Discover the Power of Familiarity: Say No to Unfamiliar Terms

24 Feb 2015 · 3 min

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TJ Walker (video uploaded Feb 24, 2015) discusses a Cleveland Fox 5 anchor, Christy Capel, who used the racial slur "jigaboo" on air after the Academy Awards. Walker recounts the incident, notes the anchor is white and that a Black colleague appeared displeased, and gives a media-training lesson: public figures must avoid using negative/attacking words they do not fully understand because of potential career and reputational harm.

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A Cleveland Fox 5 reporter, Christy Capel, is under fire for using the term jigaboo on the air. So here's what happened. It was after the Academy Awards Sunday night And the local Fox 5 in Cleveland was dissecting the award show. Christy Capel is the news anchor, one of the news anchors, and she was commenting on Lady Gaga's singing and essentially said that while she liked the music and the voice, she had a hard time concentrating because of all the jigaboo music in the background. Now, her black co actor apparently looked a little less than completely pleased at that. And, and now there's controversy because the word jigaboo is considered a racist slur. Now this is a term I've certainly heard of growing up, but if you'd asked me 24 hours ago to give a strict dictionary definition, I don't think I would have been able to accurately define it. But it's just not a word you hear very often. It's not a word I use is this. And the woman in question is a white anchor, in case you were curious. Does this mean she's a card carrying racist, a Klansmember who deserves to be fired? I doubt it. I don't know her personally. My hunch is it's just some word that stuck in her brain. She didn't know exactly what it meant, it sounded a little bit negative and she just threw it out there. And let's be honest, we all use words occasionally where we are not 100% certain what it means. But you do that with friends, family friendly conversations when you are in the public arena and when there's a video camera on you and you know everything you're saying can and will be dissected, sliced, diced, analyzed. That's not the time to be guessing. Doesn't mean every single word out of your mouth has to be written down and memorized. But it's not the time to be guessing. You especially do not want to guess when you're trying to describe something in negative attacking terms and you don't know exactly what the words mean. The real media training lesson here is don't use words that are negative and attacking unless you know 100% what the dictionary definition is and you know all the connotations. Otherwise you can end up like this woman here, seeing her career potentially vaporized.