Color me curious.
What city? What college? What decade?
Last one, did you have an equally offensive name for the white guys who hit on you?
Yeah, the handshake thing always had me headshaking, but the idea of calling a colored person a “nigger” for having the audacity to express interest in you is… a whole 'nother thing.
Really shouldn’t be all that strange to someone who says “colored person” …
I struggled with my wording there. I started with “black person” as she characterized it, didn’t think that felt right, and “person” didn’t carry her particular view forward either, so… There we go.
OK, no worries, just letting you know how that construction comes across. But I get that flubs happen.
Undergraduate was in Texas and Virginia. Graduate school was Virginia. It was the 80s. And lastly, I never had a white guy hit on me. If one had, I would have used whatever I thought was the most offensive name possible when telling him to go to hell also.
Why wouldn’t you use the same word for white guys? Why did only black guys warrant that specific word, in your view?
Because nigger isn’t as hurtful or convey the same degree of utter contempt when applied to white guys as it does when used on black guys.
So you were willing to use a rhetorical tool of white supremacy against black men who did nothing worse than expressing romantic interest in you? Are you willing to use tools of white supremacy for other aspects of your life, or only against black men in these circumstances?
There’s two reasons one might want to avoid saying the actual word. One is an awareness of the audience - I don’t say “fuck” in the presence of my mother because she’s a fucking baby when it comes to swear words, and will become so myopically focused on the fact the word “fuck” was spoken aloud that she’ll tune out the rest of the conversation.
The other reason not to say the word is because you don’t like the taste of it. I don’t like saying, or typing, “nigger”. Unlike normal swear words, which have no offense to their meanings aside from what idiots impart them, “nigger” and other racial/bigoted slurs are nasty words used by nasty people. Yeah, sure, I get that youngsters are trying to normalize it, like how my generation overused “fuck” so hard that nowadays only old folks think it’s more offensive than “shit”, but in terms of the ‘reclamation’ of “nigger”, I’m an old folk. So I resist using the word.
First off, they weren’t expressing “romantic interest”. They were expressing the desire to have sex with me which is insulting as hell to anyone that believes considers sex only for a marriage relationship and a marriage is only possible for me with someone of my own culture and ethnicity. I’ve always been open about that (i.e., it usually comes up in conversation immediately when people ask about dating or family relationship). I wasn’t married in college, but I wore a wedding ring and used Mrs. for introductions in order to avoid men trying to flirt with me. If some guy can’t read those signs that I wasn’t to be bothered with, or let’s be realistic, choose to ignore them in order to suggest I engage in an immoral act, I’ll use whatever tools are available to get rid of him. And I am not light skinned enough to qualify as white.
What probably happened in real life, is that any Black male who approached ZPG was automatically categorized in her mind as a sex-crazed animal, while White males were just seen as normal.
She sees Black men as niggers, plain and simple.
I see most men as sex-crazed animals until proven otherwise. I have never had any less distrust for white males whose privileges gives them more opportunities to be rapists than I have distrust for black males.
I think even you can recognize how outside the norm this attitude is for a college student, and while that part of it is not my business, using what is probably the worst and most insulting racial slur there is to discourage others from perfectly typical college-student behavior is despicable.
Bothering a woman who makes it obvious she wants nothing to do with men is utterly despicable and merits at the least most vile slur the woman wants to use.
If this thread is all about ZPG_Zealot now, I want to take the opportunity to ask how exactly a man can prove he’s not a sex-crazed animal. Is there some sort of notarized document that would do it?
Thanks for answering the question. Your race and skin color are irrelevant for this discussion – you chose to use the rhetorical tools of white supremacism against black men because they behaved in a way you found inappropriate due to your culture. Similar, in fact, to the way that many Southern white people used the tools (rhetorical and otherwise) of white supremacism against black men because they behaved in a way they found inappropriate due to their culture (say, dating or expressing interest in a white woman). Those Southern whites, including many in the KKK, certainly believed that a black man wanting to date a white woman was “utterly despicable and merits at the least most vile slur” and worse.
""the question is this: have you or do you use the N-word “seriously”, by which I mean not quoting somebody else, not rapping, not kidding… But in a rude way With full racist intention.
No. Rarely even in jest because I’m not comfortable accepting the baggage associated with it. I heard it all the time from family (AR, MO, MS, KS) when I was growing up and worked out it was not a particularly friendly descriptor. Also, I was assured by mother that, “There are black people, and then there are…” And since the few black kids I knew seemed alright it just never became a go-to word for me. So not because I’m a good person, but because I tend to get along with people (IRL, you people are another story).
Army story: I was fresh out of Basic (where I was way too surprised to learn black folks can get a suntan), living in barracks. My first night there I wandered into the common area to watch TV. There were a couple guys already there trying to decide what to watch. The black one rattled off something in Arabic and yielded to the preference of the white guy. Out of curiosity I asked the black guy what he’d said. He repeated it, and said it was akin to “eenie meenie mienie moe”. I must have gotten a slightly uncomfortable look because he doubled down,
“You know. 'Eeenie Meenie Mienie Moe.” [slower cadence, hard stare]
“Catch a negro by the toe
If he hollers let him go”
At which point the white guy broke in with “What’s this ‘let him go’ shit!”
And that’s how I met my first two army buddies.
My race and skin color are as relevant to the discussion as are the race and skin color of the men involved. A woman is justified in using whatever tools are at her disposal to repel unwanted attention by men, especially tools that do not require physical violence. Hitting on a woman who obviously wants men to leave her alone is basically a threat of victimization. Returning the insult in kind is quite appropriate.
Another thing you have in common with those old Southern white supremacists – trying to rationalize, again and again, using the tools of white supremacism, because someone did something your culture finds inappropriate. Most folks who think using the tools of white supremacism are wrong and never justified probably won’t find this convincing, any more than we think the attempted rationalizations of those old Southern racists are convincing.