This new Charlotte business is for kids. But its name may leave some adults wondering: Why?
A new children’s party service — which opened this week on the edge of Independence Boulevard and looks to capitalize on the national slime craze — is notable for a couple of very different reasons.
Both just so happen to relate to conversations about race.
The first: One of the business’s three owners is 34-year-old community activist Curtis Hayes Jr., who attracted media attention locally for his peacekeeping efforts during the 2016 Keith Lamont Scott protests; then nationally and even internationally after being captured on video making an impassioned plea to two Black men protesting on a Charlotte bridge in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020.
The second: Hayes, his twin sister Cagney Walker, and her wife, Teunna, decided to name their new venture The Gook Factory.
In case you’re wondering, the “gook” in the name is intended to be pronounced so it rhymes with “book.” It is not intended to be pronounced so it rhymes with “kook.” For a pretty significant reason.
There’s a good chance — though it’s probably most dependent on what generation you belong to — you’re familiar with it. But if not ... according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the second of its two listed definitions (the one that rhymes with “book”) is “oozy sloppy dirt or debris.” Or, more broadly, goo. Gunk.
The primary definition (the one that rhymes with “kook”) is the one that could, or maybe even should, raise an eyebrow: “Used as an insulting and contemptuous term for a nonwhite, non-American person and especially for an Asian person.”
Now, Hayes could hardly be accused of being ignorant. The Charlotte Observer, in fact, in reviewing candidates last year for the City Council’s District 5 seat (which he lost), noted that the Democratic candidate stood out for his “breadth of service and grasp of the role council can play on issues like affordable housing and transportation.”
And he said yes, absolutely, he was well aware of the word’s negative connotation from early on in the development process.
“As a business,” Hayes told the Observer this week, “we did our research, and we dug deeper into the word, because I did see where it came up as a derogatory term for Asian descent, or the Asian community.”
So the question is, what made them go ahead with that name?
‘There’s nothing for the kids to do’
Hayes and his sister were born and raised until they were 11 or 12 in the tiny city of Bluefield, West Virginia. Then in the early 2000s, their family moved to Charlotte, where — according to an interview Hayes did with The Washington Post after that 2020 video of him went viral — Hayes was arrested for multiple misdemeanor offenses during a troubled period in his teens.
As an adult, though, Hayes turned things around, starting a property maintenance company and getting involved in mentoring Black youth around the city.
The idea for The Gook Factory, the father of two says, was inspired by a vacation in Orlando, Florida, where he and his family paid a visit to The Slime Factory — a national chain that allows kids to make, decorate and play with the soft, moist, and slippery substance.
After he got back home, as he continued campaigning for City Council, “all we kept hearing was, ‘There’s nothing for the kids to do.’ And then we also heard that (because we’ve all been) through our own traumatic experiences, we all look for something, someone, that can embrace us. That can love us. That can empower us.”
They decided slime was the way to go, and they decided to create a character who could represent the brand and serve, Hayes says, as “a heroic figure to the community.”
But “we knew we couldn’t open up ‘The Slime Factory’ because it was already branded,” he explains. “So when we looked up ‘slime,’ we looked up different names for slime, and ‘gook’ was ... in that definition of what slime is.”
In fact, “gook” is among 15 related words listed if you Google “slime” — along with words like “ooze,” “sludge,” “muck,” “mud,” “mire,” “mucus,” “goo,” “gunk,” “yuck,” “gloop,” “gunge,” “grot,” “guck,” “glop.”
So then the next question is, why not choose any of those other words to use in the name of their “factory”?
Different reactions from different people
I hadn’t heard of The Gook Factory before this week. It launched pretty quietly and could claim just over 100 followers to its Facebook page as of Wednesday afternoon.
An old colleague texted me about it Monday to say a fellow Plaza Midwood mom had alerted her to it and to say that she was shocked by the name (which she called “so bad”). I proceeded to float it past a friend who is 51, white and male; his response was, “Uh…unless I’m out of touch on my racist nicknames, this is really bad. ... Holy cow.”
Interestingly, however, after I sent the link with no explanation to The Gook Factory’s website to my 21-year-old daughter — who is half-Korean — she admitted she thought “gook” meant slime.
Hayes says he and his sister and sister-in-law did something similar before settling on the name: “We also asked several Asian individuals that we’re connected with,” he says, including a Filipino woman of about 50 just this past Sunday who apparently didn’t know the origin of the offensive variation of the word.
What is the origin? Hayes thinks that for most people — most people he knows, at least — it was something “all of our moms had said. ‘Hey, go get that gook off your face. ... Go get in the shower, you got gook on you.’”
But as explained in “Gook: The Short History of an Americanism” in 1992 by David Roediger, an American studies professor at the University of Kansas, “the origins of gook are mysterious.” There’s an indication that American troops referred to Filipino prostitutes as “gooks” during the Philippine Revolution in the 1890s. “Another explanation,” Roediger wrote, “... is that gook developed from goo-goo, which... may have been a mocking imitation of Filipino speech.”
For certain, however, it was a commonly used slur to describe Koreans during the Korean War and Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.
Contacted Wednesday for his thoughts on the word today, Roediger replied by email to say: “The article itself ... is better than my memory of the research will be. It is very much on gook ... as an anti-Asian slur, sometimes applied to other colonized people as well. I never thought to connect it to gook ... as slime, which” — (to Hayes’s point) — “was the meaning I had grown up with.”
“I did not see anything in the sources that made me make such a direct connection. If there were one, it would be interesting in that so many anti-immigrant appeals referred to newcomers as refuse, or offscourings, or scum.”
‘I’m big on changing the narrative’
Hayes doesn’t get the least bit defensive when confronted with questions about the name of his family’s business.
He’s measured when he explains the place where his viewpoints come from. (“I’m huge on equality. Google my name. I do it on a daily. I’m a Black man in America, and my sisters are Black women in America. So the idea of that even being brought up, I totally understand, right? We never want to offend anybody, any race, any specific gender. I don’t want to do any of that. My sisters are part of LGBTQ.”)
And he gets genuinely excited when given the opportunity to talk about the character they’ve built The Gook Factory around: Mr. Gook, a teal-colored, lab-coat-wearing, elephant-like creature, with purple ears shaped like the letters “G” and “K” and the eyes representing the double-Os in between.
“Mr. Gook,” Hayes says, “is so important ... because when you think of slime places, they don’t have characters. We created a character that the kids could relate to. That they could relate to on different varieties of traumatic trauma that they may experience at home, at school, amongst peers, amongst friends.
“But Mr. Gook teaches not only science, through chemistry, through being able to create the gook — the product that we’re making, which is slime. But he’s able to empower these kids. He’s able to motivate them. He’s able to inspire them.”
Hayes has more to say about their purposeful use of the word “gook,” too.
“Again, I thought about the history,” he continues. “I’m big on history. I’m big on changing the narrative. So when it comes to The Gook Factory, me and my sisters are saying, even if that was a negative notion back in the time of war … I believe that it’s now time to give that name a better name. A more prideful name. Something that is inspirational.
“We’re trying to re-brand that name into what is also a definition in the dictionary, in the Webster, in Google, whatever. There’s another definition, which is: slime.”
This is tricky territory, as Adam Aleksic — a Harvard University linguistics student who tweets as The Etymology Nerd — explains.
“Typically,” he tells us by email, “the only way that offensive speech stops being offensive is if we have enough time to collectively forget it was offensive in the first place.” He also argues that “ethnic slurs can be reclaimed by an ethnic group, such as with the N-word, but remain offensive if used by people outside that group.”
I can’t help but agree with Aleksic.
I also can’t help but believe Hayes when he says this:
“We don’t want to disrespect the views of others, but at the same time, we want everybody to understand our view as well. And our view is something positive, it is something inspirational for the kids, it’s something empowering,” he says, hammering his message home once more, with feeling. “It is not — in no way, form or fashion — used to demean or belittle any specific group, whatsoever.”
I guess the best question to leave you with then is, What do you think?
This story was originally published January 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM.
