Reply #7: I hear you about Saban---but...some find it offensive. [View All]

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"It is highly offensive," Warren Perrin, president of the Council for Development of French in Louisiana, said on Thursday.

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Perrin has criticized the use of "coonass" well before Saban entered the picture. He referred questions about the word to a letter he wrote to the "225" magazine in Baton Rouge recently for using the term.

"The most insulting and derogatory term levied against Acadians is the term 'coonass,'" Perrin wrote. "The use of this offensive term re-affirms negative stereotypes and its vestiges of pre-civil rights era racial discrimination. This insulting slang was never a proud or complimentary term affixed to the Acadian people. We will not tolerate the use of this racial slur which has pejorative connotations."

Perrin was quoted in an Associated Press story on Wednesday saying, "I routinely state that the use of that term is highly offensive to descendants of Acadians, who are commonly referred to as Cajuns."

Not all Acadians agree with Perrin, however.

"That word doesn't upset me at all," said Comeaux High School football coach Brian Langlinais on Thursday. "I'm proud to be a Cajun coonass, and I'll die that way. I'm proud of my heritage. I am what I am. If I'm a coonass, I'm a coonass. It's just who we are."

Langlinais did say that he and many people he knows are upset with Saban for becoming Alabama's coach.

"We feel backstabbed by him," he said. "And coonasses don't forget anything. But that man did what he did to better himself and his situation. There's nothing wrong with that. We need to leave him alone."

When told that others, including coonasses themselves, do not have a problem with the term, Perrin said, "Everyone is entitled to their own bad taste and stupid opinions. You can always find somebody in Breaux Bridge with a bumper sticker that says, 'I'm a coonass and proud of it.' That doesn't make it right."
http://www.thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070203/SPORTS/702030344/1006