Here’s what I wrote:
Here’s your reply:
You’ll have to make a better attempt to read and understand what I wrote if you want a response.
Just when I thought the mental gymnastics could not becomes anymore strenuous.
“possible connotations” is doing a heroic amount of heavy lifting there.
I’m reminded of what Cristopher Hitchens said about people who are so determined to be offended that they will climb a ladder to peer into people’s bedrooms and profess to be outraged at what they see there.
I admire your determination in supporting those people in their efforts but this has now gone beyond parody so I’ll leave you all to it.
In other words, you wouldn’t expect them to guess; you’d expect it was entirely reasonable of them to ask to have the context provided.
Which is what “Jane” asked for, in the incident described.
So again, you think it was entirely reasonable to expect “Jane” to have looked up “sandboy”, but you think expecting you to look up whether “sand” is sometimes a racist slur is utterly unreasonable “mental gymnastics” to the point of being “beyond parody”?
If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, then I suppose leaving us to it is the best you can do.
I’m open minded about having my ignorance fought - but it had not occurred to me that someone would think this connotation relevant in the context of Dickensian Britain where this novel was set, where people of MIddle Eastern descent were hardly a prominent oppressed minority.
Aside from that, I’m not sure what your point is. I have said throughout that both sides could have done better here, the writer principally because of the historical pejorative connotation of “boy”, not “sand”; the reader by not jumping to unwarranted conclusions and getting confrontational about a word she had never encountered before.
“Jane” was reading a book - so yes, it’s reasonable to expect her to look up the meaning of a word she hasn’t encountered before. But she didn’t do that, and jumped straight to being offended from a position of ignorance.
But the reason we’re having to speculate on her state of mind and why she was offended is because she didn’t say why. I think @puzzlegal pointing out the problematic history of “boy” is insightful; whereas the existence of slurs including the word “sand” is a far less plausible reason for a Black woman reading a book about Dickensian Britain to be offended.
But I don’t see the parallel that you are claiming between her ignorance of the meaning of a word and our ignorance of her state of mind, which we now have no way to determine. It would be more reasonable to note that the writer could have asked her at the time why she was offended, which certainly would have been my own first reaction.
The infantilization of so-called fully functional adults is almost as bad as blindly and obsequiously pandering to those who are seeking offense.
Quite so, that would have been a better tack to take.
Let us not ignore that human nature being human nature, just as “you used a racist word without providing context to it” generates a defensive reflex on the part of the person who knows he’s not using a racist word, at that same time a response that can be perceived as a terse “no, you’re wrong, it isn’t, look at the definition” correction also generates a reflexive feeling in the other person of being dismissed or shut down. That it’s another variation of "f*** your feelings".
The interesting thing in this exchange is that here there can be a fair case for a response of “I’m sorry, I realize it may be an unusual expression, whose origin did not seem to me to have a racist slant ( ** ). Would you please elaborate how it came across as racist?”
Now, yeah, I know, there’s some people who will look at that and say even asking that is a putdown of the person who objected. But there’s got to be some margin there for an honest discussion and it can’t be that any usage of something unfamiliar must be immediately suspected of being used to provoke.
( ** some of you are about to tell me “but for some people that you did not see a racist slant means you missed the racist slant there is!” Look, one part of the puzzle at a time, OK?)
I don’t see how you got that impression from this thread. AFAICT, none of the advice and reasoning in this thread in any way supports your hypothetical outcome of your hypothetical situation.
I don’t know how to respond to your questions because your perspective just seems so completely off the wall. It’s as though you’ve been reading a completely different bizarro-world version of this thread in an alternate universe.
Thank you for your response.
Welcome to, not bizarro-world, but the real world were off the wall people exist and trolls/trolling is not limited to message boards. In fact, my point was an argumentum ad absurdum to demonstrate the fallacious reasoning that was happening in the thread, specifically something like this:
If a person is being obviously blatently malicious or rediculous, you have moral duty to fight back and not “keep my head down”. I reject the claim that “There’s no way win this one”. There are cases and ways to win in some situations. My example was used to demonstrate a possible one. Of course, justice and morality demands you act a certain way, even if there is no chance of “winning”, whatever that is.
I think what you suggested – politely direct them to the appropriate forum for their complaint and move on with the program – would be perfectly reasonable in that particular situation, and I doubt anyone would disagree. Your goal in that situation is to get her to go away so you can get on with your lecture.
In other contexts, it wouldn’t be; if you were her boss and she came to you (at an appropriate time and place) with concerns about your language, you would need to at least pretend to take her concerns seriously. Your goal in that situation would be to avoid having an unhappy and potentially litigious subordinate; in the context of a conversation which isn’t interfering with any more pressing matters, your goal should also be to sincerely communicate and arrive at a mutual understanding, not to “fight back”.
If it’s some anonymous person in the Pit who you’ll never meet in real life and don’t care what they think of you, sure, go wild.
And if it’s Grandma, putting your head down and asking her to pass the cranberry sauce might just be the way to go.
Context matters, and this seems fairly obvious to most everyone who has posted so far.
Nah, fuck (my late) Grandma, that crazy old racist. /s
Thank you for your post. I now understand and appreciate that context matters. You might find this hard to believe but I am that stupid.
Personally, I’m tickled that the first GIS result for “happy as a sandboy” is this picture of racial harmony in ‘lowest’-class Georgian Britain:
Are you sure about that?
This is a good example of how a simple and clear description of an incident, with words that are familiar to all of us, can still be misinterpreted.
So no, you are wrong. That is not what Jane asked for in the incident as described. Go back and read it. It doesn’t appear she asked for anything.
Context was not requested, There is no indication that Jane did not understand what the expression meant. There is no indication that Jane sought further context is there?
What she did do was make a claim that the term was racist. She was wrong.
OK. Here’s the incident as described:
and Jane’s clearly not saying that the term shouldn’t be used; she’s saying that it shouldn’t be used “without comment.”
Now to me, that clearly means that she was asking for it to be made clear in the story why the character was using what she thought was a racist term.
It doesn’t appear to have occured to WalterBishop to ask why Jane thought it was racist, if only in order to try to figure out whether other readers might also think it was racist. Instead, they appear to have shut the conversation down with ‘no, it’s objectively wrong to be offended’.
I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting here.
When you say things need to be contextualised, isn’t the context the point? I.e. it was Janes existing awareness of the context (viz. mid-19th century Britain) that in part led to her suspecting sandboy was a racist term. In the case of an actual racist term, isn’t the context already established? As you say:
What does contextualising mean, in this instance?
Similarly, when you talk about presenting things without comment, do you mean that “before presenting the writing to the group, it’s a good idea to talk about how you’ve written some characters as using the racial language typical of the time” or do you mean more generally that the author should find some means of commenting in the text itself on the language that the characters are using. I think the former is an excellent, almost necessary, courtesy; I think the latter is potentially a good idea but could easily be awkward and self-defeating.
I’m thinking of the Flashman novels, in which Flashman and other’s use of racist language is not commented on within the text but serves to reveal the ugliness and hypocrisy behind the myth of the Empire precisely because it is presented as completely commonplace to the characters but is jarring and offensive to us. Any sort of explicit authorial comment would undercut this effect.
Jane could and should have used language which didn’t jump to the conclusion that the word was, in fact, racist.
Walter could and should have reacted less defensively and tried to understand her point of view fully before starting to argue against it.
Both parties are somewhat at fault, but neither error was particularly horrible IMO.
No offense to Walter, but his apparent belief that “Happy as Larry” is a common enough phrase to be a useful comparison is one of the funnier parts of this thread.
Yeah, the Flashman novels are a good example. If a reader–especially a Black reader–were to say, “NOPE” to these books, based on the protagonists’ ample use of the n-word and other racist epithets, I’d completely understand; and while I enjoyed the hell out of these books, I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone without a heads-up. Here, my context is that I know the word is pretty offputting for a lot of people, in the same way that descriptions of child sexual abuse is offputting, and I’m happy to give warnings.
Compare to All the King’s Men, a glorious masterpiece of a novel whose author was as near as I can tell just as racist as the protagonist and whose liberal use of the n-word was in no way considered, within the novel’s confines, a problem. I have a much harder time recommending this book.
Were I writing a story to be read-aloud in a writer’s circle, and a character were using racist language, I’d either problematize the language in the story in the way Flashman does, or I’d give a heads-up before I read it aloud so audience members that didn’t want to hear a white dude say racist things could go out for a cup of coffee.
If an audience member told me that my failure to do either was inappropriate, based on a misunderstanding of a term, I’d apologize for not anticipating audience reactions, and I’d explain what I knew about the term’s history. Having learned that people might have that reaction, I’d probably choose a different expression, because why would I want to engender that reaction in future readers? Never mind that their reaction is based on an incorrect supposition, I’m not trying to score points on the Great Etymological Scoreboard here, I’m trying to write an enjoyable story, and things that detract from enjoyment are gonna go.
Seems to me that the burden of proof is on the accuser here. Walter shouldn’t be held accountable for how someone else’s ignorance makes them feel. That’s not to say that Jane’s feelings aren’t valid, but Walter doesn’t owe her an apology because she was ignorant of the phrase.
This is such a strange approach to language. He was writing a piece for which Jane–as a member of the group–was part of the intended audience. It wasn’t received the way he hoped it would be. “Accountable” isn’t a great framing. He has some choices:
- Resign himself to not achieving the affect on readers he’d hoped for.
- Exclude Jane and folks like her from his intended audience going forward.
- Alter his communication to better achieve the affect he’s going for.
I don’t really see any other options.
My point is that she unilaterally got offended through ignorance. He had no intent to offend, nor did he actually write anything offensive. She assumed that the phrase was racist, and became offended based on that mistaken assumption.
That’s out of anyone’s control, and I don’t think that people should be responsible or be expected to apologize for that sort of thing.
It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to footnote unusual idioms, if only so that the reader knows what they mean so that the story makes more sense and isn’t misunderstood. I mean, I didn’t know what “happy as a sandboy” or “happy as Larry” meant exactly, and the etymology of the former was actually pretty interesting.