One October night in New Orleans in 2015 resulted in the arrest of a 22-year-old man named Warren Demesme on allegations of sexual assault. He was charged with first-degree rape and indecent behavior with a juvenile and is currently awaiting trial, according to a report from the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Prior to this, however, Demesme repeatedly denied the allegations against him while being questioned by police and verbally called upon a lawyer. He was denied one. This column is not to take a position on if he should have been arrested or not, but rather whether courts treated him fairly in the appeal and interview process associated with his case.

Though a considerable majority of discourse in newspapers regarding the contact between police and African-American males like Demesme concerns the issue of police brutality, a different issue, although indicative of racism as well, presents itself in this case. As students in a neo-diverse society and campus, we must be speaking about these issues in order to solve our issues of inequality and achieve this diverse campus that NC State so boasts itself as. Diversity calls for egalitarianism.

According to the police’s recorded syntax of a detained Demesme, his request was, “If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what’s up.“ The punctuation for the statement was provided by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office, and was used against him by a Louisiana Supreme Court Justice in denying the validity of his claim, as reported in an analysis of the case in The Washington Post.

The courts claimed they could not provide him a lawyer because he had not actually requested one according to what they put down in their reading, a canine lawyer — a literal “lawyer dog.”

Demesme’s public defender insisted on the lack of ambiguity in his request and the absurdity of that reading to no avail. Taken to Louisiana Supreme Court as a result, it was ruled on Oct. 27 of this year that the appeal would be denied. Now 24 years old, he is currently jailed and awaiting trial.

Everyone knows what he was asking for. Everyone knows what he meant by “dog,” or well, “dawg,” to avoid textually reinforcing the notion that he was talking about an actual canine.

Though this case has been making its rounds on social media due to the perceived humorous nature of the interpretation of Demesme’s request, it has also been acknowledged for the inherent threat that is posed in this event: linguistic discrimination. It cost Demesme his constitutional right to legal counsel.

African-American Vernacular English, or AAVE, has long been a dialect of American English, used by urban working class and middle class African-Americans, who are even largely bidialectal themselves. A notable catalyst for the spread of AAVE was the dawn of contemporary rap music, the growing influence of which has led to popular culture and music charts becoming virtually dominated by it over time. This has seen AAVE faithfully spreading to outside communities and ethnicities.

It isn’t very difficult to notice that people who aren’t African-American have adopted the linguistic or grammatical features of AAVE. Incorrectly condemned as the racially charged term “Ebonics,” or as improper English and “ghetto” by Americans for decades, it has been a linguistic reality reinforced by this prevalence in rap and hip-hop, which ubiquitously dominates the social spaces among many college parties and other recreational activities today.

One of the linguistic authorities on campus, Jeffrey Reaser, is an associate professor of English and associate director of the Language and Life Project at NC State who has worked on a number of projects and publications studying and documenting the linguistics of North Carolina. He is no stranger to the reality of linguistic discrimination like the one of this case, which I asked him to take a look at.

“You have to almost intentionally suppress the obvious meaning in opting for the compounded interpretation,” Reaser said. “What if an Australian or British person had said, ‘give me a lawyer, mate’ — would anyone seriously think he were asking for a lover? I suspect in such a case, there would be absolutely no feigned confusion. It’s hard to not see such a difference in racial terms: the slang of white groups is readily recognized, where the [very common] slang of a stigmatized group is willfully misinterpreted.”

NC State’s English department boasts a language diversity organization of students that host events around campus providing insight into the details and nuances of language in North Carolina and beyond: the Language Diversity Ambassadors. In a statement released by them and their faculty advisors, Walt Wolfram and Stephany Dunstan, they further analyzed the linguistic nuances of this case including the myth that AAVE is “unclear.”

The Language Diversity Ambassadors (LDA) wrote about the history of prejudice toward AAVE resulting in unfair legal rulings, such as the “credibility” of Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the George Zimmerman case. This leads to misinterpretations of AAVE grammar, like “I BEEN married” meaning “I have been married for a long time and still am” being interpreted as “I was married before but now I am not.”

The LDA’s focus is centered on the inherent problem presented by the linguistic discrimination of Demesme’s case: “people of color/speakers of AAVE are given full responsibility for the communicative burden; in other words, they are to blame for any miscommunication. Communication is depicted as a one way street rather than what it really is: a two way street.”

“A linguist who has studied the speech of African Americans would have easily and readily identified the interpretation issue,” said the LDA in their statement. “This is why it is so important to involve linguists in legal cases centering around language; this case suggests that it may be useful to have AAVE interpreters or translators for assisting witnesses, defendants, transcribers, and court reporters, as linguists John Rickford and Sharese King call for.”

The bottom line is, we can’t allow language to continue to be, as linguist Rosina Lippi-Green puts it, “last backdoor to discrimination.”

In a time when the topic of bigotry and racism in America is flooding opinion sections like that of Technician, involving the exchange of hot emotions with inflaming language to match (and sadly so), an open conversation and further education on this “backdoor to discrimination” should be especially imperative for students in this linguistically diverse nation and campus.

*Disclaimer: the LDA are not taking a position on whether or not Warren Demesme committed sexual assault, only on whether or not he was treated fairly during questioning and appeal.