Keep in mind that the person we are discussing, Annie-Xmas, did more than just “think it”. She said she knew some people to whom the term applied, even if she wouldn’t say it. And she felt comfortable enough to mention it on this MB and be surprised when she was called on it. As if uttering he word is what’s bad, not noting that there are people who properly “fit the bill”.
That’s different from someone who might say: When I see certain black people whom I know, sometimes the word “nigger” pops into my head, even though I know it’s wrong.
If you’re just going for a hypothetical, that’s fine. But the hypothetical is not quite like what this thread is about. There is more than just knowing the word is “in her thoughts”.
I don’t think it is reasonable to assume someone who 1) thinks “nigger” and 2)verbally expresses the word “nigger” has a neutral attitude towards black people. I believe this because there is plenty of evidence suggesting that people who don’t do either of these things still harbor negative attitudes about black people, given the conscious and subconscious associations most of us have.
At any rate, this is a stupid debate. If someone doesn’t want to be labeled racist, then the best way to ensure this never happens is to refrain from using the word “nigger”. The listener is not obligated to give such a person the “benefit of the doubt”, especially if the listener is a black person.
I don’t think that’s quite the right distinction. I’m trying to say that it conveys information that is knowable and shared, regardless of whether it’s accurate. I find it hard to imagine I would ever say that it is “accurate” to say that a black person is uppity. That is, if a racist and I are talking to a black guy, and then the black guy leaves, and the racist turns to me and says “man, that guy sure was uppity, do you agree?” I would basically never agree, regardless of how many of the categories I mentioned above the black guy, in some objective sense, met.
But I do still think information is conveyed. I’m going to come up with a HUGELY contrived hypothetical example to show what I mean:
So you’re a superspy of some sort, in a room with:
(1) an old racist white guy
(2) a talkative, opinionated black guy, wearing a neatly pressed power suit
(3) a quiet, polite, shabbily dressed, submissive black guy
and
(4) a stolen briefcase-sized nuclear weapon
You have information that one and only one of the people in the room is a nuke-stealing terrorist, but you don’t know which one.
You leave the room briefly. When you return, the racist white guy is lying on the floor with a gunshot wound, clearly near death, and the two black guys and the nuclear weapon are gone. You rush over to the white guy and he says “he took the nuke” and you say “which one took it?” and he says “the flerglerbit” and then dies.
Now you have available superspy resources and tech to pursue only one of the two black guys. Which one do you pursue? Well, “flerglerbit” sure doesn’t help, so you’re just going to have to try to guess based on whether a terrorist is more likely to blend in by acting quiet and submissive, or whether that’s what he’d think YOU’D think, and it’s probably the other guy, yada yada yada. Basically, you’re not better off than if the racist guy had died before you got back to the room.
Replay the whole scene, and replace “flerglerbit” with “uppity”. Do you have any information that makes it more likely to follow one of the black guys instead of the other?
My contention is that in the second case, it makes more sense to try to follow guy #2 than guy #3, because guy #2 is more likely to be described as “uppity” by an old racist white guy than guy #3. Now, that’s not a certainty. Maybe while you were out of the room, guy #3 got all up in the face of the racist white guy, or something. But I think if you HAD to choose, it makes more sense to go with the guy more likely to fit the epithet, which is guy #2.
Yes, clearly, an INCREDIBLY ridiculously contrived situation, but I do hope it illustrates the point I’m trying to make.
I have 100% not argued that. I have not (I believe) commented on that aspect of things at all.
I think that “nigger” is a word that carries enormous weight of racism, hatred, and oppression, and that when people use it, that is very strong evidence that they are racist. If you were to ask me to assign a probability to the truth of the statement “Annie X-Mas is racist”, that probability would increase after reading that post.
Quoted for truth. Honestly, I can’t quite believe some of the posts in this thread. Thank God for Dopers like jsgoddess, IvoryTowerDenizen, monstro, Sunny_Daze (among others). If it weren’t for their posts I might think I had fallen down a rabbit hole into some alt-right twilight zone (to mix my metaphors quite thoroughly).
I am reminded of this brilliant, devastating poem by Countee Cullen:
Incident
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
For this scenario to make sense, you would have to know what the white guy meant by “uppity” How do you know what he meant? Is there a standard definition of “uppity”? If you don’t know what “uppity” means, or what the white guy means by “uppity”, then in this scenario, “uppity” is as meaningless as “flerglerbit”
The guy just expects you to automatically know what he means by “uppity” Just like in the Annie post, where she expects everyone to automatically know what she means by thinking that someone is a nigger.
ISTM that’s the same thing I wrote, just looked at from a slightly different angle. I don’t see a distinction between “conveys information that is knowable and shared, regardless of whether it’s accurate”, and “conveys information in the opinion of the speaker”.
You’ve chosen an example where you’re identifying a person based on the description, but that’s just one aspect of the fact that you can figure out what the speaker’s opinion is even if you don’t agree with it.
[FWIW, another example from pop culture occurred to me WRT the term “Nigger”, from the Dave Chappelle skit about the “Niggar Family” (an upper-class white family with that name). Towards the end (about 2:54 or so) Chappelle’s character introduces Tim Niggar & date to his wife, saying “these are the Niggars I was telling you about”, and she asks Tim “are you the nigger who broke the bottle over Ronnie’s head at the [?] game?” and he (Chappelle’s character) says “no, not that nigger …”. ISTM there’s a premise that the term is more likely to have referred to someone who broke a bottle over someone’s head (even if white, ala Byrd) as compared to some random black person that he might have told her about.]
Uhh… not sure what you’re saying. Yes, he had to use a word where both he and I knew what it meant. If he had said “tall”, that would only have helped if both he and I knew what “tall” meant.
Is there a generation of people growing up now in the relatively-less-racist 21st century who have absolutely zero idea what “uppity” means, and only know it as a racist insult? Possibly? And if so, the old racist white guy would have wasted his dying breath if that’s the word he chose to attempt to identify the nuke thief. But… I’m not sure if that even addresses whatever point you’re trying to make.
Well, for instance, maybe in the speaker’s family there’s a family word “goopish” that means something fairly specific, and the old racist white guy, since he was dying, wasn’t thinking straight, and said “goopish”, thinking he was conveying information. That would do no good because it wasn’t a word that both parties (speaker and listener) knew, and both shared at least some common opinion about its meaning.
But now we have gone WAY far down the pedantic rabbit hole, so it doesn’t seem like a conversation worth continuing.
And from what I know about anti-black racism, wearing a suit and having loudly voiced opinions are things that a racist thinks a black person shouldn’t be doing because they are black. And, as with so many things I’ve posted in this thread, I can’t imagine what’s the slightest bit controversial about that.
And I know a lot of things that a racist thinks a black person shouldn’t be doing. How do you know to what a racist is referring to when said racist person says “uppity”?
How do you know what Annie meant when she used that word to think about those 2 people? She could have meant any of 100s of things that racists think that word means.
Because I observed one of the two black people in the room doing more of the ones I was aware of, more visibly, than the other. I don’t “know” which one the hypothetical old racist guy was referring to but I can hazard a pretty good guess, and if I only have enough resources to follow one of the two black guys, some information is better than none.
But honestly, I still have no idea what your actual point is.
I don’t “know”. I can hazard a guess given context. I probably WOULDN’T hazard a guess, because, why bother, who cares, she’s just a person I don’t know on a message board describing people I don’t know and will never meet using racist language. But if I HAD to make a guess for some ultra-contrived reason, I feel like I would have better-than-pure-chance odds.
It seems to me that you are fundamentally opposed to the idea that a racist slur can be a racist slur and also convey information, because, somehow, if that were the case, then… I’m not sure, but you would be bothered by it.
So let me make my ludicrous hypothetical even more ludicrous. Instead of a well-dressed black man and shabbily-dressed black man, there’s a black man and a black woman. Then the dying racist man says that the person who took the nuke was “the buck nigger”. Now “buck nigger” is a term that is absolutely stunningly unbelievably offensive. But… and somehow I feel like you’re going to disagree with me here, it DOES convey information. Clearly in that case I should track the black man as opposed to the black woman. Right?