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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44985 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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(aside - I have to refrain from using the term "low-hanging fruit" at this institution).

What's wrong with low-hanging fruit? I did a quick google, and found something that seems to indicate some people may associate it with lynching, but I couldn't find anything indicating exactly what the relationship is.

If I tell one student they have stumbled upon "low hanging fruit" when they have a decent response, but I do not say the same to another student, I have created an inequality in speech, a possible microaggression. If they are different races - which race should I be using "picking fruit off tree" metaphors, and which ones would that be offensive towards? I cannot remember where this was presented to me, maybe just a twitter hot take.

This is what microaggressions are purported to be from what I understand. They can be very flexible, which I think we all know..

There's no association. There's the Billie Holliday song "Strange Fruit", which IS about lynching. And of course it contains the word "hanging". But that's all there is. There's a whole lot of woke-forbidden phrases which really have nothing to do with whatever the supposed problem with them, but it doesn't matter because the objection is not really about whatever offense is claimed; it's language policing for its own sake.

Oh, wow. Now that you say that, I realize that the sites I Googled did sort of imply the reason the phrase was problematic was just because it contains the word "hanging". That logic is so stupid that I couldn't put two and two together, couldn't understand how stupid the link actually was. My God.

If we start banning words that in entirely different contexts could have something to do with something that is racist, that's a new level of banning, and I don't even know what would be left that we could say. Slave owners were known to eat food. Therefore we should refrain from mentioning food because we can't imagine what some people might feel upon hearing it mentioned.

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