Out of 300 million people? Yes, I’m sure there are a few who are offended by that. Right wingers and racists sometimes seem to be offended by that term, for sure. There are probably some people who don’t like being lumped in with other non-white people as well.
So what? Are you claiming that if the announcer had referred to Harris as a person of color, he would have been fired? Because I’m dubious. If that’s not what you’re claiming, then what is the point of your post? Some people are easily offended? Whoa, really?
I am not claiming that the announcer would have been fired if he had referred to Harris as a person of color. The point of my post was that “[s]ome people are easily offended.”
There are probably also a significant number of older, less-educated African-Americans who would perceive the term as a back-handed way of referring to them as colored persons. And I would not want to offend them.
This point is brought up about a million times more often than is necessary or useful. I’d advise you to stop offering it, as it adds nothing to the discussion.
[quote=“Ynnad, post:101, topic:918775”]
What do you want to bet there are at least a few people in the United States that would be offended by the term “person of color”? [/quote]
About as many people as belong to The Flat Earth Society, I would guess.
I thought the whole point of this discussion was to learn how to avoid offending people. Therefore, I posit that it is very relevant to this discussion.
But it’s not relevant to attempt some kind of gotcha by reductio ad absurdum that some group of people can always be found who will take offence at virtually anything. It’s quite obvious that there are good reasons why the historical use of the word “colored” gives it significant semantic baggage.
This story seems so weird to me. WTAM is a station I’m very familiar with, as they are the local AM news station around here. For years and years and years I listened to Indians baseball on that channel. Then a few years ago they started broadcasting on WMMS FM, which was nice because the sound is better and I can pick it up on a radio that doesn’t have an AM receiver.
Now when I have to tune into the games on WTAM instead of WMMS (spring training or whatever) I am shocked and disgusted at just the commercials and the bumpers for this waste of airspace. It’s 100% commercials for old man medical appliances and “buy silver before the fed takes away your money” and clips of all their loony shows like Limbaugh and Beck. For years they ran commercials for this local cigar shop that was just a guy complaining about how much he hates his bitch of a wife and he spends all his time trying to ditch her and go to the cigar shop. Female baseball fans (at least those of us on Twitter) were none too pleased with Misogyny Cigars.
The worst is their daytime guy, Mike Trivisano, who has been on the station for eons and used to be boring and normal, then started trying to be a shock jock, and now he’s just devolved into whatever sort of old midwestern angry white guy you can imagine is acceptable in Trumpistan. That fucker turns my stomach, he’s so bad.
Anyway, WTAM is a shit station and they know it. Regular folks tune in for baseball (out of habit or because they like the postgame show, I suspect) and I am surprised if too many people who would be offended by the word “colored” heard the broadcast. And considering the programming the other 21 hours of the day, I am absolutely SHOCKED that the station took the action it did. Really, I don’t know how many listeners they thought they might lose over it. They might lose more listeners BECAUSE of the action.
I wonder if the Indians said “lose the kid or lose the contract” to be honest.
