As an American Indian, I find it ridiculous when people try and lump Columbus in with everyone else and more so to call him a slippery slope.
That GENOCIDAL FAILURE of an explorer who became a thing almost accidentally should have been the first to go a long ass fucking time ago, but since Natives have been all but wiped out, they don’t have as loud of a voice. Which is why you will STILL see them portrayed as ‘spiritual folk of the land’ and spoken of as if they ARN’T a disparate group of people with 100’s of tribes.
Depends. I’m reminded of the response of the mother of the Nigerian actor Uzoamaka Aduba when she told her mother she wanted to change her first name to Zoe because “nobody can pronounce it”:
It’s not about the intrinsic difficulty of pronouncing a particular foreign name. It’s about the fact that some types of difficult foreign names are presented as more “normal” and consequently there’s an expectation that speakers should and will learn to pronounce them, while other types of difficult foreign names are just regarded as “exotic” and “weird” and nobody should be expected to get them right.
Nancy Pelosi, never very good when it comes to the Constitution, says, "You can’t yell ‘wolf’ in a crowded theater
Three problems here which make this especially stupid:
It’s yell fire, not wolf
She’s quoting bad law, the actual functioning precedent is Brandenburg vs. Ohio. Why people continue to use that quote is beyond me, since it was part of an opinion that was overturned like 100 years ago
She endorses the hecklers veto, inferring that if an alt right protest incites violence from the other side, they can’t speak.
I endorse that message, without the “it makes me feel like I don’t exist”, and acknowledging the fact that it’s not a white thing. Every other minority language will butcher your name too. Probably worse. I dare say that Americans go further to pronounce names correctly, probably due to our diversity, than any other culture. In my experience, no Spanish speaker has ever even made an attempt to pronounce my name correctly. It’s not offensive, it’s just something you understand when people have a different native tongue.
That’s why I interpreted that video as a great example of millenials’ “it’s all about me” attitude. Now I don’t normally complain about millenials, they are the most well adjusted generation I’ve ever seen, but everyone has their thing, and self absorption is theirs.
Actually, a better interpretation than self-absorption is the idea that everyone should think you matter. That’s a consequence of spending all your time around family and friends when you’re young, rather than being out in the world early like my generation was. We learned quick that we don’t matter to everyone.
You say it makes you feel like you don’t exist? You don’t to 99.9% of the people on this Earth. Realizing that is part of growing up.
From the same people that have helped blow the “They took him off the game because of his name!!!” thing out of all proportion. So yes, we should care.
And regarding the “How dare people not pronounce my name properly” thing - too bad. That’s life as a foreigner everywhere.
Um. Except that AFAICT nobody in that video was saying anything like “How dare people not pronounce my name properly”. They were saying that it feels bad when other people don’t even try to pronounce their name properly or act as though having to try to pronounce a difficult name is an unfair burden that they should get to avoid if possible.
(Moreover, AFAICT, not all those people were “foreigners” in the cultures they were growing up in. They were minorities, but that’s not the same thing.)
Non-English speakers don’t try to pronounce my name correctly. And I take that well because they are foreigners and it’s rude to criticize their accent.
As for people not even trying, first, you have to matter to them, as I said before, and second, on the scale of annoying things I’d say it rates about where someone taking forever in the express line at the grocery store rates.
My wife has a frequently butchered name that Americans as well as non-French speakers can’t pronounce, and it is an annoyance. It’s also funny, and it does not diminish her sense of self-worth. If it does, then you’re too soft to leave your parents’ nest. I’d advise people like that to never come out, because it only gets worse.
If people were to going to express outrage either way (which is a hypothetical since we don’t know what the reaction would have been if Robert Lee broadcast the game), what was the fairest thing to do?
Many would argue that re-assigning an Asian-American with an extraordinarily common name in order to placate hypothetical outrage borne of shear ignorance was not the way to handle it.
Personally, I’m not sure it would have been a big deal at all. And I don’t think Robert Lee should pay the price for the anticipated idiocy of our society.
If your fellow human being doesn’t matter enough, that’s a problem. You should care at least enough about other people to get their name right.
Do you or your wife face racism on a daily basis? Or is it just this one thing?
And this “too soft” argument needs to be extinguished. There is no such thing. It is bully talk for an excuse to do things that hurt other people. You have no right to tell someone else to toughen up. Just be a decent person and don’t try to hurt them.
You don’t face racism, so don’t tell people who do how they should feel. Hell, outside of right and wrong, don’t tell people how to think, period.
If others don’t matter to you, then you’ve just admitted to being a psychopath. No, not everyone in the entire world needs to care about every other person, but if you can’t care about the person you are currently interacting with, then you are an asshole, and it’s our job to try and discourage you from being an asshole.
Good people care about others. Bad people don’t. One of the main reasons Trump is evil is that he only cares about himself.
The only reason to even be nice or polite to other people is that they matter to you.
