It is standard for any set of groups to have in-words and out-words that are acceptable when used in reference to oneself (if one is in the group) and unacceptable when used in reference to a member of a group to which one does not belong.
Thus, my Polish-descended friends (metro Detroit) are free to refer to themselves as Polacks while I, with my German-Irish ancestry, am not so permitted. (As a word becomes less pejorative, the boundaries tend to become less solid and, in 2018, Polack barely counts as an insult–a point that was not true 60 years ago.)
These are human conventions that are not bound by feelings of trying to create some universal, ultimate, and absolute set of rules. It has always been thus and trying to set up an external set of rules fails on the point that no one has voted to establish those rules.
Demanding that if a word is taboo for your cohort it must also be taboo for all people simply flies in the face of human reality. (It does nothing to help your opinion that around 99.99% of the time, the person demanding the imposition of your rule is a member of an out-group who is desperate to fling an insult at a member of an in-group. You may be part of the 0.01% for whom this is not true, but history and human nature do not support you in this.)
The act of changing the pejorative nature of a word, (at least within one’s own cohort), to an acceptable term is known as reclaiming a word.
Examples of such phenomena in language include yankee, geek, Impressionist, Tory, queer, (still in transition), etc. Eventually, (as with Impressionist and Tory), the word may lose its pejorative nature for all, but that is not something that can be legislated from the outside.
Now, you specified racial insults, but the same rules of society and language apply to any insult, racial or not.
I can accept all of that tomndebb, but that wasn’t really the sort of rule I was talking about. I could have been clearer. What I meant was I don’t think it’s a good idea to say group X can throw racist insults at group Y while at the same time saying group Y can’t ever throw racist insults at group X. Ideally, we don’t want anyone throwing racist insults at anyone, but that becomes impossible if we entertain double standards about racist insults.
What I mean is, if you have lying fucks like Dibble using words like wypipo, it becomes harder to argue that whites shouldn’t call black people thugs or coloureds or whatever, and that’s a state of affairs that’s bad for everyone.
Wait, so Dibble can take my words, twist them beyond recognition and then use the resultant distortions to claim - with a straight face - that I literally support dragging uppity blacks out into the woods to be lynched even though he KNOWS that’s a lie, and that’s apparently OK. But if I point out the objectively undeniable fact that he totally looks like the kind of guy who would roofie a twelve year old’s ice cream, suddenly I’m the one who’s crossing the line?
Well…maybe you’re right. But given that he said I was pro-lynching, I don’t really feel bad about it.
Of course it does. How on Earth could it not? If you use racist slurs, you lose the moral authority to tell other people not to. Why is that so unreasonable?
What you’re not taking into account is privilege. When you have privilege and those in your group are placed above other groups, then under the “shit rolls downhill” principle your expressions have the extra force granted to your privilege group. When a white man calls a woman a fat bitch or a black person the N-word it has extra force because society says that the marginalized person has just been slapped down by the person with more power in the interaction. White men always punch down (with the only exception being a poor white man taking on a rich one), and that weight is there. When a woman or a POC fights back by punching UP they do not have that extra weight of privilege, they don’t have the added societal force going for them and the playing field is NOT equal, so for the one with greater privilege to insist that the marginalized observe the “same” rules without having the same level of privilege is just another way of enforcing privilege and power.
Also, “white” is NOT a race so that’s pretty fucking disingenuous to insist that a POC using “wypipo” is a racial slur–if that seems unfair it’s probably just because you’re pissed that your privilege is not getting you the deference you think is due to you and perhaps you ought to sit with that for a while. White people have all the power in this society by default, and racism is a thing that only exists in a power gradient. Shit rolls downhill, that’s why a white person using a racial slur is racist but a black person using “wypipo” is not. Does that seem unfair? Think about how uncomfortable that makes you then multiply that by a million times and 400 years and get back to me that things need to change for you.
Technically, “human” is it but, as we all know when we aren’t being pedantic trying to score passive aggressive points on a message board, we’ve invented these racial constructs in order to justify treating easily identifiable “others” as inferior and therefore deserving of whatever shitty treatment we want to dish out. Hence John Lennon’s “Woman Is the N*gger Of The World.”
Since white people have, historically, been the leaders in imperialism and unwilling colonization of other lands they got to be the ones who decided what race was what and still basically decide who gets what level of privilege based on current ideas of who’s the shit and who’s just shit. I mean, Irish didn’t used to be “white” but now they are–amazing, ain’t it?
You’re going to have to define exactly what you mean by ‘privilege’ if you want to go down this route. How are you quantifying it? How are you measuring it? To what extent is it an objective phenomenon in the first place? If a majority of a supposedly privileged group sincerely believe they are oppressed, in what way does it make sense to call them privileged? To what extent do their realities and lived experiences inform the conversation? You can’t just blunder in, proclaim “You’re wrong because Privilege, so there!” and declare victory. That’s just using privilege as a conversation stopping buzzword.
How are you defining ‘group’? Surely you’re not naive enough to believe that the lines of demarcation in society are as simple as “White people are in group A, black people are in group B, and A beats B”. What of the subdivisions within those groups? How do they engage in power games with one another? To what extent do they overlap? Are cisgender middle-income college educated light-skinned blacks from Sacramento innately less privileged than white working class trans women from Appalachia? Is their (alleged) lack of privilege in no way ameliorated by their cosmopolitan accents, trendier clothes, greater verbal dexterity and all-round increased ability to present themselves as professional and financially stable? If not, why not? And if they trade racial insults, who is really shitting on whom?
Of course, if we just all agreed that all racial insults are wrong all the time, no exceptions, we wouldn’t need to get into any of this.
Society is not a monolith. It’s fractured along multiple axes. If the force of an insult is exacerbated by relative power discrepancies between groups, then it’s not as simple as saying “when a white man calls a black person the N word”. There’s no such thing as an archetypal white or black person. Therefore, the identity of the “marginalised” person is situational. Sidebar: It’s an interesting fact of sociology that when you collate social averages (race, wealth, education etc…) into a single profile you get a description that doesn’t actually fit anyone.
This is a dreadfully simplistic understanding of privilege. To say white men always punch down assumes that white privilege simply cannot be surmounted by other identities, which is ridiculous. Who would have an easier time getting into an Ivy League school, a middle class black kid with a private tutor or a dirt poor white kid with an alcoholic mum? If these two kids racially insulted one another, by what metric could the white kid be said to have enough privilege to be “punching down”?
To me, this sounds like you think black people should be exempt from the rules of civilised behaviour that everyone else is expected to follow. It reeks of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Also, again, whether someone is punching up or down is situational. For instance, this is a left leaning message board with a healthy complement of progressives to whom the logic of intersectionality is appealing. Mr Dibble (who, lest we forget, is a lying toad) can, therefore, be assured that he will probably be treated more sympathetically than any white conservative he chooses to insult. Can he still be said to be punching UP? Especially since, in the GD thread, he threw the first racist insult?
No-one cares about that.
Salty, salty…
This is laughably untrue. First of all, whites aren’t the highest earners. They also kill themselves in greater proportion than any other group. There are cities in America where whites are a minority of the population at every level of government. Whites have the lion’s share of political power but that’s largely because they comprise about 75% of the US population. Saying they have ALL the power is just ridiculous. It’s like saying they have all the money, or all the food or something.
You’re conflating racism between individuals with institutional racism. Bottom line: If five black guys murder a white guy for being white that’s a racist hate crime. If you disagree, what would you call it instead?
But if racism only exists in power gradients, then whether the white person is racist depends entirely on whether or not he has more power than the black person. As I’ve explained, when it comes to power, skin colour usn’t The be all and end all of everything. If the black person has more power than me, then “wypipo” is racist.
Of course, this all depends on accepting all this racism = prejudice + power nonsense in the first place. Which I don’t. Because it’s ridiculously vague and overly simplistic and doesn’t stand up to rigorous interrogation. I ascribe to a more straightforward doctrine: “Racial slurs are always wrong. 100% of the time. No exceptions.”
What it lacks in convoluted sophistry it more than makes up for in elegance and effectiveness. Give it a try.
Boy do you have historical myopia. Colonialism and conquest have been active all throughout history on every continent. 2000 years ago much that is today China was something else not Chinese; in Africa Bantu speakers came out if the west displacing the peoples who had previously lived there; in the Americas it was the Aztecs and Incas, the Sioux and other native tribes. All that was different about euro colonialism was their levels of technology.
It’s a thread, people can read what you actually wrote - you know, the part where you call for eugenic murder for people who don’t like a racist word. Teasing out the uncomfortable implications of your words in context “is twisting them beyond recognition”? Sure, buddy. Next, I expect it was all “hyperbole”, yeah?
You backpedal as hard as you can. Like I said, not as entertaining as one might hope - more like a sad clown on a unicycle.
A whiteface clown, of course.
You are a pathetic racist troll and have been from your very first post to this board. No wonder you sink to stalking and a pathetic attempt at doxing me. I must have *really *chapped your hide.