Cornell Black Law Student Group Apologizes For Offending Ad

Hat tip The College Fix


I came across the below article this morning in The College Fix. It appears the school's Black Law School Student Group sent out a karaoke ad that featured an Asian singer and a spoof on the Asian pronunciation of "r's" and "l's". The group has appropriately apologized.

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/26793/

This brings back memories of 2013 at UC Irvine when some members of  an Asian-American fraternity made a black face video.

http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2013/04/uc-irvine-in-turmoil-over-video.html

Of course, one can debate about whether the two different universities reacted exactly the same way. I know the UCI Asian-American kids involved were deeply apologetic once they learned the actual history of black face. As I recall, they self-suspended their own fraternity for a quarter.

Incidentally, it would be more accurate to say that Koreans and Japanese are the two specific nationalities that have problems with the English r's and l's. That is because in both Korean and Japanese, they have one sound that is between our l and r sounds. Thus, when they are learning English, they tend to use that sound for both the r and the l, which can cause mispronunciation issues. There is a way to correct that, and I often show this to my Japanese and Korean students. Of course, this doesn't apply to Asian-American kids whose native language is English, so there is some stereotyping involved here.

So in the immortal words of Rodney King, "Can we just all get..........."- never mind.