I don’t think this article has been linked here yet:
“Is gingerism as bad as racism?”
I’m a redhead, but not of the copper-orange variety, more of a dirty strawberry blonde. I still find the whole Ginger-bashing thing really silly. It really just reflects on the small-mindedness of the people who do it more than anything, IMHO, as trite as that may seem.
I grew up in the US and never heard this term until South Park. The terms that I was aware of were “redhead” “carrot top” and “carrots”.
And remember, if you don’t want to have ginger kids, marry an Asian person. They don’t carry the recessive gene.
I had no idea I was opening up such a can of worms! I’ve always wanted to be a redhead, myself and spent a couple of summers drenching my dark brown hair with Sun-In. Remember that stuff? It turned my hair a brassy, brittle reddish brown.
I grew up in a small mill town full of Italians, Poles, Czechs and Hungarians so not a lot of redheads here. There were only three in my grade, out of the nearly 200 of us. I don’t remember them being picked on for their hair color. (On a tangent, one managed to shoot his eye out with a BB gun – no, really! But his being a redhead was never an issue. He was just a dipshit.)
Yeah, I think that’s the point. In most places it hasn’t been an issue (it certainly isn’t here in Sweden) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue everywhere. When people say that people should “just get over it” or that they “don’t see what the problem is” it is generally because they’ve not lived in areas where it is an issue. That can be seen in the comments to the BBC article I linked to, almost all that didn’t seem to think it was an issue were from North America.
It is like my Parents. I have an awful time trying to get them to stop calling the Chinese takeaway “the chinkey”. I’ve explained to them. I’ve used the example of my Chinese friend that was so quiet and mild and I only saw get violent once, when someone called him a “chink”. But they don’t get it. They say it is “just a word”. My Dad, for bonus points, will say something like “I don’t get angry or upset when on American calls me a Limey”, which is a spectacular level of not getting it to achieve. They’ve grown up in a world where no one knew or reacted to “chink” being insulting and as such they have just failed to get their head around why it is insulting. It is the same with “ginger”. It is insulting yet in some way redheads are one of the last groups it is OK to be bigoted about. I understand that in the likes of the US it hasn’t been, and as such many Americans have the same reaction as my Parents do to “chink”, but that doesn’t explain why it is still OK in the UK where prejudice against redheads goes back decades, perhaps even centuries.
I’m 37 and have had it my entire life. I still do, although living abroad it is rare and only when I come across other native English speakers. I shrug my shoulders and let it go, but every time I hear it there’s still a young kid in me that gets hurt. You can’t help it.
I was completely unfamiliar with the term growing up in the US as well.
This little clip from The Commitments is what schooled me. I was watching it on DVD with a friend and wondered to a friend if she was comparing him to drummer “Ginger” Baker. Whereupon I was informed both about the redhead thing and the fact that “Ginger” wasn’t Ginger Baker’s real name, which was also news to me ;).
And the ranga’s boyfriend might be referred to as a ranga banga.
I’ve never been called a ginger. Copper-top, yes, but not a ginger. I don’t have typical red-head coloring, I am fair skinned but not deathly white, and I have a ruddy undertone to my skin. Not many freckles either. My hair is more copper-red than orange-red, and I have very dark brown eyes. It’s my Native American ancestry coming out. 
I always thought ginger only applied to a red-headed guy. One of my red-headed friends calls himself a ginger all the time.
I’ve seen ginger Eurasians, it’s not a safe bet.
And “Blood Nut”.