It might be called "the Fat Jap Syndrome," in honor of Spiro Agnew's jocular question aboard a campaign plane in 1968, when he observed Baltimore Sun Reporter Gene Oishi asleep in his seat and inquired, "What's the matter with the fat Jap?" What was intended as bluff bonhomie immediately appeared to be racial callousness.
Americans, with their long, fertile history of ethnic invective, have lately grown extraordinarily sensitive on the subject. At the Arizona Democratic state convention last week, Congressman Morris Udall declared innocently —or so he thought—that "we were there as free, white, consenting adults." He was all but booed off the stage. Then former Ambassador to Ghana William Mahoney told the convention: "We often conduct ourselves with all the organization of a Chinese fire drill." Again there were hoots of protest.
There is, of course, something grimily banal and automatic about many of the racial stereotypes that salt the language. Yet sometimes they add a bit of savor. Are "French leave" and "Indian giver" to be expurgated? And what Bowdler at a performance of Hamlet will rise in protest when Horatio says, "He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice"? Should that be "Polish persons"?