5 ms·

There's a few things about this (specifically and in general) that are frustrating. Writing 'the n-word' is similar to saying 'the f word' or 'the c bomb' - ev

by Jedd 8y ago

There's a few things about this (specifically and in general) that are frustrating. Writing 'the n-word' is similar to saying 'the f word' or 'the c bomb' - everyone knows what we're referring to, and I suspect many simply mentally substitute the actual word as they read. There's some Le Guin style 'power of true names' thing going on with the myriad words that are somewhere on the sensitive-to-offensive spectrum for whoever you may be talking to or near. It's especially tricky for non-USA persons, as a lot of US pop-culture is exported, and it comes bundled with a surfeit of political, social, and historical cruft we are expected to track. In AU it famously caught out one of our comedians in 1979 during an award show, when he used the word 'boy' with Muhammad Ali [1] -- spectacularly neither the host, nor pretty much anyone watching in the ballroom or at home, had any idea it meant something other than someone younger than you, let alone something derogatory. The wonderful comedian Reginald D Hunter has a strong opinion on the matter -- basically that as long as we all keep skirting around certain words they'll maintain their regrettably powerful effect over people -- but he has the benefit of being in a demographic (black and a comedian) that, by social convention, can casually drop the word. Anyway, I love the idea, but I have no idea how we can get there from here. [1] Search: bert newton muhammad ali

djtriptych 8y ago
as far as the n-word and c-word, why not consider the opinion of black people and women in this argument?
- cfadvan 8y ago
  This may come as a shock, but neither group is really cohesive and homogenous, and therefore each present a multitude of opinions on the topic ranging from permissive to prohibitive.
  - djtriptych 8y ago
    This isn’t true.
- Jedd 8y ago
  > as far as the n-word and c-word, why not consider the opinion of black people and women in this argument? Not really an argument, and as noted above I already do - but find it tricky as it's a moving target (not just those two words, but the greater field of word choice), and it's not as though there's a regular 'all hands' meeting for black people, women, Irish, Asians, short people, people who like coriander, etc where they decide collectively what the official position will be for their demographic. As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. Living in Australia there's a bunch of generally harmless words that are evidently quite powerful in the US. Always amusing to hear stories from friends travelling through the US who get hateful looks for using pussy, fanny, arse, and of course the c word, in casual conversation. But we (I speak for all Australians, naturally) don't think you (everyone else on the planet) needs to track our cultural foibles.
  - dnomad 8y ago
    > As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. For future reference, this is a stupid idea. Certain words have derogatory "power" towards a group because there remains groups of real people who still possess possess real prejudice towards that group and want to dehumanize that group. Nobody cares if you call somebody a "Neanderthal" (extremely offensive, Neanderthals likely possessed an older and more refined culture than the hyperaggressive saipiens) but go to Japan and start talking about "Shina" or go to Germany and use "untermensch" and the fascists will come crawling out of the woodwork like ants drawn to sugar. There is no reason to believe that using words a lot would remove their power. Instead, history as shown again and again (open a book for gods sakes), normalizing such language only empowers the fascist elements and silences the victims. Normalizing these words is a prelude to bloodshed precisely because they are the leading edge in a real campaign to dehumanize real people. There's a reason the German pre-war press often referred to the traitorous Jews, the Rwandan radio stations often referred to Tutsis as cockroaches and Trump refers to immigrants as animals and rapists. This isn't about "political correctness," this is about removing real people from society.
  - djtriptych 8y ago
rayiner 8y ago
Let me respectfully submit that you’re missing the point. The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country. They live shorter lives, are more likely to be unemployed, make a third less income, are much more likely to be imprisoned, etc. Across the country they continue to live in the same neighborhoods their parents or grandparents were segregated into. Compare slurs addressed to Italian and Irish Americans which, though impolite, probably won’t get you black listed, because Irish and Italians reached economic and social parity with the rest of the country. Using the N-word is bad if you’re not black not because the word has any power, but because it is a litmus test for whether you acknowledge the reality of racial disparity in the US or instead choose to deny it. It can be hard for foreigners to understand, sure, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate. There’s lots of testy subjects in societies all over the world.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Thanks for your insights. In response to: > The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country. I'd say a) for those of us not in the US we notice that the 'power' of the word infiltrates the rest of the word, and b) that's not the reason. I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power. As noted above, I'm an outsider looking in, and I'm sure there's a lot of history and nuances that I'm oblivious to.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    > “I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power.” It still seems you really are committed to this point of view, that the word has power only because people continue to agree to a social convention of assigning power to the word. But I think this still continues to miss the point. It’s not at all about whether enough people choose to assign power to the word so as to force everyone at large to deal with it as a social issue. That’s a selfish way to look at it, like your free speech is your lawn and some punk kids drove their n-word social convention onto your lawn, and you’re yelling “get off my lawn” (as in, make this convention about this word go away). Thinking about it this way, the focus seems to be your freedom to say certain syllables without having to acknowledge any broader historical context about them. But instead consider that the word, apart from any chosen modern social agenda, does represent a huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people. It does so because of its historical meaning, the contexts within which it has been primarily used, and the clear usage as a racial slur spoken predominantly by white America towards black America. These are just the facts and context of the word, which we can look at and step back a second and say, well shit, a whole lot of those deviant racism problems are still going on today. And so maybe we ought to be sensitive and respectful and careful about its usage. This isn’t a social convention to give the word power. It’s not just held up by some stereotypes of progressivism just itching for something to be offended by. It’s an encoding that is highly related to racism problems that are still severe and still on-going and so treating that word, among a variety of types of hateful slurs, with sensitivity is a lot more about acknowledging that than it is about enshrining some syllables with a progressive agenda status. Overall, if this slightly limits your vocabulary or your ability to use it as a type of shock humor or something — well, that doesn’t seem that important by comparison. It’s not just some people agreeing “well word X is OK for crass humor, but word Y is off limits” ... rather it’s off limits because it commands a basic respect for certain on-going racist aspects of our reality. Maybe one day long after our current systemic racism has stopped, future people will look back at racial slurs of this era as silly words whose context they don’t understand, and are free to joke about. Sort of how we could look at British insults of the Shakespearean era, or insults of the American Revolutionary War (“turncoats”, “lobsterbacks”), and not feel the intense political charge and visceral hatefulness they evoked at the time of their origination. To us they are silly words. But that’s because the specific contextual meaning is not still going on, day to day, with visceral consequences for people in their daily lives. But for the racism contextualized by the n-word, it absolutely is still going on.

by Jedd 8y ago

djtriptych 8y ago

as far as the n-word and c-word, why not consider the opinion of black people and women in this argument?

cfadvan 8y ago
This may come as a shock, but neither group is really cohesive and homogenous, and therefore each present a multitude of opinions on the topic ranging from permissive to prohibitive.
- djtriptych 8y ago
  This isn’t true.
Jedd 8y ago
> as far as the n-word and c-word, why not consider the opinion of black people and women in this argument? Not really an argument, and as noted above I already do - but find it tricky as it's a moving target (not just those two words, but the greater field of word choice), and it's not as though there's a regular 'all hands' meeting for black people, women, Irish, Asians, short people, people who like coriander, etc where they decide collectively what the official position will be for their demographic. As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. Living in Australia there's a bunch of generally harmless words that are evidently quite powerful in the US. Always amusing to hear stories from friends travelling through the US who get hateful looks for using pussy, fanny, arse, and of course the c word, in casual conversation. But we (I speak for all Australians, naturally) don't think you (everyone else on the planet) needs to track our cultural foibles.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > As noted, I consider Reginald Hunter's opinion -- he thinks you, me, he, and everyone else should use the word a lot in order to remove / defuse its power. For future reference, this is a stupid idea. Certain words have derogatory "power" towards a group because there remains groups of real people who still possess possess real prejudice towards that group and want to dehumanize that group. Nobody cares if you call somebody a "Neanderthal" (extremely offensive, Neanderthals likely possessed an older and more refined culture than the hyperaggressive saipiens) but go to Japan and start talking about "Shina" or go to Germany and use "untermensch" and the fascists will come crawling out of the woodwork like ants drawn to sugar. There is no reason to believe that using words a lot would remove their power. Instead, history as shown again and again (open a book for gods sakes), normalizing such language only empowers the fascist elements and silences the victims. Normalizing these words is a prelude to bloodshed precisely because they are the leading edge in a real campaign to dehumanize real people. There's a reason the German pre-war press often referred to the traitorous Jews, the Rwandan radio stations often referred to Tutsis as cockroaches and Trump refers to immigrants as animals and rapists. This isn't about "political correctness," this is about removing real people from society.
- djtriptych 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago

Let me respectfully submit that you’re missing the point. The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country. They live shorter lives, are more likely to be unemployed, make a third less income, are much more likely to be imprisoned, etc. Across the country they continue to live in the same neighborhoods their parents or grandparents were segregated into. Compare slurs addressed to Italian and Irish Americans which, though impolite, probably won’t get you black listed, because Irish and Italians reached economic and social parity with the rest of the country. Using the N-word is bad if you’re not black not because the word has any power, but because it is a litmus test for whether you acknowledge the reality of racial disparity in the US or instead choose to deny it. It can be hard for foreigners to understand, sure, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate. There’s lots of testy subjects in societies all over the world.

Jedd 8y ago
Thanks for your insights. In response to: > The N word continues to have power in the US because black Americans continue to be second class citizens in their own country. I'd say a) for those of us not in the US we notice that the 'power' of the word infiltrates the rest of the word, and b) that's not the reason. I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power. As noted above, I'm an outsider looking in, and I'm sure there's a lot of history and nuances that I'm oblivious to.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  > “I suggest the actual reason is that the vast majority of people continue to tacitly agree that it maintain its power.” It still seems you really are committed to this point of view, that the word has power only because people continue to agree to a social convention of assigning power to the word. But I think this still continues to miss the point. It’s not at all about whether enough people choose to assign power to the word so as to force everyone at large to deal with it as a social issue. That’s a selfish way to look at it, like your free speech is your lawn and some punk kids drove their n-word social convention onto your lawn, and you’re yelling “get off my lawn” (as in, make this convention about this word go away). Thinking about it this way, the focus seems to be your freedom to say certain syllables without having to acknowledge any broader historical context about them. But instead consider that the word, apart from any chosen modern social agenda, does represent a huge and unsolved systemic discrimination and repression towards black people. It does so because of its historical meaning, the contexts within which it has been primarily used, and the clear usage as a racial slur spoken predominantly by white America towards black America. These are just the facts and context of the word, which we can look at and step back a second and say, well shit, a whole lot of those deviant racism problems are still going on today. And so maybe we ought to be sensitive and respectful and careful about its usage. This isn’t a social convention to give the word power. It’s not just held up by some stereotypes of progressivism just itching for something to be offended by. It’s an encoding that is highly related to racism problems that are still severe and still on-going and so treating that word, among a variety of types of hateful slurs, with sensitivity is a lot more about acknowledging that than it is about enshrining some syllables with a progressive agenda status. Overall, if this slightly limits your vocabulary or your ability to use it as a type of shock humor or something — well, that doesn’t seem that important by comparison. It’s not just some people agreeing “well word X is OK for crass humor, but word Y is off limits” ... rather it’s off limits because it commands a basic respect for certain on-going racist aspects of our reality. Maybe one day long after our current systemic racism has stopped, future people will look back at racial slurs of this era as silly words whose context they don’t understand, and are free to joke about. Sort of how we could look at British insults of the Shakespearean era, or insults of the American Revolutionary War (“turncoats”, “lobsterbacks”), and not feel the intense political charge and visceral hatefulness they evoked at the time of their origination. To us they are silly words. But that’s because the specific contextual meaning is not still going on, day to day, with visceral consequences for people in their daily lives. But for the racism contextualized by the n-word, it absolutely is still going on.