has failed. Fire him, keep the section in the paper, and move on.

 

[Sandman]

I've grown up in central and north Iowa and have never heard the word squinny used once until now.

This is just utterly stupid. Same with the chink in the armor thing. It's a dang saying and people are trying to find racism where there isn't any.

The editor didn't do the right thing. He did the easy thing. The right thing would have been to say it was a typo and no racism was intended or implied. He buckled like a belt and that takes no integrity.

And you're a fool if you think "chink in the armor" wasn't intentional. Even on the very slight chance it wasn't, the author should have realized that it could and would be taken to be racist and edited that before he even typed it. It's inexcusable that something like that got through on a major media outlet. Even if it was a complete, 100% innocent mistake, he should have still been fired. I would be fired if I made a mistake of that level in my company and I think most of us are held to the same standards in our respective fields.