I don’t know why I spent 45 minutes reading this thread but I did so I might as well briefly comment.
I think, going way back to the OP, that there is a lot of white privilege in this thread, indeed.
Almost all the responses here amounted to “I’ve never heard of that being offensive, so obviously it can’t be a real thing and these PC leftists are being silly”.
Nobody bothered to ask whether actual Black people find the term offensive. I personally had never heard of the word’s racist connotations, but I don’t claim to know everything.
A Google search for “picnic racist term” turns up mostly right-wing idiots yowling about “cancel culture” (“Liberals Want To Ban Picnics!”). However, a couple decent articles do seem to indicate that the idea that the word originally meant “lynching-related festivity” and is related to “pickaninny”, although false, is at least somewhat widespread in the Black community. Philadelphia InquirerJim Crow Museum
So there’s something more to this than just “overprivileged white kids brainstorming things to be offended about”. I’m not necessarily going to purge the term from my own vocabulary*, but because these kids put it on their website I won’t be totally blindsided if someone ever expresses a problem with it, and I’ll know that the problem is coming from an actual cultural difference, rather than that particular person being goofy and hypersensitive. So ignorance fought, rah PARC.
*no offense to bulimics or victims of Stalinist human rights violations.
If you’d aliased that, you’d only have had to change it in your aliases file, just saying. Who are these programmers typing the same thing 30 times a day…
I know a lot of programmers. Most of my social circle are programmers. My husband is a web developer. I heard about this because my friends are DELIGHTED by the change. “About time”, was a typical comment.
John McWhorter had an excellent rant about that. His example was a student who was paralysed by an essay prompt that had the student comment on the word “N…” (literally, N followed by 5 dots). I forget the exact prompt. A student was paralysed by the presence of this word on paper.
McWhorter’s point was that we shouldn’t consider it normal to be paralysed by an N followed by 5 dots on a piece of paper. If that student was truly paralysed by it, he/she/they should be seeking professional help. Maybe it was inappropriate. Maybe the question could have been worded differently. But paralysed? People with mental health problems should be seeking help. We shouldn’t be organising our society around them.
This is not accurate, as far as I know - there are more Romani than Irish Travellers in the UK - stats vary, but something like 200 000 vs 20 000 is a good estimate.
Developers generally don’t give a fuck. They get paid the same if they are renaming feature or if they are creating a new API. It’s all just tasks. The people who give a shit are the business. They are the ones trading features, managing customers and writing checks.
Ditch diggers aren’t all that peeved when the boss tells them to dig a ditch at the wrong house, they get paid $15 an hour to dig it, will get paid $15 an hour to fill it in, and another $15 an hour to dig it in the right spots.
And to be frank, most people in the tech industry are supportive of the change (myself included) so there’s not a lot of grousing about it. The point is its not a trivial expense, but as is tradition on the Dope the signal is lost in the noise.
Yeah, for the claims about having to change a lot of names by hand, increasing the costs; it seems that some organizations do not have computers or software that automates a lot of the name changes in coding.
I’m interested to know where you got your numbers from. Here’s what I found:
The census recorded 58,000 people as Gypsy/Traveller in 2011 in England and Wales, with a further 4,000 recorded in Scotland.
The Government acknowledges that this is likely to be an undercount, with estimates of between 100,000 to 300,000 Gypsy/Traveller people and up to 200,000 Roma people living in the UK.
When I saw this headline, I jumped to the conclusion that the “spill your guts” segment was anti-Asian because a connection to seppuku, it is anti-Asian because of food.
And that looks to me like things working the right way. Dude does a dumb comedy bit that’s hurtful; when someone draws his attention to it, he changes it. One of the people hurt by it wants more from him, including an apology. He may or may not give an apology.
Shit’s messy. Corden was embarrassed, but rather than getting all white fragile about it he worked through the embarrassment and did what he thought was the right thing. That might not make everyone happy. There’s no neat bow. But that’s how things should work.
There’s a big problem in saying that any word derived from one that insults any group of people shouldn’t be used. The problem is the English word “bad”. So you’re thinking, “Wait, hasn’t that word always meant just the opposite of “good” as far back as the English language goes?”. Well, no. There are no examples of the word in writing before 1300 A.D. There are no related words to it in any related languages. There was a word “baddel” used mostly in nonstandard writing and speech which meant “effeminate man”, “hermaphrodite”, or “pederast”. It’s now thought that it and the abbreviated form “bad” began being used in nonstandard English after 1300 A.D. Gradually the meaning of it expanded into all the senses that the word now has. It’s not surprising for a word meaning “bad” in some limited way to expand to meaning it in other ways. There are examples of this in other languages.
So what should we do about a currently common word that was derived from an insult to some group in 1300 A.D.? What about one that was derived from an insult to some group in Proto-Germanic in 500 B.C.? What about one that was derived from an insult to some group in Proto-Indo-European in 4500 B.C.? How far do we have to go back?
Fortunately, nobody is saying that. People are saying much more specific things, and if you generalize in order to trivialize, you’re misrepresenting what they’re saying.
Can we explore this a bit? It looks like a good test case. Hopefully, we can discuss it without offending anyone.
I want to make a meta point about cross-cultural interactions and, especially, teasing. It’s not specifically about Asian or US culture; it’s about what happens when two cultures meet.
I get that Asians in America have faced a lot of discrimination ranging from constant teasing to cruel stereotypes to internment. I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years and most of my kids’ friends and many of my friends and co-workers were Asian. I empathise with their situation.
In that clip, Corden presents guest Jimmy Kimmel with foods including bull penis, 1,000-year-old egg, pig blood curd, and balut, with Corden laughing that he doesn’t even know what it is. (It’s a Filipino delicacy of a fertilized bird egg.) “Wow, it all looks so terrible,” Kimmel says, adding that it smells awful. “It’s really disgusting, it’s horrific,” Corden adds.
The gist of the complaint against Corden is that he is making fun of the food from other cultures. Background info: the people from those cultures experienced major teasing about food while growing up in America. It was deeply embarrassing and often hurtful.
I hope I have represented the situation fairly. Now, bookmark that and let’s look at another cultural interaction.
My kids were born in America (parents are English and Maltese). They were also teased at school and often came home in tears. The frequent history lessons about the horrible things that British people did to Americans back in the day were another source of stress for them. For most of their time in school, my kids were an ethnic minority (lots of Asians in the Bay Area).
I personally was also constantly teased about how bad British food is and about British dentistry and English people always play the bad guys in movies. The point is: teasing happens and there are cruel stereotypes about English people.
Let me pause before I introduce my third interaction to that I do not, by any measure, believe that my kids had it as bad as Asian kids. That’s not my point at all and if you say it is, I will deny it. My point is yet to come.
Now, fast forward twenty years to when we moved home to England.
I tried to prepare my kids, with the idea that English people tease ALL THE TIME. It’s constant and often hurtful. If you are Asian, you will be teased. If you are too tall or too short, you will be teased. If you are just the right height, you will be teased for that too. If you are American, OMG, the teasing will never cease. You will be teased about your foods and your history and everyone will repeat cruel stereotypes about your countrymen. Whatever teasing happens in the USA, it is 10x in the UK. It’s part of our culture. We call it “bants”. I’m not defending it. It is what it is.
My kids are especially sensitive and wanted to prepare them for the coming onslaught. My daughter went to University here. It was hard for her culturally and emotionally. People made fun of her for eating Twinkies (she does not eat Twinkies) and for invading other countries (she does not invade other countries). I empathize with her situation too, though I can’t entirely imagine myself in her position because I was brought up in a culture where teasing happens a lot and I am used to it.
Now, finally, I am getting to my point.
Late Night TV comedians make fun of things. It’s what they do. But how should we - the teased - react to that reality? I can empathise with people who are offended by cruel stereotypes. I can’t empathise with someone demanding an apology from a late-night tv comedian because they made fun of eating bull’s penises.
How much should we teach our children to be resistant to this cross-cultural teasing versus teaching them to look out for offence and to complain about it? I’ve tried to teach my kids the Stoic idea that you can’t control events but you can control how you react to them (narrator: it didn’t help).
And how much should we - the teasers - modify our behaviour to avoid causing offence? How far should the host culture be modified to avoid offending people from other cultures? I think we all agree that blackface is bad and we shouldn’t be making slitty-eye jokes anymore. But what about jokes about thousand-year-old eggs or jellied eels or spotted dick or bad teeth?
How far should we go? Is it possible to meet halfway or is it all or nothing?
And finally, what happens to American kids in China or Dutch kids in the Philippines or Nigerian kids in Japan? Do they get teased too?
