We’ve all seen it: a scruffy, homeless-looking man walking around or near campus. Maybe he asks for some change or is talking to himself. “Spokie alert” or “damn Spokies…” you’ll hear someone say, others laugh and move along without a second thought. I’d bet that most Zags have participated in this "joke" or at least been a bystander to it. I know I have. Complaining about Spokane is a part of the Gonzaga culture, and the Spokie jokes can seem like just another example of that. The word is rarely given a second thought, but once you do give it that thought, it’s hard to ignore the disrespect and classism behind it.
If Spokie was just a shortened version of Spokanite, a universal term for anybody from Spokane, this would be a different story, but it just isn't. It is used almost exclusively to describe the visibly poor: those people we see outside Safeway or roaming the Logan area and assume are struggling with mental illness, homelessness, addiction or poverty. I’ve yet to go to the Trader Joe’s in the south hill and hear somebody comment on all the Spokies there, which just goes to show the classist nature of the way it is used.
Not only is it only used to describe those who appear to be lower class, it's also used exclusively as a negative term. When someone who doesn’t fit the stereotype says that they are from Spokane they might be told “Oh… so you’re a Spokie?” but it's always paired with a chuckle to indicate this is an ironic joke and they are not a real Spokie.
These stereotypes are not completely unfounded; Spokane does have high poverty and homelessness rates especially in the Logan area. Here’s the thing, the people that are hurt by far the most by those rates aren’t Gonzaga students, it's those “Spokies” we’re looking down on. Living in an area where we see poverty so often should not prompt us to make jokes about or look down on the struggling, as the word Spokie does. Instead, as a Jesuit institution, and beyond that just on the basis that we are all humans, our reaction to seeing the the less fortunate members of our community should be empathy and a desire to help. Most of the time as a school we do follow this mission, the prominence of CCASL mentoring programs that help the sons and daughters of these "Spokies" is evidence of that.
I'm sure, at least I really hope, that most Zags don't actually look down so much on the poor and that the derogatory use of "spokies" probably (again, hopefully) comes from a place of ignorance not malice. This, however, is not a good enough excuse. The city and community members that host our school deserve our respect, even and especially those from different background than our own. So lets start giving them that respect, starting with removing Spokies from our vocabulary and using Spokanites instead.
