Cracker is the very least white slur out there. Our melanin popping friends can cue up a colorful array of descriptive terms for us melanin challenged folks.
I came across this one. does this sting more than cracker?
Homo chaffass.(Commonly referred to as the North American Hairless Polar Bear) A distinct breed of northeastern albino mammals;
How about gingervitis? Holly toner? No?
Point being none of these carry much weight as hurtful demeaning slur imo.
Furthermore, it is establishing collective guilt of the sort that people love to deny that they’re doing. In addition to hoping for equality rather than equity which is also something people love to proclaim they don’t want.
I don’t moderate the pit. I am going to stick to my lane and not opine on the main question of this thread. (And I’ve seen that report, and have opinions, and decided it wasn’t something i was authorized to respond to, in either direction.)
I will say that if you report racial slurs, being used as slurs, in the forums i do moderate, i will at least drop a mod note. (Please be explicit as to what you are reporting and why. I don’t know all the racial slurs out there.)
But i wanted to agree with
I’ve never been offended, personally, by “cracker” or “honky”. I’ve never heard or seen “ofey” before this thread. But pretty much every time I’ve seen “wypipo” used, I’ve been at least a little offended.
Translation: It doesn’t offend me, so I can’t see why it offends you.
No one is claiming that cracker has anything like the venom of the N-word, or the various slurs used against people of color. Nevertheless, it has this in common with them: it’s a word that has been used by one class of people to demean another of perceived lesser status; in this case, poor Southern whites. Like all slurs, it punches down. And it should therefore be sanctioned, just as any other racial or ethnic slur.
I generally think Miller is a great mod, but this reasoning seems faulty to me. It’s modding based on your personal reaction to the word(s) and on how modding it would make you feel, which doesn’t seem right. And I’m not sure that “virtually no white people anywhere are really offended by it” is true. It might be, I suppose, but how do you know? I’d suggest giving this further consideration in the mod loop.
Heh. “More offensive to me than cracker” is a pretty low bar. If we are moderating all racial slurs it should be moderated. If we are only moderating the more offensive racial slurs, it can stay.
What the what? This is the second time in as many days you’ve agreed with me! What is going on?!?
On a more serious note, it’s been observed a couple times after my post that ‘cracker’ isn’t so much a generic slur to white people, but rather to a specific group of white people: poor, rural, southern ones. Which I didn’t realize. So maybe I just have a blinder on this one, and my level of offense taken (and yours and Miller’s) isn’t relevant here.
So, “cracker” should be moderated because of it association with the history of discrimination against poor Southern whites at the hands of… African Americans?
This is a big part of my reluctance over moderating the term - it’s not punching down. I feel there’s a qualitative difference between terms coined by an oppressed group to describe their oppressors, and terms coined by the oppressive group to describe the groups they’re oppressing.
I’m also not thrilled at the prospect of being expected to use a rule about hate speech to tone police people expressing anger at dealing with personal or systematic racism, which is going to be about 90% of the context where this term comes up.
Maybe I’m unclear on the Pit rules, but hate speech (ie, slurs) directed against people because of inherent, largely immutable characteristics is okay, so long as it’s not race/gender/religion/sexual orientation?
That’s not the context this time. It was an expression of racism, not a protest against it.
And please - being angry at racism is no excuse for racist invective. I’m angry about racism here all the time, and I don’t use racist insults to express it. Plain Anglo-Saxon swears are much more satisfying anyway.
When I use wypipo, it’s when I’m amused or disappointed in a head-shakey kind of way, not really angry.
Unfamiliar with Black Twitter, The Root and similar, I take it…
This is very reasonable but the way I see it that would require a rule change. Current Pit rules explicitly say some slurs used as insults will be viewed as hate speech and some will not be.
This the way I see it. The mods should be looking at the apparent intent. In this particular case, it seemed clear that one person was using cracker as a racist slur against another poster.
The reality of race in America is that the racial slurs used against black people are more varied and carry far greater weight than the racial slurs used against white people. But I don’t think anyone should be given a pass just because they tried to verbally assault somebody but were held back by inferior weapons.