Scrabble Will Ban Racial and Ethnic Slurs From Tournaments and Game Rules

The phrase serves as a constant reminder to her that, even when people say that the words formed on a Scrabble board are supposedly divorced of meaning, they can still inflict pain.

That is why Flowers, who is Black, and several other members of the North American Scrabble Players Association, have called on the organization to ban the use of an anti-Black racial slur, and as many as 225 other offensive terms, from its lexicon.

“You could be sitting there for a 45-minute game just looking at that word,” said Flowers, a mental health worker from West Memphis, Ark. “And if you don’t know the person who played it, then you wonder, was it put down as a slight, or was it the first word that came to their mind?”

The issue may never come up again.

Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, said Tuesday night the players association had “agreed to remove all slurs from their word list for Scrabble tournament play, which is managed solely by NASPA and available only to members.”

John Chew, the chief executive of the association, seemed to agree. He had asked the organization’s 12-person advisory board to vote on the matter in the coming days, but the statement from Hasbro was presented as a fait accompli, which could rankle those who oppose expurgating any words from the lexicon.

“It is the right thing to do,” Chew said Tuesday night.

Julie Duffy, a spokeswoman for Hasbro, also said the company will amend Scrabble’s official rules “to make clear that slurs are not permissible in any form of the game.”