rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

Yes, thank you, rob, that's the rub: to me, the most offensive thing is using an outdated slur to portray themselves as victims of discrimination when it's really an acknowledgement of how they're part of the discriminating group now.

sorry, I read your post exactly wrong

Dago and Yankee are both slang based in first name si think.
Diego and Jan for Spanish and Dutch sailors respectively. Or at least taht's what I gather from things i've read over the years.

No worries, I wasn't very clear. rob put it better.

speaking as a half-Italian, nothing drives me more insane than when Italian-Americans rush to defend Christopher Columbus simply because a bunch of Italian immigrants swore their allegiance to America at one of his statues once.

This is the place I went to:

https://www.yelp.com/biz/cholo-helsinki

The food was good, TBF. And the cook might have been Mexican. He wasn't a Finn, at any rate.

It's also my experience just anecdotally that Italian-Americans who strongly identify w their cultural identity like to emphasize their marginalization while also vociferously discriminating against literally everyone else.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Friday, March 5, 2021 7:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sort of the same with Irish people, too— so many working-class Irish like to bring up "wE wErE SlAvEs tOo" and I'm always pretty quick to smack that shit down because it's bullshit.

(Also I live in Philadelphia lol)

I'm slightly confused by the discussion of "cholo" here, tho— its strongest association is with Mexican-American street culture, most prominently in LA. I've known a few cholos, and it was never construed as a slur by them?

this is largely driven by me accidentally confusing "cholo" with "culo"

Spanish is not my forte

Columbus was sailing for the Spanih to celebrate the conquest of the moors in Al Andalus and I think to find a place to dispose of teh jews taht were getting kicked out of the kingdom . So lovely philanthropic gestures all around, noice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholo

Interesting. Sounds like tragic misunderstanding territory.

The article had someone claim that "dago" came from the day laborer immigrants, who wanted to be paid "as the day goes," which I had never heard before.

definitely seen ther derivation from diego explained before and seems to be the first thing popping up now,
also I thought it was a term usd in Britain at a time when those refered to would presumably have been at more of a distance tahnthe relationship with day labouring would suggest. Thought it turned up in naval terms though may be from the media I'm seeing things though being from hollywood

Yes, I was sure it was some British thing, probably naval, but not according to the internet. I cannot imagine anyone in the UK using that word and getting away with it these days.

Twas known as offensive "foreigner" slur in Norway in 1978 apparently, as that is when Hammerfest band Unit Five released "Polardego", about how South Norwegians view the North ("a bit more domesticized than last year").

she is female and diversity

The president of a lawyer recruiting firm accidentally emailed me ABOUT me 😭 pic.twitter.com/cIGQisdhr0

— Diversity 💙💜💖♥️🧡💛💕mzstarrburst (@GummiPie) April 26, 2021

i should have put this in a different thread because i am not questioning that it's racist, btw

I'm getting tired of the repeated point that conservatives don't know what Critical Race Theory means. Nitpicking over the definition is clearly misdirection, when what they object to is ANY discussion of race in the classroom whatsoever. Rather than saying "you don't understand what CRT is," it should be reframed as a simple question: is race an acceptable class topic? Y/N

i love how their repeated talking point is that they're ignorant

to me, that's the point, if they can fit any discussion of race under the scary umbrella of "CRT" it makes it easier to discredit and force it out of school curricula altogether.

Weellll I thought we were talking about old televisions! Now I don’t know what the heck is going on, I can’t learn!!

along with the CRT stuff the UK right has gone all in on any and all opposition to racism being "marxist" (and also inherently antisemitic for good measure). this is obv a classic r/w tactic worldwide but it has become so fucking intense here lately and the centrist pieces of shit who make up the left wing of UK media and politics are sufficiently racist and spooked by marxism that they've happily dropped any pretence of caring about black lives. you can really sense the relief

right, the labeling gives them an easy way out, but only when people fail to question what's being targeted and instead quibble about the meaning of "marxist".

guess what the white left prefers to do most of the time

well yes, that's why I'm complaining about it

had an uncomfortable moment the other night, out with a new friend at a bar for one of the first times since last year, and for some reason awkward early bus ride memories was the subject. for me, that brings up thoughts of this kid in my grade who would always tickle me and give me a big "snakebite" on the arm every morning, it was horrible. but as i told it, i didn't say "snakebite", because i hadn't heard of it until i looked it up when i got home. instead, i said "every morning he gave me a horrible indian burn-- uh."

it's not a term i've heard in a long time, but everyone i ever met called them that without second thought. but in the context of an extremely white rural area that belonged to native americans a few centuries ago, perhaps it refers to making the skin red, like native americans.

it's common parlance in big portions of the the united states still, i think, but as of 2012 there were lots of other terms for it:

..."buffalo skin" in India, "policeman's glove" or "hundred needles" in Hungary, "barbed wire" in the Netherlands, "needles" in Bulgaria and "Brennessel" ("stinging nettle") in Austria, Switzerland and the southern parts of Germany, "thousand needle stings" in the northern parts of Germany, "thousand needles" in Sweden, "Nettle" in Latvia, Poland and Russia, "French Cuff" in Denmark, "kuuma makkara" (hot sausage) in Finland, "manita de puerco" (split pigs' feet) in Mexico

I grew up in Boston and that was familiar term there as well

that's what it was called in 80s northern Illinois too. we also had "indian summer" which I would like to learn a better term for as it happens p regularly in Montreal and my partner and I calling it "racist summer" doesn't really work outside of the house

i'd like to hear a beat happening version of that

I think it's called a Chinese Burn in the UK? Or is that something else?

that was a mid-90s Curve single IIRC

Chinese burn is the same apparently, seems to be based on the notion that the Chinese are an evil bunch who enjoy torturing people.

yeah it was definitely called a chinese burn in scotland in the 90s, probably still is judging by what so many people there still call chinese and indian takeaway restaurants/corner stores

I wonder about what terms we use today which will become off-limits in the future.

Don't get me wrong. It's not a curiosity based in WHAT ELSE WILL POLITICAL CORRECTNESS TAKE AWAY FROM US? It goes without saying that some words and terms should be looked at, recognized, and perhaps removed from the lexicon. We just haven't gotten around to them yet.

I hope "guru" fails to make the cut one day. Not because I'm overly offended by the popular use for the term usually reserved for a reverential Hindu dispeller of darkness, but only because I'm tired of hearing about web gurus, sports gurus and spreadsheet gurus.

I think ‘ex-pat’ might be in with a chance for removal…That woolly term that isn’t quite immigrant or migrant, and already conjures up images here of lobster-red brexit voting Brits drinking ice cold lager in English style bars on the Costa Brava.

ninja hopefully

I think guru and ninja both speak to the degree casual orientalism/anti-Asian racism are acceptable now. People saying "namaste" as a joke, the popularized uses of terms like karma and zen, there's tons more

tbf, I also think of pplains' larger point when I read young people saying things like "I can't watch any TV made before 2015"

xxp Like how the fans of Insane Clown Posse (aka Juggalos) refer to each other?

2xp surely not things like this
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51tYHW4%2B9iL._SY500_.jpg

i think there is a pretty fertile ground for reevaluating ableist slurs bc theres a bunch of them and they permeate our language. i will confess to not consistently checking myself on using them privately.

the namaste stuff tends to present itself as making fun of white liberal orientalism and appropriation which deserves mockery but it's clearly a thin line. was it racist to mock those trudeau-in-india photoshoots? probably some of the mockery was but the shoots themselves also felt kind of racist. idk what the best approach would have been to that

i wish people would take ableist language more seriously but i rarely challenge it unless it's egregious since it just gets treated like a joke or as PC extremism if i do. i hope that changes soon but the backlash against requests to stop using the r-word - which is what i mean by egregious - suggests that phasing out the less obviously grautitous stuff is going to be hard work. i still recommend trying to avoid the language since it forces you to think carefully about why you actually dislike thing/person instead of just assuming stupid idiot etc speaks for itself

yeah, i teach my son to think of that and finding other words to express what he's thinking or feeling.

when i think about people things that ive called stupid, it's never about a lack of intelligence. it could be arrogant foolishness, carelessness, animus, cowardice, bigotry, whatever. i think ableist slurs are so common bc of our collective emphasis on Personal Intelligence as capital (human, social, or otherwise) which is a vestige of eugenics (which brings us back full circle to white supremacy, hurray thread title)

yes and it's interesting that everyone i've ever spoken to who believed in IQ as an objective measure of intelligence/worth (telling conflation in itself) has also had very strong views on things like whether rap counts as music, or whether some people are natural athletes

i still recommend trying to avoid the language since it forces you to think carefully about why you actually dislike thing/person instead of just assuming stupid idiot etc speaks for itself

this really gets at the heart of why this is so worthwhile imo. it teaches you to really think through your negativity and start to possibly re-route your values.

I use those words a lot, typically to describe Republicans or my parents who just won’t listen. I know I shouldn’t, and sometimes I pause before typing them. Fools? Stubborn? Obstinate? Unyielding? Brick walls? Liars? I don’t know. Sometimes I get fed up and just call them fucking i*****

wait, stupid is ableist?

i try not to use terms like "crazy" or "insane" any longer. same with phrases that use the term "blind"

yeah, intellectual disabilities

The problem with "blind" is that I feel like it is the most apt metaphor for most cases where you'd use it, and it isn't always meant negatively. "Blind study" for example - I'm not sure what you'd say instead? But I am absolutely willing to listen to the blind community on what to do in those situations. I also think "stupid" and "idiot" are going to be hard to remove, as they're so embedded in the language. But "dumb" and "lame" are definitely gone from my lexicon.

I'm still constantly confounded by how many people think "spazz" is okay (and I can think of at least two songs I love that feature it heavily so it's not like it was super-easy for me to get rid of it, but it's just... not okay).