While I don’t disagree with the other facets of the warning I think it at least bears mentioning that the use of the word-that-dare-not-speak-its-name was in the context of a quote made by the subject of the quote regarding his opinion of himself as a youth.
So now we can’t use a quote that contains a verboten word context be damned?
That seems, to me, at least heavy-handed and blind to the possible implications.
Little Pig has a history of making racist comments and acting racist, in general, so him pointing out that specific line (when he was already threadshitting and acting like a troll (IMO) in the same post) by Ali is just trying to be more subtle about it…,
…but even if you take out that, the official warning I gave him for that post was for engaging in troll-like behavior, which I believe he was doing there.
It doesn’t appear to be anything Ali said about himself. The phrase appears in his autobiography The Greatest, but Ali is quoting Judge Aaron, who was castrated by the KKK, who asked him “you one of them loud-mouthed Martin Luther King niggers?”
First of all, Mississippi is nowhere near being a majority-black state. Secondly, he seemed to be insulting the voters of Mississippi in general and a white republican specifically. It might have been a little over the top, but it doesn’t seem all that unusual in that forum.
Yeah, that doesn’t match what Little Pig claimed either.
Here is Little Pig’s claim (with the n-word elided, since the mods are objecting to it):
So Little Pig’s claim is that he heard Ali call himself the n-word in a documentary.
That’s the thing that I said I can’t find any evidence for that claim.
Slur or not, under instructions or not, that wasn’t hate speech. That’s getting thrown around a lot lately, and it absolutely diminishes the accusations when actual hate speech is used.
This might be the most pathetic warning in the history of the SDMB.
Firstly, it’s pretty clear that despite IW’s later attempts to walk it back, the quoted racist term was a big part of the warning - that’s the first thing IW mentioned. Second, the notion that it was either threadshitting or trolling is highly dubious IMHO. And the attempt to tease some racist connotations out a criticism aimed at a state is laughable. (I can’t figure out the context of the other “… and he’s a Negro” quote.)
I’m curious as to whether IW’s claim that L_P was “modded and warned over using hate speech terms at least three times before” is true altogether, but I highly doubt it.
[I have no idea if L_P’s quote is accurate. What I can say is that years ago (when Ali was still active) a friend of mine told me he had seen/heard an interview with Ali. Ali was making the point that a lot of his act was showmanship, and he said that he said a lot of outrageous things so that people will “come out to see the talkin’ nigger fight”.]
Either your friend heard a racial epithet on television, your friend heard a racial epithet on the radio,…, or he misremembered. I find the first 2 unlikely.
I am unimpressed with this second-hand report. This smells like an urban myth. Example of urban myth.