City Pages’ new editor Kevin Hoffman ventured into Don “Nappy-Headed Hos” Imus/George “Macaca” Allen territory this week in a news item that squeezed three questionable ethnic stereotypes into a wee 291-word piece entitled, “New Delhi Star Tribune: Local businesses, meet your new advertising partner: Habib.”
Reporting on Star Tribune plans to outsource some 25 jobs to New Delhi, Hoffman’s April 18 piece referenced a week at the Star Tribune “that saw new publisher Par Ridder smacked around like a two-bit ho in a lawsuit filed by his former employer.” Hoffman also called the Strib’s outsourcing plan “Operation: Sanjaya,” after the wouldabeen American Idol Sanjaya Malakar, who is an American citizen born to an Italian-American mother and Bengali Indian father in Seattle. Both references — which can be seen in Google’s cache — have been scrubbed from the paper’s online story.
One curious stereotype remains: Hoffman predicts that within six to nine months, the paper’s ad designer “will be taking a rickshaw to work.” Rickshaws, while used in India, got their name from their country of origin, Japan — not the home country of “Habib,” whose name appears in the CP subhead.
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