back in the 2000s, if you said the N-word, everyone around you said “OMG, what a racist shithead! I’m not talking to you anymore! Go to hell!” and you lost all your friends.
In the 2010s, if you say the N-word, half of the people around you say “YEAH, right on, fuck political correctness! Fucking special snowflakes offended by a word! FREE SPEECH, LIBTARDS!” and the other half beats you to a bloody pulp and works hard to track down your workplace to get you fired and tracks down your address to deliver 100 pizzas, and a riot forms between the two sides trying to decide how they should treat the guy who said the N-word, and it ends up on the news.
What happened when you said the N-word in other decades? If you said the N-word in the 1950s, did people just not respond at all?
So basically there’s a linear trend with usage of the N-word becoming more socially punishable over time.
At this rate, the 2030s will have vigilantes programming web crawlers to find instances of the N-word all over the internet, and AI getting their dox and sending automated messages to their employers and parents and friends. It’s a dystopian future.
1> There’s a non-linear but long term trend in our society that being an asshole is less acceptable in public, yes.
2> You know the meaning and history of the word, don’t be obtuse about it and pretend it isn’t anything wrong.
3> Social pressure has existed as long as society and tribes. As our population gets larger and the interconnectivity of the world greater, aiming a vicious group based insult at someone can have a larger audience that you intended. This is no longer the village to village majority ethnic group controls the conversation world that allows such things with only limited consequences. It honestly doesn’t matter if you don’t like it or don’t agree with it. It is a consequence of democratization and modern communications.
Oh, I can already see the posts…so it’s okay to say if I’m not angry? No, not then or now. I can honestly say, to the best of my recollection, I’ve never uttered (though I have thought) any “racist” term in anger. Have it used it in a joke, yes. Would I do it today, no.
I suspect people who missed this thread first time (probably because of its less-than-clear title) were intrigued by the OP as they’d recently posted another couplethreadsthat screamed “just joined” but surprisingly that was not the case, so they were looking into their posting history. But I’m just speculating.
And the rise in the unacceptability of the word nigger is directly parallel to the rise in unacceptability of racism in general, no surprises there.
In 1856, if you said that slavery was evil, someone might come up to you later and beat you half to death (while a friend held off any defenders with a gun) - and the guy who beat you would be hailed as a hero (by people who admire cowards), receive no jail time and be voted into high office.