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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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If I coined the term "black stealing" for shoplifting, nobody would be satisfied with my claim that it isn't talking about all black people.

I think the problem is that about 30 years earlier, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term "the gaze", and Laura Mulvey was understood to be developing an extension of the concept in her original essay about the "male gaze."

So it's not like you coining "black stealing" in isolation at all. It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

EDIT: As the Nybbler said elsewhere in this thread, "male gaze" is generally taken to be something the camera is doing. A female director can give a film a "male gaze" if she films a female subject in a particular way, and a male director can give a film a "female gaze" if he films his subjects in a particular way. This is part of what I meant when I said that a "male gaze" is not equal to "gaze of males." Using it to refer to "looks/gazes of males" is a bit like talking about "charmed quarks" like they're under a literal magical spell. Sometimes jargon takes on a very specific meaning, slightly disconnected from the words that compose the jargon.

It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.

If this is what happens, it would be entirely predictable that "black stealing" would come to be interpreted that way, even if it's "incorrect". Jargon phrases whose straightforward meaning is something hostile will predictably result in a motte and bailey between the jargon meaning and the straightforward meaning, especially by hostile people.

"'Black fatigue' does not equal 'fatigue caused by blacks'! Trust me bro!" - an avid fan of Steve Sailer somewhere, probably

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