Complaint about perceived racial slur has Kansas recalling hundreds of license plates
Two years after a similar recall, Kansas is telling hundreds of motorists to return license plates whose tags include lettering that could be seen as a racial slur.
Owners of vehicles whose plates have the letter combination NGA have in recent weeks been receiving notices in the mail from the state’s department of revenue telling them that they must return the plates or risk being ticketed for having invalid tags.
The letters do not explain why the plates are being recalled, only that “we have removed the assignment of this plate to your vehicle in our system.”
A Kansas City Star reporter who received such a letter on Thursday called the official whose signature was on the letter to ask why he needed to return the plate, as he’d only recently acquired it to replace one that had been stolen from a vehicle registered in his name.
Sarah Bayless, inventory manager at the division of vehicles, told him that more than 800 plates with NGA on them were being recalled because the state had received a complaint that NGA could be read as an abbreviation for a racial slur.
The letter was dated Sept. 15, but some vehicle owners are only now finding the notices in their mailboxes, along with a temporary tag to use after they have returned the metal plate in a pre-paid envelope.
“The plate combination, if read as a phrase, can be perceived to read as a racial epithet,” is how department spokesman Zach Fletcher explained in an email the reason for the recall. “Standard plate combinations are to be read as individual letters and numbers instead of as phrases like is customary with vanity/personalized plates.
“To ensure these plates were no longer on the road, letters were sent to 828 Kansas license plate holders to make the switch to a different combination.”
In 2018, Kansas recalled more than 700 plates after a Japanese-American man in Culver City, California, saw a car on a street near his home bearing the Kansas plate number 442 JAP.
Not only is JAP an ethnic slur, but for the man who complained about the plate in a letter to then-Gov. Jeff Colyer, the number on the plate compounded the unintended insult. The 442nd Combat Regiment Team was made up almost entirely of the nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight in the European theater during World War II while many of their family members were confined to internment camps in the United States.
An Abilene, Kansas, couple also wrote Colyer and the revenue department decided to recall all 731 of the JAP-series plates.
State officials say they try to avoid issuing license plates that might be considered offensive. Requests for personalized plates are denied if the director of vehicles deems them to be profane, vulgar, lewd or have an “indecent meaning or connotation,” according to the revenue department website.
The department’s computer system automatically rejects 27,000 combinations that are never issued on regular plates because they phonetically sound like profanities or “could double as phrases deemed offensive,” Fletcher said.
Occasionally, though, some that might cause offense do escape detection and are then stamped onto metal and end up on the rear bumpers of cars, trucks and SUVs.
When that happens and someone complains, as happened in this case, the complaint is evaluated by revenue department staff and a decision is made on whether to issue a recall.
This story was originally published October 29, 2020 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Complaint about perceived racial slur has Kansas recalling hundreds of license plates."
