They both happened in the real world, and not the world of platonic forms. The point to you, clearly, is that until a preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that a particular person has been in a forest, they may not know about trees. And I think that’s great!
Um. I said real-world examples. I would agree that if you could, hypothetically, survey every person in the world, you could prove that the word “tablet” is not homophobic. But no one would need to do that, because no one thinks it is. But it is possible for someone to naiively use, and to naiively hear, a bigoted term, and for that usage to do objective harm.
And full disclosure, when I learned of the other term for “queer” I had a bias against homosexuals. I was a teenager in the 90s. Being a teenager meant I was kind of an asshole, and in the 90s people weren’t very accepting of LGBTQ folks. Remember that the film Philadelphia was released in 1993, and it was one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to address homophobia. It wasn’t until years later that I was enlightened; getting to know and befriending gay people helped, growing up helped, and our culture started being more accepting of different sexual orientations. I evolved.
I don’t think the game had anything to do with my attitude as a teen, but it did fit with it. It might have reinforced it, perhaps. It’s hard to psychoanalyze who I was 30 years ago, since that person doesn’t exist anymore.
Deciding a “queer” (the person who is “it” in a game of reverse-tag) is worthy of being tackled on account of their being the “queer” (“it”) is not homophobic. It has nothing to do with prejudice on the basis of orientation.
Deciding a “queer” (gay person) is worthy of tackled on account of their being “queer” (gay) is homophobic. This is explicit prejudice on the basis of sexual orientation.
If, twenty years from now, the word “stranger” acquires an incredibly homophobic connotation, that doesn’t make our use of it homophobic today. Our “stranger danger” lessons today aren’t homophobic based on some future meaning of the word "stranger’.
~Max
I’m sorry, but I don’t think I properly understand your analogy. I know, ironic, since I used the tree falling in the forest analogy.
~Max
This I agree with. If even one person makes the connection, then you have a problem. I thought you were arguing that if everybody in the room was naiive, there would still be harm.
~Max
There will be. You seem to be focusing on conscious intention, and conscious connection. If no one in the room knows any Jewish people or consciously connects the phrase to bigoted concepts, I’m saying that it will still have a harmful effect on their concept of Jews. Which harms them, Jewish people,and society. Because language is fundamental to the construction of culture.
If no one in the room mentally connects an utterance of “Jewed them down” to Jews, IMO that specific instance of “Jewed them down” doesn’t harm Jews whatsoever. It doesn’t contribute to a culture of Jewish greed stereotypes because it has no connection to Jews. It doesn’t have a connection to Jews, at least not yet, because nobody in the room mentally connected that specific utterance to Jews.
Likewise if no one present mentally connects an utterance of “smear the queer” to gay people, it seems that specific instance of “smear the queer” doesn’t harm gay people whatsoever.
In contrast, posting the word “queers” to a public message board where people will read it with a homophobic connotation is directly connected to homophobic culture.
~Max
OK. How the hell does one not connect that to Jews? I just don’t get it. “Gypped” I get. It’s a bit obfuscated. The root may not be obvious. But “Jewing down”? I didn’t knowingly meet a Jewish person until I was in college, to my knowledge, but the expression “Jew down” was clearly referencing Jews and the perception they are either cheap, in search of a bargain, shrewd business people, or otherwise value attention to pecuniary detail.
Because it is a given in the hypothetical,
~Max
But that’s a real-world example, according to the poster. It’s just … odd to me no one noticed that “Jew” there may refer to a Jew.
I’d say it’s like people who say and hear “go to Hell!” (or “how the hell”) without thinking about Hell at all.
Jewish people, even.
~Max
By “mentally” do you mean consciously?
Smear the queer wasn’t a hypothetical name of the game, it was the real name of the game. And, if Atamasama was unaware of the meaning of queer, somehow, in the 90s, that doesn’t mean that all of his friends and their parents and any new friends, and any people on the street, and any of the school friends (who may have been gay themselves) wouldn’t know what it meant.
Your example of “stranger” becoming a bad word doesn’t work, because it has the timeline backwards. Just like it’s not homophobic when Alice in Alice in Wonderland calls something queer, it wouldn’t be homophobic if someone today played “stranger ball” or whatever, if it later became something different. In this case, queer was already a homophobic slur and had been for decades.
Imagine a very young child one day blurts out an extremely offensive racial slur at the breakfast table. The child is not being racist - children parrot the words they hear. For the same reasons, the parents shouldn’t feel affronted or personally attacked by the use of the word.
Something shitty happened when the child was exposed to the word, and something shitty might happen down the road. But in this frozen moment in time, is any harm being done? I can’t see how.
But what do the parents do? They explain to the child that this word is not to be used - not even in the comfort and security of their own home. Not even if nobody else is around. They explain that it’s bad to say things that are hurtful, even if you don’t necessarily intend them to be hurtful.
And that’s where this whole “innocent children playing smear the queer” thing breaks down as a useful metaphor for informing behavior on the SDMB. We expect children to learn that a bad thing is bad and that you can’t claim “but I didn’t mean anything by it!” once you’ve been taught otherwise.
Around here, discussions about dehumanizing language always seem to go back to this place where posters argue that poor language must always be judged in the context of the individual poster, or that of course some language is bad, but the insults I use are all in good fun.
The difference is that we can tell children that unkind words are hurtful and you shouldn’t use them, but adults often reject the notion outright if it means introspection and personal change.
A Jewish friend frequently used the phrase “I Christianed him down”, which evoked the same connotation.
I don’t think so.
Well, that’s just silly. The boogeyman isn’t popping out of a mirror because of some situationally taboo incantation.
The use of racial/sexual/etc. slurs is forbidden in civilized discourse not because it might lead to imaginary phenomena like boogeymen popping out of mirrors, but because it perpetuates harmful and degrading mistreatment of minoritized groups.
Using slurs like the n-word or “Jew down” or “smear the queer”, even if the user isn’t aware of their offensive meaning, helps normalize the use of such terms and increases the likelihood that their offensiveness will come back to bite the user later.
Look at what happened when the British politician Michael Gove as recently as 2012 used the very common expression “welshed on the deal”, meaning backing out of or failing to honor a commitment. That idiom is commonly associated with historic English denigration of Welsh people, and Gove apologized for using it.
Neither he nor anybody else gets a free pass on using a term that is widely perceived as offensive just because they weren’t actually thinking of it as offensive or intending any offense.
No word is forbidden. There happens to be selective outrage.
Anyways, my comment was directed at the usage of words in private and how that causes real harm. It should be obvious that that assertion is not a fact.