If missing the point were an Olympic event, that post would win gold.
Oh, really? You are the one who, in order to make your point, compared what was said about the guys having the fraternity party to what would be said in a church setting.
This would be funny and on point - if they’d ever come for the real racists. But no, they left the real racists alone to prattle on ad nauseum, and then they came for me, and that’s what I don’t like one bit.
So the veiled hypocrisy accusation? Not going to work.
I have no idea where you got this. The invitation clearly states both fraternities are hosting the party. The article says nothing about it being a “coming out” party for AEPi. I am, however, terribly impressed that a South African is as familiar as you claim to be with the Greek system at SMU, a campus you’ve presumably never set foot on, that you know the Pikes there are “notoriously shitty.” You certainly are more familiar with the Pikes than I am, and I’ve been to their parties in the Big Ten.
Jew’s harp is fine.
As far as I know, so is “wandering Jew”, as the name of a plant. In neither case is “Jew” used as an adjective, so I’m not sure how either is relevant to what I said.
Jew as a noun, describing people who are Jewish, is fine. It’s the word that Jews use in polite conversation.
Jewish brothers <> Jew bros, just as negro <> nigger. Well, the difference is smaller, but the point is that small differences in spelling and pronunciation can have large differences in connotation.
It’s hard to compare linguistically to “Christian”, because that word is both the standard form of the noun and of the adjective, so useage is of course, different.
From wikipedia:
*According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (2000):
It is widely recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and highly offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, which is unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun.*
There’s a tipping point to these dynamics. I think the white people who are, now, so attached to the non-racist usage may have missed their chance to counter the racist-code appropriation. Where were you in 1992?
“The Wandering Jew is a figure in Christian mythology who is doomed to wander the Earth until the Second Coming, for rebuffing or striking Christ during his trip to Calvary to be crucified. The first recorded variation of the Wandering Jew archetype appeared in the writings of Roger of Wendover, a monk of St. Albans. In this version, he converted to Christianity and has since lived a godly life. However, the legend served to re-enforce the idea that Jews are a people cursed by God. It has been claimed that the prevalence of the Wandering Jew myth, and the accompanying belief that it proved that Jews were wicked, was a direct cause of antisemitic violence during the Middle Ages. The Wandering Jew was also adopted as a symbol by German antisemites in the nineteenth century. Tragically, this led to the Wandering Jew being used as propaganda in the Nazi Party.”
I like Tradescantias (botanical name for the genus of plants sometimes called Wandering Jews). Some of my best plant friends are Tradescantias. The long-standing popular name carries too much offensive freight and should be dropped.
If a black fraternity had some kind of get together with a black soriety and some sort of “controversy” erupted about said event…would a reference to the “bro hoes” be appropriate?
You know, Santa would be banned here if he said “HoHoHo” more than once.
You are welcome to believe that, but for me it’s akin to an alarm going off with certain sentence constructions. For unfamiliar phrases, reasonable people will have different thresholds.
Dibble’s post happened to set off my alarm. I’m currently taking it at his word that he had no ill-intent. I’m sympathetic to verbal error and think that reading too far into such things can be bad practice and highly dubious psychology. Weirdly when I searched the social media for “Jew bros” I did find within-group usages that did not trigger my internal alarm. I have no explanation for that. Sorry.
Being a patsy of instant-language definition–almost all most heavily backed and promulgated by middle class, educated whites, for they have the access to media and skills to take part in cultural debate–is to take part in a form of argument which, being nothing more than half-baked instant claims of a marked identity not particular interest one way or another to other people, is far more useful (and used) useful for those so invested in the new vocabulary of distinctions: it amounts to a vocabulary for a sexist, classist, racist, and pejorative mode of speaking and thinking of so many creators of new “problematic” language issues.
It is no accident that the most common birthplace for language police come from college students and their tender administrators (12 pronouns, anyone? cultural appropriation?), as students in college first confront the fact of declaring, or understanding, an identity, as not just any old high-school kid. Any identity, please God, let me be special. And to be special means to be able, depending, to being “a victim” to “having one’a feelings hurt.” Eventually one hopes they grow up.
See my first sentence. Am I anti-Irish? Am I taking part in a discourse where anti-Irish echoes are still uncomfortable and hurtful, even though I may have never known that “Pat” stands for any Irishman, but it does etymologically and if I didn’t know it I do now, as I am so often gently reminded? Even though it isn’t?
EYA: I greeted my friend with a “Yo, Jewbro!” today. Excellent.
Yes. In exactly the way that I would have Mod noted an American who used Hottentot, unaware that it was offensive to you, on the grounds that it was inappropriate…
Why do you keep coming back to harp on this? The construction is offensive in the U.S. because of anti-semitism. I do not presume that someone outside the U.S. who uses the construction is anti-semitic, but it remains inappropriate.
Like wise, the person who used the word “hottentot” in her name was black. So, by your own logic, that should’ve made it okay.
Social media chatter.
I didn’t say just Pike at SMU was notoriously shitty. They’re notoriously shitty everywhere. And I got that from the news articles, the last couple times they threw this same shit at other Unis. As linked in that other thread.
Colour me surprised…
Khoisan aren’t Black. She had about as much connection to the name as you have to the Emperor of Japan.
Are all those Jewish twitter and instagram users antisemitic?
Probably not, but they may occasionally say mildly anti-semitic things that they’re not aware of.
According to you. Well, you should let them know. You know, so you can help make them better people.
If I see or hear them do so, and am position to say this to them, I certainly will.