Missouri professor makes mask joke, gets suspended

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Missouri professor makes mask joke, gets canceled

On Friday, August 28, a central Missouri contact of mine alerted me to a podcast that I would surely never have paid any mind to, and that's because the thrust of it is sports at the main campus of the University of Missouri (UMC) in Columbia.&nb...
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With all the professors doing Zoom classes, now every word said becomes a means to cancel someone.
 
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The joke he made was rude. The uni was right to discipline him.

Joking with a Chinese person about him spreading virus is about on the same level as joking with a black person about riots and police brutality.
 
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A summary for those that don’t read the articles or have low bandwidth connections:

During an online session the professor asks if any students are attending lectures from outside the USA. A student volunteers that he is attending the class from Wuhan, China. The professor respons “hold on, let me put my mask on” back to the student. The school ok l put him on leave while they perform an investigation.

The video title above says the teacher was fired. But I have only found reference to the teacher being suspended.
 
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I guess I took the joke differently. “Lemme get my mask on” is likely just a reference to the high number of cases there. He could have said the same of Italy or, frankly, the U.S. It’s a dull attempt at a joke, but not inherently racist.

This conservatively biased source claims that the student wasn’t offended. Beloved Mizzou Professor Under Investigation After Making Mask Joke to Chinese Student - Washington Free Beacon
ThinkingSapien said:
The video title above says the teacher was fired. But I have only found reference to the teacher being suspended
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I feel better knowing this. Firing him definitely seems like overkill.
 
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Maybe the student took it in good grace, maybe he felt pressure to be polite and say it didn’t bother him because he doesn’t want to be the reason somebody lost a job, maybe he was afraid of being harassed. It’s still rude.

If I say I’m from Cleveland and the professor makes a joke about Cleveland being “The Mistake by the Lake” or the river catching fire, maybe I’ll say it doesn’t bother me (Because I’ve heard such jokes 1,423,794 times, one learns to ignore it) but it’s still rude. It’s not what I expect to hear from a professor.
 
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blackforest said:
I feel better knowing this. Firing him definitely seems like overkill.
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I’m not familiar with the procedures of this specific school. But the suspension isn’t much unlike procedures at other places that I have seen handle such matters. An accusation or a hint of a problem at some other places has been sufficient for suspension. Suspension isn’t necessarily a punishment. It can be a procedural matter for protecting the interest of all involved.

I’m puzzled as to why this is being labeled as “cancelling.” That looks like an overly broad usage of the word for which any temporary suspension could fit.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
If I say I’m from Cleveland and the professor makes a joke about Cleveland being “The Mistake by the Lake” or the river catching fire, maybe I’ll say it doesn’t bother me (Because I’ve heard such jokes 1,423,794 times, one learns to ignore it) but it’s still rude. It’s not what I expect to hear from a professor.
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Or referring to the Browns as the Factory of Sadness.

Sorry, not helping.
 
blackforest said:
I guess I took the joke differently. “Lemme get my mask on” is likely just a reference to the high number of cases there. He could have said the same of Italy or, frankly, the U.S. It’s a dull attempt at a joke, but not inherently racist.
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I agree. It’s not like he engaged in racial language. It was a joke about a place of residence.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
If I say I’m from Cleveland and the professor makes a joke about Cleveland being “The Mistake by the Lake” or the river catching fire, maybe I’ll say it doesn’t bother me (Because I’ve heard such jokes 1,423,794 times, one learns to ignore it) but it’s still rude. It’s not what I expect to hear from a professor.
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I had a manager that was working from out of Bermuda. Her coworkers would make a lot of sexual jokes. She absolutely hated it, but gake-laughed along because of concerns that objection to them would result of her suffering losses or even being fired. I was kind of surprised to hear a worker there openly state the pecking order for the office. “White British Male” was at the top. She was an Asian American Female that was raised by an Italian family.

The actor in many of the AT&T advertisements (sometimes called “The AT&T Woman”) has been suffering a form of distributed harassment, where no one person is bothering her, but thousands of individuals come along and make the same immature comment. She says that the severity of any one comment is not that big, but the repeatativeness of the encounters is what gets to her.
 
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Asians often will hide their discomfort about remarks or jokes, and just laugh and go along with the joke, out of politeness. It’s their culture.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
The joke he made was rude. The uni was right to discipline him.

Joking with a Chinese person about him spreading virus is about on the same level as joking with a black person about riots and police brutality.
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This was online with one student and it was a bit off. The student did not react.

He made a one line comment. If a complaint was made, he could have been taken aside and talked to and asked to reflect on it. If it happened on a regular basis then there would be concern. Having worked in an Asian community they often have very good sense of humor. I think most Asians that I have met and I have met many would have not paid one bit of attention to it. They would have brushed it off.

This idea that everyone had to get outraged over any word said during any conversation are going to have a difficult time in life… How will people work with each other as daily comments are made and most people brush off a lot of stuff. They just go one working.

This professor also tells the same student if he has a a difficult time finding a place to stay because he could not get back during the summer, he has an extra room, clearly he did not mean to offend this person. He tells the student he has visited two cities in China yet he hasn’t had the pleasure of visiting Wuhan.
 
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ThinkingSapien said:
I had a manager that was working from out of Bermuda. Her coworkers would make a lot of sexual jokes. She absolutely hated it, but gake-laughed along because of concerns that objection to them would result of her suffering losses or even being fired. I was kind of surprised to hear a worker there openly state the pecking order for the office. “White British Male” was at the top. She was an Asian American Female that was raised by an Italian family.

The actor in many of the AT&T advertisements (sometimes called “The AT&T Woman”) has been suffering a form of distributed harassment, where no one person is bothering her, but thousands of individuals come along and make the same immature comment. She says that the severity of any one comment is not that big, but the repeatativeness of the encounters is what gets to her.
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Distributed harassment.have not heard this term before.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Asians often will hide their discomfort about remarks or jokes, and just laugh and go along with the joke, out of politeness. It’s their culture.
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Probably being nit-picky here but there is no such thing as Asian culture.

An Asian can be from Jerusalem, New Delhi, Kuala Lampur or from Beijing or Seoul. Very, very different cultures within one continent.

The concept of Asian culture in the US as a monolithic whole is mistaken.
 
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I understand that East Asians are called Orientals right?

However if you go back to the 19th century and beyond, the word Oriental has been also applied to the peoples of the Near and Middle East.
 
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Sarcelle said:
I understand that East Asians are called Orientals right?

However if you go back to the 19th century and beyond,the word Oriental has been applied to the people of the Near and Middle East also.
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Asians is a term used for many people from many different countries so is Latino or Blacks.
 
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That is a little nit-picky IMHO. It’s understood in USA that “Asian” generally means from China eastward, and I have not met anyone from any of those countries that responds forcefully and forthrightly to criticism. In other words, they do not act like Germans or Australians who would tell you in no uncertain terms where to go if they didn’t like what you said.

Furthermore, the level of understanding of this thread and this forum do not lend themselves well to explaining the fine points to people who don’t even get why the joke was offensive. I work in a company with people from countries all over the world, I also went to graduate school in a multinational program with classmates from over 100 countries, and to another graduate school with a large number of professors and students from a number of Asian and Middle Eastern countries, so let’s just say I don’t need a lecture. If I were having this discussion with a mixed group of folks from China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, I would not use the word “Asian” because I know they don’t all like being lumped together any more than the Scots, Irish, English and Welsh like being lumped together, however we have to have a basic level of understanding from others in the discussion to address the differences.

I think I’m done here - all I tried to do was stand up for the guy getting made fun of, and I seem to be getting criticized by everyone for it. Next time I’ll just stay quiet and let someone else handle it.
 
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Asian can be used as a term for many people from Asia.

That is not my contention.

My contention is there is no such thing as Asian culture.

What is often meant by Asian culture actually means Chinese culture.

Chinese culture is Asian culture but Asian culture does not always mean Chinese culture.
 
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