4 ms·

> Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. I'm seriously trying to figure out the riddle of how any of these terms are

> Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. I'm seriously trying to figure out the riddle of how any of these terms are remotely racial.

amluto 4y ago
I’ll give it a try, not necessarily successfully: Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.) Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized. Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color. At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)
- superfrank 4y ago
  > Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. I'm guessing the logic is something similar the absolutely ridiculous (IMO) graphic I've linked below from the National Museum of African American History & Culture which lists a lot of aspects of white culture in the United States. One of the many items on their list was the "Protestant Work Ethic" and a few bullet points about how hard work equals success. https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=20 https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2...
  - throwawayacc5 4y ago
    The first time I saw that I was convinced it was a 4chan troll. I was so sure it was an elaborate 4chan ruse that when shared by someone else at work I instinctively told them it's a racist 4chan meme and they shouldn't be sharing that at work. It took some back and forth with links from the actual museum before it hit me that it was real. I was speechless.
    - amluto 4y ago
      The link in that tweet is IMO quite problematic, too: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten... Since when are “white people” a monolithic group with all these privileges? There are many different groups of people who would be generally considered white, and they have very diverse stories, privileges, and disadvantages. There are plenty of so-called white people who do not feel they have all these privileges. Just to pick on an easy one: > I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed Many “white” women would disagree with this, although the extent might depend on where they go shopping. There are clearly many forms of discrimination that happen due to the ability of some groups to be easily recognized at a quick glance (regardless of whether that recognition is accurate), but that is far from the only form of social injustice in the US.

> Urban, vibrant, hardworking, and brown bag all crash to earth for subtle racism. I'm seriously trying to figure out the riddle of how any of these terms are remotely racial.

amluto 4y ago

I’ll give it a try, not necessarily successfully: Urban, in the sense of urban or inner city youth, might be a reference to black children. (Or it might not. And one might actually be referencing urban things in the sense of not suburban or rural.) Vibrant: makes, ahem, people living with color blindness feel marginalized. Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. Brown bag: I’m guessing this is in a similar category to “tarball” from the rather regrettable list out of Stanford recently: it has nothing whatsoever to do with equity or inequity, but one might imagine an alternative etymology in which it has an inequitable meaning, connotation or origin. So brown bag could somehow be about brown people, even though as far as I can tell, neither the origin of the phrase nor any common uses are at all related to skin color. At this rate, we risk running out of English words. Fortunately, English has a lot of words :)

superfrank 4y ago
> Hardworking: I’m struggling to come up with something even as credible as the last two. Maybe it’s ableist: some people can’t work hard. I'm guessing the logic is something similar the absolutely ridiculous (IMO) graphic I've linked below from the National Museum of African American History & Culture which lists a lot of aspects of white culture in the United States. One of the many items on their list was the "Protestant Work Ethic" and a few bullet points about how hard work equals success. https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=20 https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651?s=2...
- throwawayacc5 4y ago
  The first time I saw that I was convinced it was a 4chan troll. I was so sure it was an elaborate 4chan ruse that when shared by someone else at work I instinctively told them it's a racist 4chan meme and they shouldn't be sharing that at work. It took some back and forth with links from the actual museum before it hit me that it was real. I was speechless.
  - amluto 4y ago
    The link in that tweet is IMO quite problematic, too: https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten... Since when are “white people” a monolithic group with all these privileges? There are many different groups of people who would be generally considered white, and they have very diverse stories, privileges, and disadvantages. There are plenty of so-called white people who do not feel they have all these privileges. Just to pick on an easy one: > I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed Many “white” women would disagree with this, although the extent might depend on where they go shopping. There are clearly many forms of discrimination that happen due to the ability of some groups to be easily recognized at a quick glance (regardless of whether that recognition is accurate), but that is far from the only form of social injustice in the US.