(A story on "what not to say/write", from the Toronto Star newspaper)

Racial slur on sofa label stuns family
Mother had to explain to daughter, 7 origin of 'totally unacceptable' word on wrapping of furniture built overseas

April 06, 2007
Jim Wilkes
Staff Reporter, Toronto Star

When the new chocolate-coloured sofa set was delivered to her Brampton home, Doris Moore was stunned to see packing labels describing the shade as "Nigger-brown."

She and husband Douglas purchased a sofa, loveseat and chair in dark brown leather last week from Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store on Dundas St. E.

Moore, 30, who describes herself as an African-American born and raised in New York, said it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out the label just after delivery men from the Mississauga furniture store left.

"She's very curious and she started reading the labels," Moore explained. "She said, `Mommy, what is nig ... ger brown?' I went over and just couldn't believe my eyes."

She said yesterday each piece had a similar label affixed to the woven protective covering wrapped around the furniture.

"In this day and age, that's totally unacceptable," Moore said.

Douglas explained the origins of the word to daughter Olivia, telling how it was a bad name that blacks were called during the days of slavery in the United States.

"It was tough, because she really didn't understand," Moore said. "She'd never heard that word before and didn't really understand the concept of it."

Moore, who has a younger son and daughter, said she's heard the word used many times, although it has never been directed in anger at her.

"But it's a very, very bad word that makes you feel degraded, like you're a nobody," she said.

Moore said she called the furniture store the following day and three other times since, and feels discouraged that no one has returned her calls.

When interviewed yesterday by the Star, Romesh Kumar, Vanaik's assistant manager, passed the buck to his supplier, Cosmos Furniture in Scarborough.

"Why should I take the blame?" he said. "I'm a trader, I don't manufacture. I sell from 20 companies, maybe 50 companies. How can I take care of all of them?"

He said that he would check similar stock and make sure other labels were removed.

"That's terrible, that's a racial ... something?" Kumar said. "This is entirely wrong, but it's not my fault. It's my job to sell good product to people."

He said the best he could do is to give Moore the telephone number of his supplier, so she could take it up with him.

The owner of Cosmos Furniture, Paul Kumar, no relation to Romesh, said he was upset to learn packing labels on products he sold carried a racial epithet.

"I import my products from overseas," he said. "I've never noticed anything like that. This is something new to me."

He passed the blame to a Chinese company, but apologized for the labels. He said he would contact the furniture maker in Guangzhou and demand they remove all similar labels.

Moore said she's not sure she wants the sofa set in her home.

"Every time I sit on it, I'll think of that," she said.

Photo:  Doris Moore's 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, spotted this label on covering around a new sofa set.  (JIM WILKES/TORONTO STAR)

Seeing red over brown

Controversial label on one leather sofa sparks international debate and outrage

April 14, 2007
Francine Kopun
Staff Reporter, Toronto Star

It's not often that a packing label prompts an international embarrassment, but there was Toronto, on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, a city where, viewers were told, a dark brown leather couch was being marketed as "nigger-brown."

"You've got to be kidding," said Dobbs, shaking his head at the shame of it. The guest held up the Toronto Star story about a black woman in Brampton whose new couch arrived in her home bearing a packing label describing the colour as "nigger-brown."

Message boards and blogs are rife with debate about it, this ghost of an expression, which once was common usage – most commonly, it would seem, in Britain where schoolchildren were instructed as late as the 1950s to buy "nigger-brown" cloth for their school uniforms.

As one blogger pointed out: "Someone tell me who in their right mind would use that term when describing the color brown and even further what company would let that pass through their standards! Some people are so STUPID!"

The audience of Lady's Pictorial magazine in London, circa 1914, would have wondered what all the fuss was about. Ads for soft taffeta hats in nigger-black were common then. A 1915 edition of the British Home Chat magazine described cloth as "nigger-brown." Writers D. H. Lawrence and John Dos Passos wrote about nigger-grey and nigger-pink. And as late as 1973 The Times wrote of autumnal colours in a shade that "used to be nigger brown."

The couch bearing the offensive label landed in Brampton last week by way of China, where things like paint and shoes for men are still being sold today with the description.

"Nigger-brown" pigment is available for purchase from the Wenzhou Kunwei Pearly-Lustre Pigment Co., Ltd. Men's shoes from the Nanhai De Xing Leather Shoes Habiliment Co., Ltd., are described this way on its website: "this product is leisure & fashion, Comfortable, beautiful outside Size 39#-46# Color French rose, `nigger-brown.'"

"If it was used with impunity in the first half of the 20th Century in England, it is possible that it survived in the manufacturing byways of Hong Kong as a kind of imperial excrescence, as a kind of colonial marker," says Jack Chambers, a professor in the University of Toronto department of linguistics.

"For all of that, the way the world works and the way the world has worked since the 1950s, the word nigger under any guise is forbidden.

"There's no excusing it."

Colours have caused controversy before. Crayola has revised its original colour palette numerous times since launching the popular crayon in 1903, changing "flesh" to "peach," in 1962, and "Indian Red" to "chestnut" in 1999. The name "flesh," was dropped partly in response to the civil rights movement. The company says Indian red was not meant to represent the skin colour of Native Americans, but referred to a reddish-brown pigment found near India.

Prussian Blue was changed to "midnight blue" in 1958, at the request of teachers, according to Crayola's website.

Choosing and naming colours is in fact, serious business for companies like Crayola, and automotive companies like Ford and of course, paint companies like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams. None would dream today of crafting a name based on skin colour.

"We try to incorporate words that have cultural reference, but always in a positive way," says Sheri Williams, director of colour marketing and design for Sherwin Williams Paint Stores Group. Examples include Grecian Ivory and Barcelona Beige.

The closest a Benjamin Moore representative can come to remembering a politically incorrect name was an exterior colour called "tobacco," which was phased out in the 1980s. These days colours are chosen with attention to trends in everything from fashion to food, with names to evoke an emotional response.

"People don't get romantic about `967.' They will get romantic about `cloud white,'" says Sharon Grech, colour and design manager for Benjamin Moore Paints.

David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., remembers bidding online two years ago for a carton of children's crayon sticks, one of them called "nigger-brown," although he cannot recall the name of the manufacturer.

The museum in fact, has several objects advertised as "nigger brown," mostly from England and Australia.

"What it shows you is how deeply ingrained that word was, and the sort of lack of racial consciousness that people had. I'm certain that nobody really meant something horrible by it," says Pilgrim.

The exception, he said, is white supremacists who use the expression today to refer to people of mixed race.

Museum director John Thorpe says using "nigger" as a way of identifying colour was acceptable up until the civil rights movement.

"That vocabulary has not died out completely in some segments and part of the country even today. It might not get published in the newspaper anymore, but it would be referred to in ordinary conversation."

Doris Moore, the Brampton airline worker who bought the couch, remains angry. Explanations do not assuage her. The couch is beautiful – she and her husband saved up to buy it. But seeing it now brings up unpleasant thoughts. She thinks she'd like to return it.

"I don't want to keep anything negative in my home."

Chinese translation error blamed for slur on sofa label

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- Doris Moore was shocked when her new couch was delivered to her Toronto home with a label that used a racial slur to describe the dark brown shade of the upholstery.

The situation was even more alarming for Moore because it was her 7-year-old daughter who pointed out "nigger brown" on the tag.

"My daughter saw the label and she knew the color brown, but didn't know what the other word meant. She asked, 'Mommy, what color is that?' I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. I never thought that's how she'd learn of that word," Moore said.

The mother complained to the furniture store, which blamed the supplier, who pointed to a computer problem as the source of the derogatory label

Kingsoft Corp., a Chinese software company, acknowledged its translation program was at fault and said it was a regrettable error.

"I know this is a very bad word," Huang Luoyi, a product manager for the Beijing-based company's translation software, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

He explained that when the Chinese characters for "dark brown" are typed into an older version of its Chinese-English translation software, the offensive description comes up.

"We got the definition from a Chinese-English dictionary. We've been using the dictionary for 10 years. Maybe the dictionary was updated, but we probably didn't follow suit," he said.

Moore, who is black, said Kingsoft's acknowledgment of a mistake does not make her feel better.

"They should know what they are typing, even if it is a software error," she said. "In order for something to come into the country, don't they read it first? Doesn't the manufacturer? The supplier?"

Romesh Vanaik, owner of Vanaik Furniture, where Moore bought the sofa, said it has been a best seller. He said he checked his stock but found no other couch with the offensive label.

"It's amazing. I've been here since 1972 and I never knew the meaning of this word," said Vanaik, a native of India.

His supplier, Paul Kumar of Cosmos Furniture in Toronto, denied responsibility and refused to give the name of the couch's Chinese manufacturer.

"It's not my fault. It's not the manufacturers' fault," he said, adding that Kingsoft was to blame.

Huang said Kingsoft has worked to correct the translation error. In the 2007 version, typing "dark brown" in Chinese does not produce the racial slur in English. But if the offensive term is typed in English, the Chinese translation is "dark brown," he said.

Moore is consulting with a lawyer and wants compensation. Last week, she filed a report with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Commission spokeswoman Afroze Edwards said the case is in the initial stages and could take six months to two years to resolve.

Moore, 30, has three young children, and said the issue has taken a toll on her family.

"Something more has to be done. We don't just need a personal apology, but someone needs to own up to where these labels were made, and someone needs to apologize to all people of color," Moore said. "I had friends over from St. Lucia yesterday and they wouldn't sit on the couch."