’Wife beater’ and bias: Language changing after Durham PD mistook teen for gunman
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The ribbed sleeveless T-shirt has been around for decades. You probably know someone, a friend, an uncle or brother — who regularly sports one.
They might wear it every day beneath a shirt. Or on its own on a hot summer day.
Some call them, simply, an undershirt. Others say A-shirt — short for athletic shirt.
But beginning around the late 1980s and early 1990s, a jarring term became associated with the white tank top: “wife beater.”
It’s unclear if a single source popularized the phrase and contributed to its use in everyday life.
But after a case of mistaken identity at a Durham apartment complex last summer, a city review board wants to make sure police officers don’t use it again.
White cotton undershirt
The Oxford English Dictionary defines wife beater as a “sleeveless (white) cotton undershirt or vest” that is popularly associated “with men who commit domestic violence.”
That association entered popular culture in 1997, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower told The New York Times in 2001. Sheidlower was the principal North American editor for the dictionary at the time.
Back then, Sheidlower said, the term had gained popularity from the rap, gay and gang subcultures, in some cases where it may have been used to undermine the power of the abusive phrase. Around the same time, linguists and parents were saying they were startled to hear young people using the term in a colloquial sense.
Pamela Munro, a professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles, and an expert on college slang, says her students first volunteered the term “wife beater” as a man’s sleeveless undershirt in 1992.
Students continued using it until 2009, which was the last time she did that project, she said in an email.
Calling a tank top a “wife beater” today sounds like an outdated linguistic relic. But while white tank tops were just as common in the early 20th century as they are today, Munro said, she’d never heard anyone use the term until the 1980s.
“My father wore this type of undershirt every day of his life, I think, and I think he would have been shocked by this term, which I never heard till I began teaching at UCLA,” Munro said.
And as quickly as the term spread through American culture, it seems to have disappeared just as fast.
“I have not heard it recently, and I’m sure that PC-dom may have killed it,” Munro said, referring to political correctness. The last time she heard anyone use it colloquially, outside of the classroom, was nearly 20 years ago, she said.
Durham teen handcuffed
Many may no longer use the term, but it has resurfaced locally in a Durham review board’s scrutiny of the police department’s response to an incident last August, when an officer mistook a Black teenager wearing a white tank top for an armed suspect.
The officer chased the 15-year-old at an apartment complex, pointed his gun at him and handcuffed him before the teen was released without being charged. The officer was later suspended without pay for one day, after an internal investigation by the department’s Professional Standards Division.
“Someone called and said someone had a gun out here with a wife beater on,” an officer explains to a resident in police video of the incident aired by CBS17.
Among several other recommendations, the city’s Civilian Police Review Board said the Durham Police Department “should ban the use of the term, ‘wife beater’ to refer to a white tank top T-shirt.”
In a memo responding to the review board last week, Interim Police Chief Shari Montgomery concurred.
The department “whole-heartedly agrees and has taken steps to address this concern with department commanders,” she wrote.
The Durham Report
Calling Bull City readers! We've launched The Durham Report, a free weekly digest of some of the top stories for and about Durham published in The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun. Get your newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday at 11 a.m. featuring links to stories by our local journalists. Sign up for our newsletter here. For even more Durham-focused news and conversation, join our Facebook group "The Story of my Street."
