I am surprised you can’t figure this out for yourself.
There is a distinct difference between using coarse language and using racial and sexual slurs. One may offend someone’s genteel sensibilities, the other is a direct insult. The former marks you as someone who can use coarse language, the latter marks you as an asshole.
I don’t ever use it as a racial insult since I learned it was a racial slur. I very rarely write it and say it orders of magnitude less. That said, I don’t think any word should be forbidden or taboo in adult company.
Even a thread like this where it’s natural to write and discuss it I’m still using pronouns.
It still makes me feel like shit though.
Wait, I hear “That’s my nigger” all the time whenever I’m around a black person who freely uses it. Maybe it’s a California thing but both forms are used interchangeably from everything I heard.
I’m Australian, so (in my experience) the word generally only exists as a concept in American media.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that any word is offensive in all contexts. I would never call someone ‘nigger’ hatefully, but would have no qualms doing so jokingly/playfully with friends. In the same way that I would never call someone ‘retard’ or ‘honky’ or ‘fag’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘boomer’ to be hurtful, but have no qualms jovially calling friends any of these things (particularly while gaming).
Nor do I believe that there is anything wrong with using the word in discussion (like this one), or singing lyrics, or reading a book aloud.
I find the American habit of calling it ‘the N-word’ to be laughably juvenile (and similar for ‘the F-word’ or ‘the C-word’ or what have you). Instead of the listener hearing the word, you’re now forcing the listener to conjure the word in their head by alluding to it. You haven’t spared anyone’s feelings, all you’ve done is converted the offending material from audial to mental.
Is there a slur used in Australia to refer aboriginal people?
Sounding like nonsense is no guarantee that something isn’t happening. This is distinctly a concept and ongoing discussion right now.
I feel like it’s the same in the UK, but it must have been in common use in the past because I’ve read it in old books. Maybe in areas with a large black community it sees some use, but I don’t live near one.
It just wouldn’t occur to me to use it, or really any racial slur. I didn’t even learn a lot of them until adulthood, some I think from this very board. And I wish I hadn’t, to be honest. Ultimately racist people are to blame for creating them.
There are several, though I’ve only really heard two of those in the wild: abo and boong.
As a white guy born in South Africa (though I left when I was very young), I’m familiar with many more slurs for black Africans.
In both cases (slurs against black Africans, or slurs against indigenous Australians), these words are considered offensive when used in a certain way – most notably when person A calls person B out of derision. But, as far as I’m aware, there’s just nowhere near the same kind of attitude that the word ought never to be named in any context (like nigger or Voldemort).
Australia does not have the same history of race relations, nor the same history with the word that the US does.
I totally get Black people saying it, however exactly it’s pronounced, and it still being off-limits to white people.
Jews can say a lot of words that we’d bristle hearing from gentiles. If a gentile called something “Yiddisher kop,” that would be beyond weird, and if a gentile referred to a woman as “Jappy,” them’s fightin’ words, although I know a few women who refer to themselves this way-- mostly self-deprecatingly.
Once when I was driving somewhere with some other Jewish women, we got a flat tire, and the woman who owned the car was about to call her auto club, when I said “Let me put on the spare,” which I proceeded to do in less than 10 minutes. Then I asked her where she bought the tire. She didn’t know, but I found the receipt for it in her glovebox. We drove to the nearest branch of the place she’d gotten the tire, and she had a road hazard warranty on it, so they replaced it for free, and put the new tire back on the car. All done in an hour. We probably would have waited longer than that for roadside assistance.
I looked at the other tires and noticed one had lost its balance weight, so I told her she should spend the $10 or so it took to have the wheel taken off, balanced, and remounted. She did, and said the car handled a lot better afterwards.
Upshot of the story if that one of the women said to me I was lucky my parents hadn’t raised me “Jappy.” Now, in strict point of fact, my parents didn’t teach me anything about cars-- I learned it all on my own-- but they did raise me not to be afraid to seek to learn things like that. Anyway, she said she got nervous just filling up her gas tank, and wouldn’t know how to use a tool to save her life.
If a gentile ever commented that helpless Jewish women who were raised always to believe there’d be someone there to do things for them, and they didn’t need to learn to take care of themselves were “Japs,” he’d get an earful-- or maybe an eyeful of knuckles-- I don’t know-- but it would make my blood boil. When a Jewish woman calls herself that, it just makes me sad, because I know she means it.
And I’ve used the word as well, but I have to be pretty pissed off to use it-- like the time someone actually suggested I was less than Jewish by virtue of my collection of power tools, and my ability to lift them over my head with one hand. She was the kind of woman who had a standing appointment with “her” manicurist, whom she called by her first name, but expected to be addressed back as Mrs.
Now, I know there are people who think the word should never be used, but it has a history, namely that late 19th & early 20th century immigrants were amazed at the lives Jews were allowed to lead in the US, that they could dress like the nobility in Europe, if they wanted to, and treat their children like royalty. And so they did. There are lots of jokes about it that Jews find hilarious, and gentiles don’t even get. But for a generation of new immigrants it was a matter of pride that their children didn’t know how to do a lot of things-- how to make their own candles, how to sew a buttonhole by hand, how to pluck a chicken-- because as Americans, they didn’t have to.
It just got a little (OK, a lot) out of hand.
Oh, no, the attitude in South Africa with “the k-word” is even harder than with nigger. No-one is “taking kaffir back”, and there is no dialectal variant of it that Blacks use.
I used it in college a lot whenever a black guy hit on me. It was the fastest way to get rid of them.
Wow.
“Hey, aren’t you in my Sociology class with Dr Renkin?”
“N****!”
Hitting on someone at my college meant more than casual conversation. It was approaching with overt sexual intent. Since, I was someone who was obvious about not ever being interested in casual sexual relations, they deserved as much insult as possible, delivered as hatefully as possible, in my opinion.
You wore a sign, like a sandwichboard?
I was first introduced to “JAP” when I was in graduate school. Two of my labmates were Jewish–James and Esther. Esther was sweet but very feminine and didn’t come across as an intellectual heavyweight. She also wasn’t a hard worker and liked to ask for favors from the rest of us without offering anything in return. For instance, we were at the whims of the tide schedule (as well as our own classes and teaching schedules). Friday was often the only day that worked with people’s schedules for driving out to the marsh to get animals for experiments and the like.
Esther was Orthodox. The trip out to the field could be for 8:00 AM on Friday morning, to a location just down the road a little, but she wasn’t going. Because if the car broke down and we ended up being stranded on the side of the road for 12 hours, then she’d break the Sabbath and that was a no-go. (Mind you, this was in the era of cell phone technology. And we were working in northern NJ. Not Bumfuck). So she would always ask us to bring back critters for her while she stayed behind and played with her orchids (I’m not kidding at all).
Which would have been tolerable if she ever went out on the field the other six days of the week. But she always had something else to do.
It infuriated everyone, especially the other women in the lab. But no one was as mad as James. “She’s such a JAP!” he would often hiss behind her back. He broke it down for me once because I was so confused. I had never heard of the stereotype because all the Jewish women I had known up to that point seemed to be the opposite of that. Our graduate advisor was a prime example of the anti-JAP.
(James would crack me up sometimes. Esther would tell everyone that she attended Columbia, which is where James went for undergrad, and then James would cut in and say “No, you went to Barnard, Esther!” He died unexpectedly last year. He was such a cool guy. Esther was a trip, but she wasn’t as awful as he made her out to be. Just a little insufferable.)
So instead of learning not to hit on people who didn’t want to be hit on, they learned that they think you’re a racist?
My mother was Jewish and I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. My dad was Protestant or Presbyterian, one of the “P” religions that celebrate xmas. We had an xmas tree, menorah, but did not go to church or shul.
Anyway, there were cookies my mom used to make that were filled with apricot goo. They were delicious. I found very similar cookies at a specialty store, sold frozen. We heat them up in the toaster oven and have one after dinner as a special treat. I call them “Jew Cookies” .
The last time my mother-in-law was over to visit my gf asked her and I if we would like Jew Cookies. MIL was shocked; covered her face with both hands until she was able to get her act together. We explained where the name came from and that it was meant with love.
A sandwich board in the form of a rather large wedding ring. Also, my clothing style was highly modest at the time.
Remember that you’re talking to someone to whom holding out your hand for a handshake is tantamount to a rape attempt…