I haven’t been sold on the fiction that they are two different words. One is clearly just a version of the other with the final syllable shortened. If a person decides to go hunting, is that a different thing than when someone with a southern drawl decides to go “huntin’”?
Because teenage kids enjoy provoking adult shock and horror. It’s a normal teenager thing.
But that doesn’t mean that adults are obliged to endorse teenagers’ provocative behavior as appropriate or etiquette-approved.
[QUOTE=aldiboronti]
But as long as they’re using it non-pejoratively among others who take no objection then I say good luck to them.
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When they use it on social media that are visible to the whole world, on the other hand, they’re bound to encounter people who do have objections. Tough luck.
While I sympathize with your evident concern that your own teenage children might inadvertently inspire resentment for their use of the word, you can’t really bypass that by appealing to public opinion to somehow decree the word acceptable or post-offensive.
There are still a whole lot of people who are offended by the n-word, no matter how you spell it. While I agree that white kids using it to their white friends because they think it sounds cool and badass is not necessarily deliberately racist, it’s positively stinky with white privilege. Declaring that the solution is for everybody else to just stop being offended by the word in that context is also fairly stinky with white privilege.
If the n-word ever becomes really non-offensive in general usage, we won’t need an acceptance campaign for it.
I don’t have teenage kids, but I was one, and you’re right in that I and my friends were sponges for basically everything around us we thought was cool.
Somehow we managed to avoid using racial slurs, though.
That’s not to say we didn’t do stupid things. Being a teenager, at least in my experience, meant a lot of disregard for others. The whole “centre of the universe” thing. That’s stupid no matter what foolish things result from it, but when it means people weigh up using terms with long histories of racial abuse against wanting to be cool and awesome, and pick the latter, that’s a particularly racist kind of self-centeredness. That’s even assuming a purely innocent use of, and taking of, the word, too. You’re talking about a desire to appear cool; it’s that same desire that could lead a friend who actually WAS offended by using that word not to speak up about it.
Queer is one of those heavily contextual words now. I think that’s the best way to describe it. Only if the usage is positive would it be construed as “ok”. For a positive example: “I am happy to hear the university is offering queer studies”. Now, take a neutral example: “Wow, there are a lot of queers out on the street”. That neutral statement can make a person wonder if there’s homophobic tint to the statement. So without context, it could be construed as a bigoted statement and best avoided.
…however if you say it five times in a row it does earn you a warning.
“Is it time to lift the taboo on nigga?”
Stop and think about that statement for a moment. That is what is meant when people talk about “White Privilege.”
Why the heck do you think that you have any valid input on whether a given term is suitable for general conversation?
(If our kids grow up and have disarmed the word through use, and the darker-skinned people in society agree that it is no longer a trigger, then the ‘taboo’ will have been lifted through the evolution of language. This is not something we have any right to try to implement.)
Nigga, please.
Regards,
Shodan
Why would you?
There’s also a lot of (stinky) white privilege in deciding for other ethnicities that they should be offended.
A term that is so historically offensive cannot be white-washed just because my kids are just so cute when they use it.
Are you also baffled as to why kids listen to black rap and hip hop? You know, they’re picking it up from urban gangsta rap culture which is, I’ve heard, quite popular. It’s also funny how you single out whites. You do know there are other non-blacks in the world, right? Latinos, Asians of all kinds, middle easterners, they all get into the black rap stuff too and surprise, they also say nigga too.
Nigga please, it ain’t just the white folk be stealing the black peoples shit and stuff.
Me? No particular urge to use the word, but I wouldn’t act all shocked the youts pick it up and use it.
non-sequitur.
Explain why your input would be more valid than someone else’s.
As a general rule, I’d agree, not because I have any particular desire to use the word in my daily life, just because I think banning a word, whether officially or through social stigma, isn’t helpful. The issue here, though, is that there’s a generational thing going on. As an example, my parents grew up in a time and an area where, as she puts it “nigger is just what you called black people”. In my youth, it was a taboo word but it got less and less taboo, partially do to rap, but just some general usage. Hell, I had a black friend when I was 18 that INSISTED that I refer to him as “my nigga”; I think I did it once or twice while we were hanging out after he insisted on it and I don’t think I did it again thereafter.
That all said, taboos don’t just go away or get lifted, it takes time. In this case, there’s still a lot of people alive who have memories of the civil rights movement, race riots, etc. I don’t think many people who grew up like that will find it easy to disassociate their own person experiences from the casual usage of the word or derivations therefrom. However, I wouldn’t be shocked if within the next 10 or 20 years, as more and more of that generation retire and it becomes more common among younger people that it just is a thing.
My input? I am taking the conservative position that there needs to be no change in the usage of that particular term. Those who are advocating for the change are the ones who need to provide ‘input’ which can be evaluated.
But the kids aren’t listening to you and, as ever, language usage is not in the control of conservatives who think it should be preserved in aspic and never change.
I would argue that anyone who uses the word in public is saying they want the taboo on its use lifted. That’s the way language works. We absorb the words we hear around us to determine what is acceptable and what is not. Words that we only hear in hushed tones, we know are not to be used in public. Words that we here out in the open, not so much. And the more we hear those words out in the open, the more the argument is made by the speakers that those words are acceptable public speech.
If you want it to be any other way, you need to find a new species that communicates in a different way than H. sapiens does.
Well, there is a subset of the population that wants it to be taboo for some people but not for others. There are also people who think it’s okay for themselves but don’t care or will only eyeroll if others use it (the -“a” version that is, not the “er” version.) And some of all races who think it is always inappropriate. Only the first of these three is problematic to me.
I personally don’t ever use the word, because I consider it pretty offensive, but don’t care so much if someone else uses the -a version once or twice. If I were to hear it all the time, I would be afraid that I would use it by mistake and be attacked, but that is not the case.
Now you’re the one fundamentally misunderstanding how language evolution works. It’s not that any “subset of the population” specifically wants the n-word “to be taboo for some people but not for others”, it’s that at present the linguistic reality is that the word is taboo for some people but not for others.
That’s how in-group/out-group linguistic usage works. There are some terms that are perceived as offensive if people outside a particular group use them, but not if they’re used by members within the group. Nobody’s trying to impose or enforce that as a “rule”; they’re just pointing out that that’s the way it happens to be in the current state of the language.
Linguistic taboos don’t get lifted by proclamation or petition. If the n-word ever does become acceptable for general use, it will happen without any concerted efforts or fiats.
In the meantime, the reality remains that non-black people who use the n-word in any form do so at their own risk of being considered seriously offensive. If it doesn’t bother you and your friends to use it amongst yourselves, then knock yourselves out; nobody else has any business policing your private use of language.
But if you use it where other people can hear/see it and somebody’s offended by it and thinks less of you because of it, well, that’s the risk you chose to run. Tough shit for Miss Teen USA Karlie Hay and tough shit for the OP’s teenage kids. And tough shit for the OP’s own impotent anger at the people he chooses to consider “trolls and creeps” for being offended by white teenagers’ use of a word traditionally considered offensive—a word which in fact seems attractively “edgy” and daring to white teenagers precisely because it’s traditionally considered offensive.
ShoNUFF!
As for the OP:
Taboos in speech don’t really work that way. Or, to put it another way…
[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
Try using it and see how it goes.
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Let us know how that goes for you. If it works and you survive (and aren’t blasted verbally or physically), THEN it might be time to ‘lift the taboo on nigga’ for people who aren’t black. If you die, we will all know it’s not time, but your sacrifice won’t have been in vain.
Personally, even if society decides it’s time, I wouldn’t be comfortable using that term just because some black people use it. It has highly negative connotations for me, anyway, having grown up watching how the civil rights movement played out on my TV and having my parents generation so openly prejudiced towards black people, as well as seeing the latent prejudice still in our society. There is no real use, afaiac for that word nor what it represents, and no reason to remove the taboo from it IMHO.
I recall when someone had their ass handed to them for properly using the word “niggardly” and the OP is talking about the “free” use of “Nigga”?
I recall in boot camp during a class on Field Sanitation, one recruit decided to tweet our D.I. by claiming to be offended by the use of the word “chigger”. He went through the rest of his basic training being called “Cheegro” by everyone, training staff and recruit alike.
In many accents, nigger is pronounced nigga. For all practical purpses tehy are te same word.
I have been knownto call other black men “nigger” when we are not around white persons and when the black anin question is acting in a distatesful fashion. But from a white peron to a black person it is not acceptable; the cultural freight is too great. Similarly, I do not feel free to call my work wife a dyke, though her actual wife sometimes does.
If the OP is thinking about the controvery over the blone beauty queen currently in the soup for calling another young white girl nigga in text messages, I don’t care what white kids do among themselves. I am not her daddy.