Bohunk: The Next Macaca?
What’s up with Republicans using obscure racial slurs? You’ll remember August, 2006, when Virginia Sen. George Allen (R) called a Webb campaign worker of West Indian descent a “macaca”.
Now we’ve got NY State Senator Dale Volker (R) dissing Abi Aghayere, an award-winning, MIT trained, RIT civil engineering professor, by calling him a “bohunk”. Aghayere is a Nigerian native and US citizen.
Aghayere is a bridge expert, and apparantly Volker (R) didn’t take too kindly to his assessment that a Lancaster bridge was in poor condition.
What’s a “bohunk”? I always thought it was a poorly educated lower-class macho man, but the first seven definitions in The Urban Dictionary are all variations of “A nasty term of derision for Eastern European Caucasians. Sort of like “nigger” is to African Americans”. Wikipedia agrees with this definition.
It’s likely that Volker didn’t realize that it was an ethnic slur (or maybe he mistook Aghayere for a Czech…) Regardless of the meaning of the insult, or the intended meaning of the insult, it is still an insult. It is outside the bounds of civil discourse to use a slur to insult someone because of their professional opinion.
To his credit, Volker (R) has apologized.
hey thanks for the nod of approval
You know, this is pretty insulting to some of his constituents. His district wraps around Buffalo, which has one of the highest concentrations of people of Eastern European descent in the country. Three of the towns in his district (Lancaster, Elma, and Alden) have very large populations of Eastern European descent, from a quarter to a third of the population.
His wife has a Polish surname, too.
It’s unlikely that he didn’t know what it meant.
Honestly, I’ve heard the term and never knew is was an insult. I think it was in the movie 16 candles. I thought that they were saying “beau-hunk” and that it meant a good looking man. Guess I’ve misinterpreted that one all these years since that movie came out!
But, it sounds like Volker was trying to insult the man so I doubt he thought it meant what I thought it meant. I can believe that he might not have known it was a racial insult, but I don’t believe he didn’t know it was an insult given the context.
[...] as being his "macaca moment" and apparently, Rochester Turning felt the same way. « Previous [...]
Volker’s nasty side has really come out over the last year or so; Buffalo Pundit’s blog has done a good job of following these episodes. What I am hearing (I live in his district, which is dominated by Erie County but goes as far east as Canandaigua) is that Volker has made it clear he wants to retire, but Bruno won’t let him. I believe he has been in the seat for over 3 decades and is viewed as unbeatable. If it becomes an open seat, it’s one more Bruno has to worry about protecting to preserve his vanishing margin.
Interesting.