And in before the contrarians - yes, cracker is a racial slur, other usages notwithstanding, and no, it’s actually worse that he put it in the mouths of his made-up racist Blacks.
One of the main criteria for if a word is offensive is if the targeted group finds it offensive, right? Well, there may be a few white people genuinely offended by cracker, but they probably are few and far beween. As an extremely white person, I can’t think of (or almost conceive of) any anti-white term that doesn’t bounce right off without notice. If an insult falls in a sentence and nobody notices does it make a slur?
First of, my apologies for your reports not getting responses. I didn’t actually see either until just now - it looks like What Exit accidentally cleared the first one, which dropped it out of my review queue, and the second one got hit by a technical issue we’ve been having with the board software, where some reports aren’t showing up in our queues like they’re supposed to.
As to the actual issue, I’m more or less with Darren_Garrison. “Cracker,” “Honkey,” “Wypipo.” “Ofey” if you want to get classical. None of these phrases mean anything to me. I mean, I know their definitions, obviously, and I can recognize in context when they’re meant to be an insult, but there’s absolutely no teeth to it. It’s like being called a can of soup. If I’m moderating something as “offensive to white people,” but I’m not offended by it, and virtually no white people anywhere are really offended by it… I’d feel like kind of an asshole, to be honest.
It’s not that White people have to be offended by it, it’s that the Asian gets a pass at flinging around what he clearly intends to be a racial insult,and that he gets away with putting it in the mouths of Black people.
I don’t see what “teeth” has to do with it - if someone clearly intends to use a racial slur, mod them on that.
And wypipo is nothing like those other slurs, which if he’d used them, I would have reported too.
Basically, either you want to run a board where racial slurs are not OK, or you don’t.
Cherry-picking them because they don’t mean anything to you isn’t the right metric, IMO. If we had a Black mod who wasn’t personally offended at the word nigger, or a Jewish mod who laughed off kike, that wouldn’t make a lick of difference. The word is a racial slur nonetheless.
Is it? The only white people I ever see complaining about “cracker” are the same ones complaining about “wypipo,” and in both cases, those people tend to have questionable motives for making the complaint.
Well, you say “history and animus,” I say “teeth,” and I think we mean more or less the same thing. And I don’t think any of those phrases have much of it.
So if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s officially OK to use racial insults in BBQ as long as they’re ones without teeth, with cracker, ofay and honkey being officially sanctioned.
And if anyone reports them to you, you will respond by saying they don’t bother you, so there’s nothing to worry about?
How can they, when it has no teeth? Unless the degree of offensiveness to the intended slur-ee group isn’t the only measure of offensiveness, and the intended offense level by the slur-er plays a part.
I’m not “rules lawyering”, I’m trying to make the mods see the ridiculousness of their stance on this point by Socratic dialogue.
I have no intention of suddenly honkeying and ofaying it up in BBQ. I’m not trying to find a way around rules, I’m asking that they be applied consistently.
It looks like a false equivalency to me. I don’t see where honkey comes close to the level of many other racial epithets and what you’ve been doing quacks like a duck as far as rule lawyering goes.
Doesn’t have to be full-on n-word to still be a clear race-based insult.
If you’re going to mod race-based insults at all, it’s a piss-poor look to not mod the White ones. And that’s me saying it, I’m hardly Mr Redneck Pride. But dear departed Liberal shamed me once - even hillbilly is a slur, so I don’t use it anymore.
I’ll agree with @MrDibble here. While some whites, like me, would laugh off being called honkey or ofay, some white people don’t like it and feel it is an insult.
If you are going to mod race based insults, and you should, you should mod them all equally, not according to your feelings on degree of offensiveness. Really, this is one rule that could have a bright line, without any loss of quality in a discussion. What’s the possible benefit of allowing cracker when it adds nothing to the conversation?