'Unofficial' Slur Angers Students

The South Asian Association (SAA) plans to call for an apology from the publishers of The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard for the use of the word “Paki” in a nightclub description.

Short for Pakistani, “right-wing politicians and white gangs” in Britain coined the term in response to substantial South Asian immigration after World War II, said Ali S. Asani, professor of the practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Culture.

The slur was used indiscriminately to denigrate South Asians in general, a practice that Asani said is becoming more common in the United States.

“It’s like the term ‘nigger,’ you wouldn’t use that term,” Asani said. “It’s offensive.”

“‘Paki’ really carries the weight of that kind of racist, anti-immigrant, anti-South Asian rhetoric,” said Sharmila Sen, an assistant professor in English and American Literature and Language, who specializes in Anglophone literature from South Asia.

The term, used on page 293 of the Guide to describe the clientele of Boston dance club Karma, was noted by The Crimson yesterday.

“The club du jour of the upscale, international crowd, bringing together the exotic and the moneyed who…exchange hugs and new cell phone numbers with the Pakis and Habibis they haven’t seen since [they] were all here a week ago,” the passage reads.

Cindy L. Rodriguez ’02, president of the guide’s publisher Harvard Student Agencies, said HSA had not known that “Paki” was a racial slur when it decided to keep the previous year’s blurb for this year’s edition.

“Should our readers ever be culturally offended by something written in the Guide, we would certainly do our best to incorporate their concerns in the next edition,” Rodriguez wrote in an e-mail.

Several SAA members said they were astonished and angered that the term was used, although they acknowledged that the slur was not intentional.

“What were they thinking?” said SAA President Sandeep Kulkarni ’04. “That’s terrible…there’s no excuse for referring to people that way.”

“Maybe they didn’t mean any harm, but using racial slurs are seeds of ignorance that we are now seeing manifested as hate crimes against people with brown skin,” he added.

Some suggested that the term may not be as offensive as it would have been if used decades earlier. Sen said some Pakistanis are appropriating the word for themselves. Fatima Raja ’03, a Pakistani, said the slur seemed to be gaining a modicum of acceptance.

“I do think it’s offensive but I feel that recently it’s been getting less so. No Pakistani from Pakistan would use that word but a Pakistani-American or a Pakistan from Britain might,” Raja said.

But some cautioned that the word should not be taken lightly.

“We are talking about a time when there’s a lot of bias crimes against Muslims, against Pakistani-Americans,” said Sreenath Sreenivasan, a Columbia journalism professor and co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association. The organization recently issued a call for responsible journalism regarding the coverage of Arab-American and South Asian American communities.

This incident follows one last spring involving the Asian American Association (AAA) and the Korean Association. A Korean Association member objected to a drawing in AAA’s annually published Handbook to Asian America at Harvard and Beyond that depicted a Korean Association representative sporting spiky hair, sunglasses, a dark suit and smoking a cigarette. Drawings of other Asian American students were nondescript.

The editor of the Handbook subsequently wrote an apology.