Politics, Society

Pittsburgh Officials Remove Bus Slogan After Complaints That It Reminds Riders Of A Racial Slur . . . When Read Backwards

Port_Authority_bus_PittsburghWe have been discussing the expanding number of terms and phrases deemed racist or, in the new lexicon, a form of “microagression” against minority groups. An example this week is found in the decision of the Port Authority in Pittsburgh stripping buses of its new ad campaign after complaints that “Ziggin Zaggin” is racially offensive because it reminds riders of the n-word when read backwards.

The Port Authority that “. . . due to recent complaints about how this message appears when read backward, we have decided to remove the message from our vehicles.” That will take days and added expense. In all honestly, I really did not get the slogan or why it was selected. However, the decision is being debated as to whether we are becoming too prone to injury or offense in our society.

This controversies raise the difficult question of where or how to draw the line when some object to an interpretation or reaction to particular words. I expect some would be surprised to see the word “Naggaz” or “Niggiz” in a reverse image in a car mirror and would take a second look. However, is that enough to deem the slogan offensive?

What do you think?

Source: CBS

96 thoughts on “Pittsburgh Officials Remove Bus Slogan After Complaints That It Reminds Riders Of A Racial Slur . . . When Read Backwards”

  1. I love freedom. I think people should be free to be stupid, and make bad choices. I am conflicted, with these increasingly stupid people- I want them to be free to live their lives, but as Paul noted – “our special snowflakes are too delicate to live in this world.” Olly asks, ‘where does it end?’. People this stupid should be put down. They are too stupid, it hurts- my brain, and society’s smooth function. That is my conflict as a freedom lover. I even want the communists to be open and freely speaking about their ideas! Just this level of stupidity.. gah…

  3. issac – The Confederate flag stands for all who fought for it. It is also part of the state flag of many Southern states. The swastika is a symbol that is world-wide and that was the student’s point. The swastika he put up came from India where it is a symbol of peace.

  4. “Like the Confederate battle flag there is only one point to flying it, provocation by ‘being nasty’. The rest is BS.”

    Conclusory.
    Shelby Foote, author of the 3 volume “The Civil War” explains his view:

    “The flag is a symbol my great grandfather fought under and in defense of. I am for flying it anywhere anybody wants to fly it. I do know perfectly well what pain it causes my black friends, but I think that pain is not necessary if they would read the confederate constitution and knew what the confederacy really stood for. This country has two grievous sins on its hands. One of them is slavery – whether we’ll ever be cured of it, I don’t know. The other one is emancipation – they told 4 million people, you’re free, hit the road, and they drifted back into a form of peonage that in some ways is worse than slavery. These things have got to be understood before they’re condemned. They’re condemned on the face of it because they take that flag to represent what those yahoos represent as – in their protest against civil rights things. But the people who knew what that flag really stood for should have stopped those yahoos from using it as a symbol of what they stood for. But we didn’t – and now you had this problem of the confederate flag being identified as sort of a roughneck thing, which it is not.

    INTERVIEWER: Had you been alive during the Civil War, would you have fought for the Confederates?

    FOOTE: No doubt about it. What’s more, I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar. There’s a great deal of misunderstanding about the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, slavery, the whole thing. The political correctness of today is no way to look at the middle of the nineteenth century. The Confederates fought for some substantially good things. States rights is not just a theoretical excuse for oppressing people. You have to understand that the raggedy Confederate soldier who owned no slaves and probably couldn’t even read the Constitution, let alone understand it, when he was captured by Union soldiers and asked, What are you fighting for? replied, I’m fighting because you’re down here. So I certainly would have fought to keep people from invading my native state. There’s another good reason for fighting for the Confederacy. Life would have been intolerable if you hadn’t. The women of the South just would not allow somebody to stay home and sulk while the war was going on. It didn’t take conscription to grab him. The women made him go.”

  5. issac – what you say in situations like that is “It is clear you are not a lady, but my friend is a lady.”

  7. John Banzhaf – the student stood by the symbol for a long time and explained it. It was when he removed himself for some reason that all the trouble began. But I agree, our special snowflakes are too delicate to live in this world.

    I was reading something on Ty Cobb the other day and they were mentioning that Dr. Spock (the baby guru) and the American Psychiatric Assoc. recommended that boys get into at least one fight a day.

  8. “Would these censors seek to ban Winnie the Pooh and Tigger …?”

    Yes, even though everyone knows that Tiggers are wonderful things.
    Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs.

  9. Some folks should just get a life. The swastika (a/k/a “Hacken Kreuz” to Adolph & Co.) is a religious symbol found even in the US among native tribes in the southwestern states. It is also an architectural embellishment on classic Greek buildings. As an institution of “higher [price] learning” someone at GWU should have known that. A quick call to the university to its northwest would have confirmed this.

    As for Pittsburgh … zig zag is something that is part of English for a helluva a long time and has nothing to do with race, color, national origin, ethnicity, &c., &c. Would these censors seek to ban Winnie the Pooh and Tigger because “tigger” can rhyme with an epithet?? This is silly and the transit authority should just put the ads back on the buses.

  10. John, I have been following this travesty @ GWU and have been disappointed JT has not done a post. At least I don’t think he has?

  11. Below is an even worse example, and how this PC overreaction was corrected.

    Banning a symbol which is sacred in many Indian religions because it might be mistaken for a Nazi swastika makes as much sense as banning the Jewish six-sided star because it might be mistaken for an evil pentagram.

    The following is from CollegeFix:

    George Washington University – the first college in the nation to crack $50,000 in “total cost of attendance” for students – won’t expel a student after all who posted a symbol resembling a Nazi swastika on his house’s bulletin board, which turned out to be a Hindu religious symbol, the Times of India reports.

    The school made a big stink about the symbol when it was first discovered – President Steven Knapp even opened a hate-crime investigation – yet has made nary a peep in the past two months as its ignorance was fully exposed.

    The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Hindu American Foundation told the school it was illegally punishing a student for his speech, and two of its own law professors – John Banzhaf and Jonathan Turley – said the school had clearly crossed the line.

    Banzhaf said in an email blast Wednesday night that the school only relented in its attempted punishment of the student following “threats of legal action, widespread condemnation from several major religious organizations, and very critical if not satirical reports” in the international media.

    The symbol “somewhat resembles the Nazi swastika but is different in color, orientation, and proportions,” Banzhaf said. The professor had warned that individual university officials could be personally liable for punishing the student for posting the symbol, which is used by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians.

    It’s good to know that as the number of administrators spikes in higher education, threatening them with personal ruin is still an effective way to get a response.

  12. “Where is the finish line on this nonsense?”

    There is no finish line.
    This is all part of the left’s social deconstruction program, which is at its core a war of ideas and concepts.

    As Orwell explained in 1984, tyranny involves changing the definitions of words.
    ‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.’
    Marx adds: ‘Property is theft.’
    Baltimore and Ferguson chime in: ‘Rioting is protest. Crime is justice.’
    Marriage is any physical relationship between any group of people for any duration.
    Bruce is Caitlyn.
    Wanting to cut off your own arm is ‘transabled.’
    And now words spelled backwards or that sound like other forbidden words are racist.

    The problem is indeed there is no finish line.
    It’s the Underpants Gnomes plan for leftist deconstruction:

    STEP 1. Deconstruct all of Western Civilization.
    STEP 2. ???
    STEP 3. Utopia!

    Seriously, they’ve got nothin.’
    Nothing to replace the West.
    3 guesses what steps in.

  13. I think the Port Authority is wasting my money. 50 racial, ethnic, religious, et cetera slurs are carved into the seats and windows of the busses, the T, and the incline. They don’t fix those forms of graphitti, but they’ll go out of their way to fix this? Priorities, yo.

  14. PC is about control. The purveyors of PC love to make people jump through hoops and obstacle courses. I know there are some people who comment here that like this decision. I hope they are the balls to comment on why this is righteous.

  15. Reverse PC and social engineering at work? I’m looking for more ads like this in my rear view mirror.

  16. Reminds me of Charles Manson. Didn’t he think that the Beatles were speaking to him, through their albums, played backwards? It appears as though there are more than a few Charlies out there, wandering through the Pittsburgh Port Authority, seeing/hearing nefarious messages. Even more amazing is the Port Authority’s decision to cave and remove the slogan because of a few nutjobs reading words backwards.

  17. Where is the finish line on this nonsense? It’s pure ignorance to be offended by it and absolutely cowardly to succumb to the micro-minority of people that have no developed ability to reason. Come to think of it; JT, I’m offended by this article and demand it be removed at once.

  18. I think we are becoming more un-democratic. Soon we’ll be arrested for saying a word that someone deems racist.

    Am we in America…because it’s beginning to look more like Syria, Iran, Russia, and N. Korea?

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