ethnic slurs
epithets and slurs label people as less-than-human, which then makes them easier to discount, degrade, and destroy. In Contreras v. Crown Zellerbach, Inc. the Washington State Supreme Court held that "racial epithets which were once part of common usage may not now be looked upon as 'mere insulting language.'" They constitute instead a tort of outrage, or "intentional infliction of emotional distress." According to Irving Lewis Allen in his excellent Unkind Words: Ethnic Labeling from Redskin to WASP, "Well over a thousand abusive nicknames aimed at more than one hundred different American ethnic groups have been recorded in dictionaries and other studies of our popular speech ... If epithets were added for quasi-ethnic groups, such as the hundreds of terms for poor whites and rustics, mostly various white Protestant groups, the number of ethnic epithets in historical American slang and dialect would rise to nearly two thousand terms." Terms like the following range from moderately to deeply offensive: banana, camel jockey, chico, chink, cracker, dago, frog, gook, goy, greaser, gringo, guinea, honkie/honky, jap, kike, kraut, limey, mick, oreo, paleface, Pancho, Polack, slant, slope, spade, spic/spick, spook, towelhead, white trash/poor white trash, whitey, wop. See also brave (Indian), Chinaman, Chinaman's chance, Dutch treat, half-breed/half-caste, Indian giver, Injun, Jew boy, "Jew down," Jewish American Princess/JAP, the n-word, Nip, ofay, Oriental, redskin, shanghai, squaw, welsh (v.), wetback, Yid.
