Not quite. You have to show that I called anyone a racist prior to that message. Your accusation was before that, and it was that I’ve been doing this throughout the thread. Try again to find some actual support for your inflammatory claims about me, and also maybe try to respond to the rest of what I said? I gave you a point by point breakdown of how wrong everything was in your last message and this is all you reply with? You’ll have to to better than that.
Also are you denying that Limbaugh is a racist? Really? Is that a hill you want to start defending at this point?
No, I don’t have to do anything like that. Pointing out that you did what you denied doing in the very same post is quite enough to justify laughing hysterically at your post.
This is the kind of thing that is so fascinating about the SDMB - you people believe that if you deny something loudly and in unison, you can change reality.
The Blue Fairy isn’t real. Wishing on a star doesn’t do anything.
You made an accusation of me. It was false. That is kind of frowned upon here. Also “you people”? Really?
So are you ever going to address the rest of my post detailing every way you are wrong, or are you just conceding the entire debate to me at this point?
I had a friend of mine once make the same argument about the n-slur. I assume you don’t agree with him, right? So it’s just a matter of where the line is drawn.
For me, I take my cues from those directly affected by this. If Black people are saying, in large numbers, that “thug” is racially tinged and inappropriate, I’m going to take them at their word. Because I’m not a total asshole, and i recognize that just because something may not be an issue for me personally, that doesn’t mean it’s not an issue.
No it does not. It just means “black people”. The so-and-so dictionary of 1623 (date picked at random) backs me on this, which is proof it has no negative connotation. So there.
I thought you would feel this way. Very glad to hear it, in fact.
So, what’s the evidence for your position?
I mean, of course I agree that the n-slur is disparaging in the extreme. Even the dictionary definition - well known for being slow to accept linguistic drift and respond to social change - acknowledges this.
But that’s something that you sort of feel in your gut, right? No one really needed to prove to you that the slur was completely inappropriate for white people to use in nearly any situation; you just knew that. I’d expect you’d respond quite negatively to someone who persisted in their use of that slur because they refused to accept that it was wrong to do so, as my friend I mentioned above did.
I’m not being snarky, but the only people I’ve heard making these accusations are the media and white liberals.
I would think that if black people had been complaining about the negative racial implications of thug, especially in ‘large numbers’, I’d somehow have heard about it.
As an aside, I knew a young white woman about twenty years ago who was into bad boy black guys. She called them thugs and said that’s how they referred to themselves - it was a point of pride to them. She wound up a drug addict and prostitute, being schlepped around from hotel to hotel by whichever was her current pimp, until she finally got busted because one of them advertised her in Craigslist and the customer turned out to be a cop.
I’ve often wondered why it is that given the tremendous amount of harm that the criminal culture in the black community inflicts, especially on blacks themselves, neither the media nor white liberals can ever be heard criticizing or making any sort of attempt to address the problem of black crime itself, but instead get into high dudgeon at the mere mention of it (or at any word that refers to it, even if the word is commonly used in that way within black culture itself).
How involved are you with social justice activism? Do you read Black-oriented sites and such? I mean, your Black acquaintances and coworkers are unlikely to bring this up, because white people are famously fragile about this sort of thing. www.theroot.com is a good starting point if you’re interested to start dipping your toe into those waters.
Oh, and the media doesn’t talk about efforts within the Black community to deal with crime and whatnot because white America doesn’t really care. Ever heard of My Brother’s Keeper? The media has a narrative, and whatever doesn’t fit that narrative gets sort of ignored. As for white liberals such as myself (more a socialist than a liberal, but tomato tomato), we don’t talk about this stuff because there are Black voices that are far better equipped to do so, and they do. You (by which I mean white America) just don’t generally hear about it unless you take pains to do so.
Thanks for that web site, I will definitely take a look. I clicked on one article - it is definitely refreshing to see a black celebrity criticized for stupidity. Now - do you think a non-black-activist web site could get away with describing a black celebrity as “ill-informed, lazy-thinking” or an idiot without accusations of racism? And if you agree that it couldn’t, is that problematic, IYO?
I’ve never seen Don Lemon described in any sort of positive way anywhere, so that’s hardly limited to this one site. Do right-wing sites like him? I don’t know enough about the other two mentioned to comment.
But given that there are so many obvious targets for this sort of thing, and that any site should have Black writers on staff anyway, I don’t see why passing that sort of assignment to the Black writers would be a problem. Don Lemon in particular gets called out by the Black community for his trumpeting of respectability politics and such. By definition, a Black writer is going to be more informed about such issues anyway.
It’s not really that. The big difference is, the word “nigger” never referred to anything but blacks. Whether it was value-neutral before and became disparaging later is a different matter, but who it referred to never changed.
The word “thug” always was a disparaging word referring to a violence prone person, with no relation to the race (yes, it has Asian origins, but that is long forgotten). Now some people are trying the “You said “thug”? You racist!” gambit. That’s just stupid.
I asked before, in this thread, to give me another example of an originally non-race-related word disparaging word in fairly wide use that became a “racist” word. I can’t think of one. So why do people think this would be the first ever occurrence of such a thing happening?
It is kinda funny in the “You said “moron”! You must be referring to me!” kind of sense. A self-inflicted insult.
Yeah, I forgot about The Root. Used to look at it quite a bit several years ago. Thanks, I’ll do that.
I wasn’t talking about efforts within the black community to deal with it but rather the fact there is absolutely nothing coming out of the liberal community to condemn it or try to lessen it or to villainize the perpetrators of it, such as there is with regard to gay rights, women’s rights, trans rights, and other social issues. Instead all we hear are insults and condemnation toward any non-black who’s critical of it, which in my mind serves only to defend and propagate it.
And I’d disagree that white people don’t care. I think they care about it quite a lot and would love to see something tangible being done to try to deal with it. Unfortunately, any time someone even mentions it, let alone trying to come up with steps to deal with it they get deluged with accusations of racism.
I’ll be leaving soon and may won’t be able to answer for a while, but thanks for your post.
Your 1, 3 and 5 terms were never disparaging before they because racial.
Same with 2 and 3, in that they became racial when they were applied to people. When Blanche calls Stanley “an ape” in Streetcar, was she not referring to his Polish background? Remember that, back then, it was common to speak of the Irish Race or the Polish Race.
How about “savage”? You have to go pretty far back, possibly pre-colonization, but savage used to refer to any number of people. Once white people started colonizing Africa, the term began to refer more and more to Black people specifically, to the point where when translating a Persian speaker’s words into French (around the turn of the century), the Persian word “savage” became “Black savage.”
Ironically, now the word savage is starting to be used in much the same way “thug” is now - as a dog whistle.
Also, everyone here agrees that there is such a thing as dog whistle racism, right? We’re not arguing on that level, are we?